If the title doesn’t already tell you: *Warning: Explicit Language*
Rory Scovel’s new special, Rory Scovel Tries Stand-up for the First Time on Netflix, begins rather oddly.
No, I’m not talking about the Goodfellas-esque, Scorsese, steadycam, follow-through-the-bowels-of-the-theater opening. Nor the twenty-seven seconds he spends repetitively thanking the audience, though that is somewhat humorous and definitely sets up the next part – I’ll get there.
No, I’m talking about his opening joke. Both Vinnie Mancuso of A.V. Club and Graham Techler of Paste comment on it. Techler says:
The special begins with tactless question posed to the audience; have they ever had anal sex?
Lenny Bruce’s piss joke
The joke immediately reminded me of one I had only read about in the work of John Limon: Lenny Bruce’s piss joke. That joke is as follows:
If you’ve er, [pause]
Ever seen this bit before, I want you to tell me.
Stop me if you’ve seen it. [long pause]
I’m going to piss on you. (16).
Limon says,
Bruce waits after his announcement, and for a half-second a fraction of the audience rumbles, followed – so closely that the first stage is easy to miss – by seventeen seconds of unanimous laughter, accompanied by the sound of one or two people clapping though not applauding: adding to the percussion of their laughter, as if it were not possible to laugh sharply enough (16).
Seventeen seconds of laughter is significant – it’s far longer than most jokes get – and apparently there was no milking or pantomiming. The audience’s laughter also doesn’t wax and wane but remains continuous. Limon notes that usually such a thing only happens when we reprocess the joke. Here, he argues, perhaps they laughed, and then laughed that they laughed, without a pause in between.
Joke work
In trying to parse out why it might be funny, Limon notes what Freud called the “joke work,” which others have referred to by various names [I’ll insert some here later], but basically it’s set up, delay, punchline. The format is familiar to most people in Western civilization, and we know where and when we are supposed to laugh, and often do so.
Bruce sets it up by telling us to “Stop me if you’ve heard this one…”, pauses, then hits the punchline.
Similarly, Scovel doesn’t just “begin with a tactless question.” Instead, he says:
Let’s get right into it:
Anal.
Who’s done it?
Although the pace is quicker, the joke work is there: set up “Let’s get right into it,” pause, punchline. As with Bruce’s audience, there is a brief pause in Scovel’s audience after he says anal, and they don’t start to laugh until a half second after the question is posed.
Tendentious jokes
Working from Freud, Limon talks about Bruce’s joke as tendentious, as having, “underneath the joke work, a repressed content, unhumorous but willing to be humored, which is either aggressive or sexual” and “‘sexual’ means ‘excremental/sexual'” (14). This is, again, Relief theory. The theory is that society represses us from talking about sex, pissing or pooping, and the joke creates tension that begs for the relief of a laugh. So Bruce’s joke easily ducks under that bar.
So does Scovel’s – perhaps precisely hitting the “slash” in “excremental/sexual.” Scovel himself said he was “seeing if the crowd would laugh at the shock of it.” Anal sex shocks us in that it crosses all kinds of lines, the shock creates tension, which then begs for the relief of laughter. In this sense, it’s just a dick joke.
Again, for Limon, the continued laughter suggests that some people were laughing at themselves laughing – that they thought it funny that people would laugh about the possibility of being pissed on, rather than being disgusted. Scovel’s joke doesn’t have that dimension; it’s just a dick joke. However, Scovel then builds on that.
Repetition and riffing
Whereas Bruce has to try two times to continue through that seventeen seconds of laughter, Scovel powers right over the top of it with repetition:
Who’s done anal? Who here’s done anal? Who’s done anal? Who here has done anal?
Techler notes,
But it isn’t rhetorical, and Scovel continues to ask the question so many times he can eventually suggest that this may be the only joke in his arsenal.
“That joke started by repetition,” says Scovel. “Saying something over and over again, seeing if the crowd would laugh at the shock of it, then lose them and then see if they’d come back around.”
However, Scovel isn’t simply repeating; instead, he riffs on it, changing the wording, which changes the rhythm, and he also alters intonation to milk the joke. These are pags, follow up punch-lines, slightly different than the original, and meant to get as big a laugh. This riffing goes on for a full eleven seconds, then a five second meta-critique (see below), then another eight seconds of pags:
Anal. Who’s done anal? But like, anal. Anal, though. Anal. Who has done anal?
Then comes a twenty three second meta-critique, then another few seconds of pags before he starts mixing it up, getting dirtier/more obscene and doing characters:
Anal. We’re still – this is still – anal. Anal! [in a nasally voice] Anal! Does that sell it, if I added – if that’s my posture: Anal! [shouting] Who’s done anal? [still in character, but softer] I’m the brattiest comic on the circuit. [shouting] Who’s done anal, though? [laughing].
[In a country accent] Buttfuck, who – [normal voice] does that help? Does that help? Does that help, though? Buttfuck. Somebody’ll be, [country accent] “Oh, buttfuck. Ok yeah. Ok. Yeah. Dude said ‘anal,’ I was like, ‘Who’s the doctor-lawyer on stage?’ Anal, what? Buttfuck, that’s more my speed; that’s more my style. Truth be told, that’s more my style. I buttfuck. Wanna know something about me – I butt-”
[normal] You have to say ‘buttfuck’ with an accent. If you say it without an accent you sound like a goddamned serial killer. [In a creepy voice] “You guys ever buttfuck?”
Once the audience is laughing, the repetitive pags can hold the laugh – if he varies it a bit. He also benefits from the word taboo that comes with all variations of fuck. Now it becomes – more truly – a dick joke.
However, if the audience didn’t start out laughing, this would go the way of Lenny Bruce’s infamous Australia show, which Limon notes created such a hullabaloo over the piss joke. If Scovel tells that initial joke and no one laughs, would they pick him up at some point? Maybe. because of the way he set it up.
Repetition and riffing as joke work
As I mentioned, when he walks on stage, he doesn’t “Get right into it,” he instead thanks the audience – more importantly, he thanks the audience at least ten times. And he similarly riffs; he never says it the same way twice. He plays with the name of the city to add variation: Atlanta, ‘Lanta, etc.
This is more joke work; Scovel has set a pattern in the mind of the audience, so when he repeats the line, over and over, the parallel structure satisfies what we’ve come to expect of him. He can’t milk it forever, however; eventually he has to transition to another joke, and this brings up one more part of Bruce’s joke: it fits the form of ritual humor.
Ritual humor
Limon talks about Apte’s theory of ritual humor, which “is characterized by purposeful verbal and nonverbal behavior by individuals and groups in which … sexual activities are simulated in an exaggerated manner, and simulated defecation and urination are carried out with scatological overtones.” The argument is that perhaps in Western civilization we are conditioned to respond to these types of jokes; that they fulfill an anthropological function. Once again, this definition nails Bruce’s joke, but Limon is questionable on whether or not that’s relevant.
Scovel gets there too, some two minutes and forty-five seconds later when he finally talks about having tried it with his wife. He paints an exaggerated picture:
My wife and I tried anal sex once and I didn’t like it, and for some reason I feel like that makes me a gentleman. “Oh, that’s pretty cool, babe, we don’t have to go down that road again. Lord knows, you hated it. All the tears.”
He’s finally made it more of a sexual joke, but at this point, we’re really on to another joke. Well before this point, the audience had to make some decisions.
Decisions
Techler notes,
For him [Scovel], it’s a page out of the Book of Glass (Todd), who would make sure the first joke of his set let the audience decide right away whether this was going to be for them. That way, says Scovel, “you’re not really begging anyone to watch your thing.”
We know good comics will “work the room;” they will mention a category or premise, pause for a response, and on the basis of the audience’s response decide if a joke on that topic is going to succeed (McIlvenny et al.; Scarpeta & Spagnolli). That’s not what Scovel and Glass claim to be doing.
Here Scovel’s suggesting he was going to do this joke regardless, to allow his audience to opt out. He wants to tailor the audience to his material and not the other way around. That’s a fairly ballsy move for someone who’s not a household name.
Further, ten seconds into the repetitious pags that begin the joke, he spends five seconds calling attention to it.
This is the show. Who has – everybody here’s like, “Wait, so is this the show?” This is the show. This is the show.
Then he’s back to the pags for eight seconds, then he returns to his meta-critique of the act for twenty-three more:
I have one joke and I’m half-way through it. This is – This is it. I do sort of a reverse Louis CK, I write one new joke a year. And this is actually a three year-old joke, so it should be a pretty good special. You guys made a pretty good choice watching, thanks for being here. Oh.
I’ve talked about how a lot of comics in the documentary, Dying Laughing talk about trying to create a rhythm and a group mindset. These statements do the opposite; they make the audience take notice, breaking the rhythm of his joke and any collective effect that he may be working toward. He offers another subtle one later on, speaking as an audience member talking to his wife. So we get three chances to opt out of watching, where he says, “this might not be for you.” Again, ballsy for someone who has less than superstar status.
Summary
I don’t want to misrepresent Limon; I’ve already written about his theory of absolute stand-up, and I’ll write more on his other theories later. Limon’s purpose was not to say, “This is why Lenny Bruce’s joke worked,” because it didn’t work in Australia. Humor theories are great for looking at possibilities, but none yet can nail it 100% of the time. That’s what makes stand-up comedy (and any form of public address) exciting!
Nevertheless, I like to point out when people have done similar material, with similar theoretical backing, to highlight what’s going on.
Like Bruce’s piss joke, Scovel’s anal joke makes use of subtle joke work, to capitalize on what he thinks is shock value within a relief theory – it’s a dick joke (although Bruce’s joke may have, admittedly, more to it).
Unlike Bruce, Scovel uses repetitive pags that riff on the original to keep it going for nearly three minutes, and he does this to test his audience, before he continues onto another joke. This is a novel approach. My thoughts:
References:
Apte, Mahadev L. “Humor research, methodology, and theory in anthropology.” In McGhee and Goldstein (eds.) Handbook of Humor Research, : 183-212.
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974.
Limon, John. Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
McIlvenny, P., Mettovaara, S. & Tapio, R. “‘I really wanna make you laugh’: Stand-up comedy and audience response.” In M.K. Suojanen & A. Kulkki-Nieminen (Eds.) Folia, Fennistica and Linguistica: Proceedings of the Annual Finnish Linguistics Symposium, 16. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Finnish and General Linguistics Department Publications, 1993: 225-245.
Scarpeta, Fabiola & Ann Spagnolli. “The interactional context of humor in stand-up comedy.” Research on Language and Social Interaction, 42(3), 2009: 210-230.
Transcript:
Let’s get right into it: anal. Who’s done it? Who’s done anal? Who here’s done anal? Who’s done anal? Who here has done anal?
This is the show. Who has – everybody here’s like, “Wait, so is this the show?” This is the show. This is the show.
Anal. Who’s done anal? But like, anal. Anal, though. Anal. Who has done anal?
I have one joke and I’m half-way through it. This is – This is it. I do sort of a reverse Louis CK, I write one new joke a year. And this is actually a three year-old joke, so it should be a pretty good special. You guys made a pretty good choice watching, thanks for being here. Oh.
Anal. We’re still – this is still – anal. Anal! [in a nasally voice] Anal! Does that sell it, if I added – if that’s my posture: Anal! [shouting] Who’s done anal? [still in character, but softer] I’m the brattiest comic on the circuit. [shouting] Who’s done anal, though? [laughing].
[In a country accent] Buttfuck, who – [normal voice] does that help? Does that help? Does that help, though? Buttfuck. Somebody’ll be, [country accent] “Oh, buttfuck. Ok yeah. Ok. Yeah. Dude said ‘anal,’ I was like, ‘Who’s the doctor-lawyer on stage?’ Anal, what? Buttfuck, that’s more my speed; that’s more my style. Truth be told, that’s more my style. I buttfuck. Wanna know something about me – I butt-”
[normal] You have to say ‘buttfuck’ with an accent. If you say it without an accent you sound like a goddamned serial killer. [In a creepy voice] “You guys ever buttfuck?”
[In a feminine voice] Oh my god!
[As an audience member] Karen put your fucking hand down! It’s obviously a trap. It’s a death trap.
[Feminine voice] Well I don’t know, I’ve never been to one of these things.
[Country accent] Y’all ever buttfuck?
[Normal] Isn’t that – it’s kinda – immediately you’re like “Oh that’s not so bad.”
[Country accent] Y’all ever buttfuck?
[Normal] Hey, it’s the guy from the gas station. Answer his inquiries.
[Country accent] I just wanna know if y’all ever buttfuck before? Y’all come on now, oh [breaking character; back] Unleaded, fill it up, you got it! You every buttfuck?
[Normal] Hi, I’d like to fill it up, I’m over on pump 10. I gotta tell ya, that one employee, he is a lively sort, I – What’s that? That’s not an employee? I’ll be right back. I’ll be right back. No. It’s on me, there were a lot of red flags and I – I don’t – I should’ve – I should’ve tuned in. I should’ve tuned in.
[Country accent] Y’all ever buttfuck? Buttfuck!
[Normal] My wife and I tried anal sex once and – [at a sound from the audience in the wings] Shut the fuck up! Shut up! I already asked you if you did it, nobody said shit! And now I have to talk the entire show. This job sucks.
I feel like, right now, some people are like, oh, maybe he does only have the one joke. Where we thought he was being facetious. The twist in tonight’s show, was honesty. Hmmm.
My wife and I tried anal sex once and I didn’t like it, and for some reason I feel like that makes me a gentleman. “Oh, that’s pretty cool, babe, we don’t have to go down that road again. Lord knows, you hated it. All the tears.”
If your wife cries during sex, she is telling you something. Check in, you know what I mean? Do it. Check in. [High pitched voice] “You Ok?” Just one of those, “Hey everything cool? What’s going on? You got a little misty here. I don’t. Huhh.” [Normal] Also, talk like that. That’s a big turn-on for women. That’s a huge turn on for women. [High pitched] “Hey, just a quick question, what’s going on with the tears?” [Normal] Be that ecstatic. Be like [Yelling high-pitched] Hey! What’s the deal with the tears? Let’s get back into it [pantomimes thrusting].”
Where did I lose some people? The visualization of my wife crying during anal sex? Is that where some people were like, “You know what, no. No. Next exit. We’ll take the next exit. I’m not here for this.”
