In an interview with Paul Seaton of Pokernews.com (7/10/2017), Joe Stapleton had several things to say about stand-up:
It’s rehearsed
On Spontaneity in stand-up, Stapleton says:
Stand up is rehearsed. The goal is to make it sound unrehearsed and sound like it’s off the top of your head. I’m still working on that.
This once again refutes the idea that good comedy is spontaneous; most of us have it practiced to death.
Get on stage!
He makes a comparison between stand-up and poker:
It’s an evolution when it comes to stand-up. It’s similar to poker in a couple of ways. Your friends are also your competition and you’re secretly hoping that they’ll fail. Well, you might not want them to fail but you want to be the best person in the room. It’s also like poker in that a small sample size does you almost no good…. You need an almost infinite sample size in poker and that’s also the way your jokes grow and evolve. You’re always tweaking it. The really good stand-ups do five or six sets a week minimum. I do at most two a week.
To get better at stand-up, you have to do stand-up. Onstage. In front of as big an audience as possible. That can be difficult when you’re hitting open mics and your audience is just other comics, who aren’t really listening, just waiting for their time, but even that work is essential, as just going through the bit is helpful.
Hecklers
I still have to put up stuff on Hecklers, but we’ll get started with this: Stapleton tells a story of a guy who came out to see him:
This guy came to my show who was with three girls I knew from the show. They invited him off Tinder. First I was happy, it was another butt in a chair paying $20 to see me. However, about halfway through the show, he got stereotypically-British drunk and lost all control over the volume of his voice. All of the comics addressed him at some point and I was mortified. After the show he came up to me and said ‘Wasn’t that great?!’ I was like ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ I was trying my best not to yell at the kid, but he said ‘I provided so much more comedy, everyone got to make fun of me and I gave them so much more material. Wasn’t it great?’ I looked at him and was like ‘No! They had to take out material from their acts to waste time on you.’
Again, this situation came up because the guy thought that comedy is spontaneous, and that he was a participant in the show, when ideally (for the comic), the show is set and rehearsed – unless you’re doing crowd work, but then you’re asking for it.
Stapleton continues:
I’ve had weird situations where poker fans have turned up and heckled me. They’re doing it from a good place, but they’re also being obnoxious and want attention from me and I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to destroy a fan, but it’s not an interactive show. OK, it sort of is, because I want to make you laugh, but that’s it. Come in and shut up but not too much, still laugh. And don’t laugh too weird, either, just a normal laugh. Also, don’t smile. Actually, laugh verbally, then stop while I’m telling my next joke. Applause breaks are fine.
This again recognizes that the fans think they’re helping, but they’re not. Stapleton doesn’t view them as active participants in the show – the audience is just there to be objects that he “makes laugh,” that’s their role, to receive the humor from him.
Problems of addressing hecklers
What ends up happening is that I don’t know how to address it. If you address a heckler you can ruin the mood. But when an audience know that you can hear the heckler but you aren’t addressing them, they lose respect for you. I’m not very good yet at that delicate balance between not wanting to put someone down and dealing with it.
Aye, there’s the rub. Addressing the heckler interrupts the act, which can change the momentum and the audience’s mood, ruining the rapport you’ve tried to build. However, not addressing the heckler can do the same thing. If the person is really heckling and if a large portion of the audience can hear them.
I saw a comic just the other night address a guy who wasn’t even heckling, just talking loud in the back of the showroom, and it totally ruined the mood. It was a bad situation because, where I was sitting, I couldn’t even hear the guy – and I suspect two-thirds of the audience were in the same boat – so this counter-attack just came out of nowhere in the middle of a bit.
The comic tried to recover, and eventually got back on track, but it was close to coming off the rails, and for no good reason – most of us couldn’t hear it and those who could knew that it had nothing to do with the act.
Summary
Stapleton’s view on spontaneity is fairly common: We’re super-prepared. He also reinforces that you need stage time to fully develop your act. He also introduces the heckler problem, and I will have a lot more to say about that.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
