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For The Future Indicative, Ep 8 Part 2
Transcript
ALEX EFFGEN
Welcome to the Future Indicative: a podcast on the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business. My name is Alex Effgen, and today’s topic is stand-up comedy.
STEPH DALWIN
“The people who can benefit most, ironically, from greater representation is probably the establishment. Ultimately, you’re pushing a better product forward. It’s more interesting. Incorporating more perspectives is more interesting.
If you think about product research, what are you trying to capture? You’re trying to capture as much information as possible from as many perspectives as possible. And so I think the same thing is true of standup. The people that can benefit most from greater representation are the people who are already represented.”
ALEX EFFGEN
That was Steph Dalwin, a stand-up comedian in Boston and one of the founders of New Normal Comedy. New Normal produce shows that aim to feel different. They aim to create a room where comics feel like they can succeed and to bring people who haven’t been made to feel normal, together. And I find my friend Steph very funny, so that’s why I’m coming to her to discuss the business of funny.
There have been many books written on the history of stand-up comedy, as there have been many iterations of what stand-up comedy is, should be, and what makes it funny. As a published scholar of Mark Twain, I can tell you that elements of stand-up comedy date to his era, his peers, and his lecture performances. We’re talking an American industry over 160 years old. It has also grown and prospered in Old World markets and foreign soils, but for being international, it remains incredibly regional.
One hundred years after the Lyceum circuit, fifty years after Vaudeville, and twenty years after supper clubs, local restaurants and nightclubs in the 1970s were looking for attractions to draw crowds. And what began with open mics in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco became a network of venues that could pay an opener, a middle, and the headliner for a night of laughs.
But did that make it a profession?
STEPH DALWIN
“When we look back and we see innovations in comedy, in a way stand-up comedy was an innovation in comedy. The idea of someone standing on stage with a microphone, just saying words at you to make you laugh.
I remember watching Jerry Seinfeld talk about this and he’s telling his dad “Yeah, I’m gonna be a stand-up comedian.” And his dad’s like, “What is that? That’s not a real profession.” And so in a way, stand-up comedy was an innovation on comedy.”
ALEX EFFGEN
One of the seminal incubators for modern comedy is Boston, Massachusetts. A lot of famous funny people grew up in Boston, or perhaps more appropriately boiled like corned beef in its cauldron. But don’t take my word for it.
“People think of like, New York is tough, and you think, yeah, Boston.
…I remember we used to have, in the early days of Late Night, I would have all these Boston comics come on, and some of them, you know, you’d have a comic on who had only been in the clubs in Boston. …And a guy would come out and he’d have his hat pulled down over his eyes and be like, yeah, yeah.
And it was pure vitriol and anger. And I remembered my audience would be like, Jesus Christ! Make that monster go away!
They had lived in a…they had grown up in a sea of lava.”
That was Conan O’Brien talking to Denis Leary. Denis went from Emerson College in the late ’70s to graduate studies in stand-up at the Ding Ho restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a focal point for Boston comedy over 45 years ago. From then to now, comedy in Boston had a type. And even though it also produced many comedians against type, such as Steven Wright, Paula Poundstone, and Dana Gould, many of those idiosyncratic voices went elsewhere (like San Francisco) to define their stage identities. The rest stayed here, developing acts that were…caustic.
But for younger stand-ups, like Steph Dalwin and the other founders of New Normal, they see opportunities in new audiences.
STEPH DALWIN
“The people that we’re always trying to reach are the people who don’t think that stand-up comedy is for them.
So the people that are afraid to go to shows basically. We target the folks that the establishment would be terrified of. People that have never been to a show before, people that don’t know show etiquette, if we’re being honest, and that can be tricky. But people who think that stand-up comedy is avoiding the front row so you don’t get roasted, or bracing yourself to be insulted for half an hour by a comedian. The people that are scared to go to shows that’s who I want. People who think stand-up is not for them.
And I think there’s a massive untapped market there.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Comedy is big business these days. In 2022, Bill Burr performed stand-up to 35,000 people at Fenway Park. And even then, there’s room for more markets, delivering humor with the best (or worst) intentions.
STEPH DALWIN
“There is this perception of stand-up comics as these modern-day prophets. They’re reflecting culture back in a mirror to the rest of us.
I think that gets really problematic because what is a prophet? It’s someone who has an unpopular message that maybe not everybody wants to hear, but they’re ahead of their time, even if they seem crazy in their current time. That gets really corrupted in stand-up comedy where you just get these people who will just say anything for shock value, for edgy content.
I went into stand-up comedy thinking that why stand-up comedy matters is because you have these prophets that are sending a really unpopular message that people need to hear, and now I don’t think that’s why stand-up comedy matters at all. Stand-up comedy matters now because it’s a tool that can be used for…healing, for representation, for community.
A lot of the best comics came out of terrible times. For as much as comedians are tasked with the responsibility of saying something uncomfortable, they’re also tasked with the responsibility of caretaking. And that’s what’s really powerful about stand-up comedy. The reason I wanted to start doing it is I saw myself in Ali Wong. I saw myself in Joan Rivers.
And so, why stand-ups have such an awesome responsibility is not because they’re saying something unpopular, something edgy, something attention-grabbing in this messianic way. It’s because stand-up comics can reflect society back to you, point out its flaws. Validate you. Make you feel seen. And so it’s a really powerful tool in terrifying times like we have now. I think it’s a really powerful tool for resistance and community.”
ALEX EFFGEN
If stand-up can be a tool for community. If it can be used for healing, and for representation, then it must address the needs of an audience. It must provide value.
The term “Show Business” contains the letter S four times. If I identified each of them with a principle, they would include:
SPECIALIZE: What is this?
SELL: Who needs this?
SECURE: What can disrupt this?
SCALE: How do we expand this?
Every entertainer must address these four categories, whether they’ve signed up for their first open mic or sold out Madison Square Garden. But no matter the venue, you must respect the craft.
In our digital age, we have a lot of platforms. And a lot of influencers. But can they stand up to stand-up?
STEPH DALWIN
“Podcast hosts, or like a TikToker that does social media sketches, just decides to dip their toe in stand-up. And because they have a huge following, clubs are saying, “Yes, that.”
Now I know TikTokers and, sort of, social media influencers in Boston who are doing comedy, I would say, the right way: slumming it out with the rest of us at open mics, at terrible bar shows, kind of getting the reps in. We need innovation on the art form. We need outside perspectives. We need those podcasters, we need those TikTokers to try stand up.
But the skills and audience from one medium have to be massaged into another. It’s not a direct one-to-one and so I think local clubs need to be a bit more aware of that.
That was a really long-winded way of saying seeking revenue, seeking headcount, seeking butts in seats is not going to push this art form forward.
If we take the metaphor of insurance, you have to learn to underwrite the risk better. You have to learn to underwrite your portfolio a bit better. In the case of stand-up comedy, that’s literally writing. It’s not enough just to innovate on how you make money. You have to innovate on the product a bit too.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Cool. So who’s out there SPECIALIZE-ing?
STEPH DALWIN
“When Hannah Gadsby came out with their special, a lot of the establishment comedians…were saying like, “Oh, what they’re doing is not really stand-up comedy. It’s storytelling.”
Hannah Gadsby created this really clever mix of storytelling trauma and jokes. It wasn’t a traditional set-up/punchline—I’m gonna stand on stage and tell jokes at you for an hour. It was doing something different. It was telling a story. It was unraveling and working through trauma. And it was funny. And a lot of the establishment didn’t like that. But I think that was a really important innovation on form.
I just watched Chris Fleming’s special last night. Boston-based guy. He breaks every rule that any stand-up comedy teacher would tell you. He pushes things to such illogical absurdity that sometimes the thread is hard to follow, but it kind of doesn’t matter because he’s just glorious. He will meander on a premise for like 10 or 15 minutes. No established stand-up comic would do that. That’s so risky and it’s so difficult to find venues to test one bit at a time for that long. And I mean, anybody who does amateur standup knows you float between bits in a 5- to 10-minute set.
I also just watched Gianmarco Soresi’s most recent special. And while I wouldn’t say that he’s necessarily innovating on set-up/punchline, per se, he played with space in a really interesting way. He clearly had curated his stage to serve as a vehicle for interaction with his art, as opposed to him just standing on stage and like, Okay, this is the stage, this is me. He used physical comedy in a really interesting way.
Stand-up comedy doesn’t have to be an hour of 100 jokes that you managed to fit into a set. Alex Edelman talks about one specific, like, a tiny slice of life and blows it up into an hour, and it’s so good.
Anyway I think innovation on form needs to happen. And I think that’s kind of a big idea right now that at least I’d like to see. I think it’s a big idea that people don’t want to talk about though.”
ALEX EFFGEN
It’s happened before. Subsets of generational cohorts define what is and is not funny. Define what is in and what is out. And the technology of that moment helps codify those definitions.
In the middle of the 20th century, the first (white/mainstream) comedy album of the modern age was Mort Sahl’s The Future Lies Ahead, released on Verve in 1958. For the next five years the comedy LP as an art form overwhelmed the popular charts. By the Third Annual Grammy Awards in 1961, Bob Newhart won Best Comedy Performance – Spoken Word for his second album, as his first album won Album of the Year and Newhart won Best New Artist.
If we hold to the premise of media theorist and philosopher, Marshall McLuhan, that “the medium is the message,” whereby the form of medium in any communicated message imposes a symbiotic relationship influencing how the message is perceived—then consider the vinyl medium’s influence on comedy providing the perfect 45 minutes of playing time required for cultivating 20th-century laughter. Now fast-forward to the 2-minute clip on TikTok for 21st-century attention.
The medium is the message. But does the set up need a punchline?
STEPH DALWIN
“From a content and form perspective, we can learn from the past that mechanics just work, right? Any stand-up comedy teacher when they’re teaching you how to write a joke, the quintessential structure that they teach is Henny Youngman, “Take my wife…please.”
There are certain mechanics that just work. Set up/punchline. Subverting expectations. Building tension and releasing it. And I don’t even know if that’s a looking to the past thing. That’s just a fundamentals thing. If we are going to look to the past, though, I think that just sitting with discomfort, I think, is something that all great comedians in their era do. Being comfortable being misunderstood.
Jeff Bezos…being inflexible with the vision but compromising on the details. You know what you’re doing, you know what you’re trying to put into the world. That actual execution may vary; you know what you’re trying to put into the world and being comfortable with that.
That always seems to work with stand-up comedy. It’s just dangerously, somewhat delusional self-belief. Even and especially when what you’re doing is different from the establishment.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Steph thinks about what is established and how she can deliver something different. Something novel. But how does that SELL? And how do you track the value it provides?
STEPH DALWIN
“We talk about this in, like, traditional marketing or sales. The tangible metrics. I sold tickets and I got a lot of laughs.
But how do we deal with softer metrics? How do we deal with the intangible metrics? It’s really hard to capture someone walked away with a good feeling. A lot of people came up to me after the show and said they liked that.
One thing that I’m seeing a lot, especially in stand-up, when you get to these newer audiences or these audiences that are not used to seeing themselves in comedy, there is an etiquette hurdle to overcome, a lot of them are very restrained with their laughter. A lot of them you have to navigate, like, I didn’t know that people would be sensitive to this thing. People are afraid to laugh a lot at identity things, which I find very interesting.
But when you’re reaching a new audience, the old metrics don’t necessarily apply.
And so, there needs to be a bit of flexibility to explore those new metrics, and see what else this can provide to people, besides what it can provide to the comedians, right? Which is ticket sales and laughter. Is there something beyond laughter that stand-up comedy provides? I think we’re still exploring that.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Thank you for joining us on Part 1 of the Future Indicative’s Stand-Up Comedy episode. In Part 2 we’ll discuss what makes comedy timeless, and what makes it of its time. And we’ll explore how comedians balance the humor they provide an audience, the revenue they generate for a venue, and the creativity they bring to their act.
Speaking of acts of creativity, while the opinions expressed here are solely our own, this open mic is meant to feel different. To bring people together. If you’ve heard something you like, then please stand up and shout it out. And if you’re looking for that kind of community in comedy, please visit newnormalboston.com. On behalf of Indicate Marketing, I’m Alex Effgen. And we appreciate your time.
