Dumb Lightning

 
 
 
 

Transcript:

People shouldn’t have to think to get the joke.


If people spend too much time thinking – oops.  You’ve made an error.  You wrote it incorrectly.  You delivered it incorrectly.  You’ve got the wrong formula.


Practically speaking, you’re talking to people who are a little buzzed, maybe a little high.  Perhaps a tad tired.  Trying to relax.  This isn’t a lecture for students taking notes.  This is a distracted audience of sedated feral cats that you have to corral.


They are sedated.  They’re not angry feral cats, for the most part.  But sleepy feral cats don’t wanna do math.  You gotta spoon feed ‘em a little.  And the spoon needs to have something tasty in it.


Audiences aren’t going to make the same mental leaps you did when you thought of the idea for the joke.  You’ve gotta connect the dots for them.  You can’t expect 200 different people in an audience to have the same individual eureka moment you did when you thought of the bit and it made you laugh to yourself.


You have to walk them through it.


But you’re not giving them instructions.


It’s more like they’re tied to a leash that you’re leading them around by.  You’re leading them through a joke maze attached to a leash.


You need some intelligence to think of the jokes, but you’ve gotta be dumb to write them out and perform them.  Brainstorming the jokes might be kinda smart sometimes.  But figuring out the punchlines and playing with the joke on stage: that’s the work of an idiot.


You can’t be excessively dumb.  You don’ wanna be drooling out the side of your mouth.  But you gotta be a little bit dumb.  Your goal is to lead sedated feral cats around a joke maze by a leash.  Who does that other than an idiot?


What exactly are you trying to accomplish?  Ya know?  It’s nothing fancy.  Have some humility.  Even starting down this path of becoming a comedian, you’re a certified moron.


But yea, you don’t want people thinking during your jokes.  You just want them paying attention and listening.  Listening, not thinking.  Hypnosis.  It’s not math; it’s poetry.  Listening, but not thinking.  Hypnotized by silly poetry.


This podcast is about the art of stand-up comedy.  It’s not the mathematics of stand-up comedy.  Yes, there is structure to comedy, but it’s also unstructured.  Poorly defined.


People get captivated by great art because it expresses something they struggle to put into words.  Great comedy comes from a dumb person struggling to put the words together.


Paul Feig, I think that’s how you say his name?  Paul Feig?  Dicey last name to have to say.  But he’s directed a number of successful comedy films and TV shows.  He directed Bridesmaids.


He did an interview with Mike Sacks for Sacks’ book Poking a Dead Frog.  In the interview he said, “I think the main problem I see with comedy is that a lot of it is overwritten and it’s created by people who are very precious about their words...So, what happens is, there’s no life in it...That’s the key to comedy as far as I’m concerned: lightning in a bottle.  You have to capture that moment when it first happens, because that’s when it’s funny.”


I come at comedy in many ways from the perspective of a writer.  That’s my strength.  So, yes, I am very precious about my words.  And that is useful.  It helps me in all sorts of ways.  I hold myself to a standard that I labor over every sentence, phrase, word – I revise and whittle away again and again and again.


But it can also get in the way.  I can get too attached to the words and that takes me further away from feeling the feeling.  The lightning moment gets lost – buried in the milieu of my tactical syntactical revisions.


What usually happens?  I have the lightning in the bottle of dumb moment.  I laugh to myself.  Then I overwrite around that idea.  End up with two or three or four, sometimes five or six or ten pages of mostly unusable stuff.  Then I hack and chisel and whittle away until I have a page and a half of something I can actually put into action on stage to lead the sedated feral cats around by their leash.


The writing almost always takes me away from the momentary flash of dumb funniness.  But I’ll find more little kernals of dumb funniness as I go through the writing process.  It’s still worth something.  Trying to be smart with the subject matter can lead to more insights of dumb.


Thankfully, the ultimate test, being in front of the audience on stage helps me cut and carve it all out properly in the end.  All the kernels get tested in front of a live studio audience; that’s where you get to the truth of whether you’ve got fun comedy poetry in a bottle or a bunch of math equations that nobody likes.


The seeds of stand-up comedy are all momentary flashes of feeling.  Momentary.  They’re inklings of an attitude toward a subject that flit across your brain.


They don’t have to be persistent feelings.  They don’t have to be what registers with you at the core of your being, forever and always.  Jokes can just be a passing thought.  A whim.  That’s where the dumb lightning bolts come from.


You’re not trying to rationally walk people through an argument.  You’re leading sedated feral cats around on a leash.


When you’re on stage entertaining the sedated feral cats, you have to say what you really think and feel.  The sedated feral cats don’t like it when you lie to them.  They can sniff that out and they will hiss at you.


You have to share your real thoughts and feelings.  But those don’t have to be the things you think and feel consistently and persistently.  They don’t have to be your deep seated beliefs.


It doesn’t have to be your real opinions and feelings you would use in polite society.  It just has to be your real opinions and feelings as a member of the species homo sapiens.  As someone who is participating in the human experience.  The human experience is broad and deep.  It’s not just what we present in polite society.


Jokes can be how the dumb version of you thinks and feels.  The idiot who doesn’t have it all together and figured out.  The fool.  The fool who doesn’t know he’s a fool.  He thinks he’s king of the sedated feral cats.  You gotta get in touch with that fella a lil’ bit.

Michael Franke