Overacting

 
 
 
 

Transcript:

I have no acting experience.  I took a performing arts class in high school because it was required, but I don’ think I learned anything.  I don’ really remember.


But having experience as actor woulda been nice, because, I do like to play with characters a little bit in my stand-up.


I make the typical mistake most stand-ups make and I overact.  It comes out a caricature instead of a real person.


And caricatures can be funny, but they can also be hacky and feel stale very quickly.


Rather than creating a caricature, it’s better if you can make a real person funny.  It’s better if it’s all grounded in a real person.


So you have to fight your impulse to move toward the goofy, cartoonish portrayal, that’s a rookie mistake, gotta try to push closer to an actual flesh and blood human being people could believe exists.


I came across an interview with this actor, Martin Landau.  He was in a buncha tv shows and films.  No one old enough to remember or care is likely to watch this, but I didn’t know anything about him.  I just saw this interview where he says, “No one tries to cry in life, you try not to.  Only bad actors try to cry. / Only bad actors try to act drunk.  A drunk wants another drink, he doesn’t want anyone to know.”


That’s great.  That’s great advice.  Behave as an actual human being would behave in the situation you’ve set up.  Don’t concoct something because you think it will be funny.  It won’t play naturally.


So that’s something I try to think about in my writing, but I’ll get reminders that I failed to follow that principle cuz I’ll try to do the joke with the caricature, and it’ll get a lukewarm reaction and then I’ll remember, “Oh yea, I’m doing that thing where I’m pretending to do a thing for the bit, but that’s not how it would organically happen in real life.  How would it organically happen in real life?  What’s false about what I’m doing here?  How do I rewrite this so that I’m still making the joke, but people feel like it’s more grounded in reality?  How do I make this less of a cartoon an’ more relatable?”


Stand-up pushes you to be a cartoon.  You’ve got a group of people staring at you.  They’re expecting something.  You want them to give you all this energy of laughter – it’s a big, loud emotion.  So the natural impulse is to think you have to give them this big, expressive energy first in order to pull that energy out of them.


That’s a trick though.  It burns everybody out.  People lose interest.  It becomes too much of a gimmick if you’re overly cartoonish.  It’s bad acting.  It’s trying to cry.


I remember I was watching a tv show that had gotten excellent reviews.  An’ I was kind of 50-50 on it after several episodes.  An’ at the end of one of the episodes, this guy, one a’ the main characters, he just starts sobbing on a bench, puts his face in his hands, starts sobbing…and it was the least believable thing I’ve ever seen.  It was supposed to be this dramatic thing, and it read completely false.  I stopped watching the show.  Haven’t gone back to it.  That killed it for me.


I thought, “Ok, fine.  He’s a youngish actor.  He doesn’t know how to cry.  Whatever.”  But then an editor and a director green-lit that to stay in the final cut a’ the show an’ I thought: “How good can this really be?  If they’re leavin’ that in there?”  Completely took me out of it.


So I think about that now.  I don’t want to throw off the integrity of everything else I’m doing with my jokes by presenting a character that rings false.  But I still want to play with characters, cuz that can be fun.  It’s a balance.


There’s a humor writer, Mike Sacks, wrote for The New Yorker, lots a’ other magazines - he’s done two books of interviews with other comedy writers.  One’s called And Here’s the Kicker… and the other is Poking a Dead Frog.


There’s an interview in And Here’s the Kicker with Merrill Markoe, she wrote on a number of comedy tv shows, she says “Real human beings don’t behave in big broad strokes.  They behave with tiny, exacting, site specific details.  Your stupid McDonald’s employee should be different than mine.  I hate cliches…I want to hear an individual point of view.  I don’t want the same Jewish mother or black church lady.  I want to see the one you know.”


Aside from throwing McDonald’s employees under the bus, I think it’s a great quote.  I’m guilty of painting in big broad strokes and it’s simply not as interesting.


It’s better if you can portray the tiny, exacting, little details and quirks.  That’s more true to life.


But it’s tempting to paint in big broad strokes because people will get what you’re talking about.  They’ll latch onto it more easily.


But it’s never as interesting.  There can’t be as much depth and truth there.


So you don’ wanna be a cartoon, you don’ wanna be a caricature.  You want to portray a character how a person could actually be.  And you gotta do the work to have the little details in that portrayal that make it unique an’ interesting and’believable.  You can’t really make that stuff up.  It has to be a person you’re intimately familiar with.  You can’t write in that fine detail and portray it if you’ve just read an article about such a person.  You need to know that type of person in real life, and then you have to put yourself in their shoes.


I don’ know that I ever actually succeed in doing that, but it’s something to aspire toward.


I should probably take some acting classes.  Do some community theater…


Or jus’ get out an’ meet more people.  So I can mine their personalities for my art.  That’s not narcissistic, right?

Michael Franke