How Life Becomes Standup

People are often curious about where standup comes from and how life gets turned into material for a comedy act. The questions are often phrased in rather egocentric ways. Here are some of them and the replies I'd give if I weren't as sweet and pleasant as I am.

After saying something only mildly funny: "Oh, you're gonna use that in your act now, aren't you? You better send me a royalty check."

Reply: "No I'm not going to use that. It wasn't that good."

After saying something that is actually very funny: "Don't go putting me in your act."

Reply: "Don't worry. You're not interesting enough to put in my act and I only enjoy talking about myself."

After I say something funny: "That was funny. You should put that in your act."

Reply: "It wouldn't work in my act. That joke was custom tailored to the circumstances of this moment and to you. Stripped of context it would no longer be funny."

Whether or not real-life funny can be turned into standup hinges on whether or not the context can be reestablished for an audience who wasn't there and isn't the person for whom the occurrence was originally funny. This is what the "set up" is for. If context can be established quickly with an economy of language then you might just have the basic ingredients of a joke.

Anytime an attempted retelling of a story ends with "well I guess you had to be there" it is a failure to establish context. Another common version of this is "well I guess you'd have to know Julie." Which, by the way, is why I avoid telling long stories about people my listener doesn't know. They're boring.

So it's actually pretty rare that I'm interested in turning something funny from real life into standup for two reasons. Either context would be impossible to establish or depends on too many things to establish quickly. Or the joke isn't about me. Telling a joke about someone else requires that I establish them as a character in the narrative. Since I'd much rather talk about myself I don't usually bother.

I do have a few characters I use in my act. If I can make a joke about one my recurring characters it's far more likely to become standup. My characters are:

• Dumb Straight Boys
• Guys I'm Hitting On
• People Who Annoy Me (Computards, Whiny Chicks, My Family)
  

All of these characters serve the same narrative purpose, I need people to whom I can condescend.

---

Enough! If you've made this far then I owe you some funny. Remember the guy who called me "heteronormative"? It took a few days to gestate but it's turned into a nice little bit. I performed it at SuperEgo this week and it killed.

HETERONORMATIVE, THE BIT
I was chatting up this cute college boy and he says, "I love your beard, it's so heteronormative."

/big laugh

Not tuff, or butch, or manly.

(slowly) Het-er-o-NORM-a-tive.

/small laugh

Conforming to societal gender norms.

So I said, "Hey, You're a women's studies major aren't you?"

/big laugh

(act out his reaction of surprise during the laugh) "How did you know?"

(dripping with sarcasm) I'm psychic.

/small laugh

I've got an idea. Let's go back to my place. We can bring down the patriarchy of the military industrial complex with our homo-AB-normative butt sex.

/big laugh

There's a gender equality revolution in my pants and you're invited.

/big laugh

HETERONORMATIVE, THE ANALYSIS
Notice how many of the details get stripped out of the story to turn it into standup. You don't need to know where he was from, that he was wasted, or that I wasn't actually interested in hooking up with him. The only details needed are that he's in college and that we were flirting.

Notice the streamlining of language, events and reactions. It faster and smoother to say I was chatting him up than to say I was being chatted up by him. Notice how the choice of "chatting up" instead of "talking with" implies a bar setting. "Chatting up" also implies a sexually charged conversation and agenda. These two words paint the whole scene making them a very efficient set up.

The term heteronormative is so odd, it sounds so strange in the ear, and it's use in a pickup line is so patently absurd that the first laugh doesn't even have a punch line. Really the first laugh is still set up for what is to come.

The word is so inherently funny that it gets another laugh, albeit milder, when I say it again slowly. This is fortunate because for a lot of people I bet this is the first time they've heard the word. So it must be defined before I can continue. Usually the need to define a word means there's something wrong with a joke. But here it works.

Usually I avoid repeating words in a joke. Because once you've used a word, the second utterance usually has diminished effect. But this joke bit uses "norm" repeatedly in different forms. This is so I can do the joke that hinges on turning "normal" to "abnormal". I put a strong stress on the "ab" syllable, making it stand out.

The structure of this bit worked out so nicely. It's tight, about a minute, with 6 jokes, that's awesome. It starts with a big laugh and ends on two big laughs.

When I first started doing standup, I would tell these long winding stories with good laughs, but way too much extraneous stuff. It's all I knew how to do. The problem was the laughs were so far apart that the audience would cool off between each one so I wouldn't get any build up of momentum.

Now I know how collapse a story down now to just the bare essentials. I get in, I crank as many laughs out of a premise as I can as quick as I can, and I get out while it's still fresh.

Even the best premise can run dry if you go to the well too many times. So I always try to work a bit for one less joke than it's worth.

---

P.S. I wrote my first holocaust joke this week. It's about butt sex. I can not tell you how deeply satisfying this is for me. The hope that I created the world's first holocaust/butt sex joke makes me profoundly happy. And before you ask, the answer is "no". I'm not going to post it here. It's just too raunchy and I gotta save something for the show.

Politically Correct Pickup Lines

So I'm in a bar and this adorable but completely wasted college student chats me up. He's effusive and fun but a bit too messy to take seriously. I talk to him anyway, though, 'cause it's entertaining. And he lays this line on me....

"Great beard and buzz cut. You're so heteronormative."

"Um ... you're a women's studies major aren't you?"

"Oh my God! How did you know?"

Just a hunch, sweetheart. Just a hunch.

---

I barely know where to start with this comment, so I guess I'll just do what I usually do ... rant.

Heteronormative.

I am soooooo anything but.

(OK, I just had to stop writing and teach my spellchecker "heteronormative" so it'd stop bugging me. Do we even count stuff made up by women's studies majors as real words? Sheesh.)

I am a huge nerd and a huge fag. My beard and buzz cut are an affectation, a "look". They do not mean that I represent anything even vaguely related to male or heterosexual norms.

"Normal" is a fantasy ideal that people use to feel insecure and to denegrate themselves and others.

And here's my rather bold opinion about it....

"Normal" does not exist. There is no such thing. Absolutely no one is "normal". We are all different.

"Normal" means conforming, average and expected. I seek to be none of those things and neither should you. As far as I'm concerned the word is a pejorative. Having spent my whole life trying to get comfortable with my differences I'm now rather fond of them.

What matters is whether we're different in good ways or bad ways. Bad ways of being different include alcoholic, self obsessed, abusive and afraid. Good ways of being different include artistic, goofy, nerdy and impulsive.

The concept of normality is a way of encouraging conformity. It's a way of censoring differences in others which confuse or offend us. "That's not normal." "I just want to meet a man who is normal."

And it's a way of censoring our own differences. "Am I normal?" "Everyone wants to be normal." "Help! I'm worried I'm not normal!"

So I guess my point is this.

Fuck normal.

---

/// deep breath ///

OK, so that rant had almost nothing to do with the comment of "heteronormative". It's just "normal" has been on my mind and I guess I just wanted to get that off my chest.

So what my little buddy obviously meant was "your look appeals to me because it is a male archetype."

Which is what it's intended to be.

Problem is ... as previously mentioned ... I'm a huge nerd and a huge fag. And sometimes I forget that I've reshaped my outer appearance to be this male archetype 'cause I feel the same on the inside.

The first problem is my voice. I have the voice of a nerdy fag. I wish I had the voice of James Earl Jones or George Clooney. Every guy does. But hell, I'd be content with the wonderful, deep, resonant voice of Kathleen Turner.

So my voice causes some problems with my new look. I've actually had guys come up to me and then almost immediately walk away when I start talking. And when I think back on what turned them off I realize that my topics (nerd) and the pitch of my voice (fag) failed to deliver the fantasy offered by my look.

And I wanna squeal, "No, wait, come back! Gimmie a 'do over'. I can be butch."

So I have to remember that having adopted this affectation, I have to at least try to maintain it. There are a few things that help.

The first is a mirror. (Yes, yes. Excuse me please while I drown gazing at my own reflection.) Looking in the mirror reminds me, "oh yeah, I'm that guy now." A quick glance resyncs the inside to the outside.

The other thing that helps is something that works for the creation of almost any persona and is also helpful for seduction. It is simply this.

Talk less.

As we speak, we move from being someone's fantasy of who we are to being our real selves. So if you say less, you retain some mystery and keep a portion of yourself in the realm of fantasy.

Now I'm not suggesting being a deceptive, withholding prick. Just pace yourself. Reveal yourself slowly and it'll make your target hungry for more. Talk about your ex for twenty minutes in the first conversation and you're done.

Now if all of this sounds false, dishonest and manipulative let me say this in my defense.

I enjoy playing with archetypes and stereotypes. Because there are a thousand ways that I fit into nerd and fag stereotypes. And there are a thousand ways I contradict them. I enjoy playing into a cliché and then breaking it. Confirming it. And then breaking it again.

So my new look is just more of the same. It's me playing with different parts of myself. None of it is a lie. It's just me showing a different side of myself to the world to play with people's perceptions. Try it sometime.

Life's too short to be normal.