by Peter McGraw
9
MONTREAL
Punch line
Backstage at the Comedy Nest, an upscale comedy club in downtown Montreal, we’re a world away from the Denver dive bar where we launched our adventure more than a year ago. But everything about this place feels strangely similar. There’s the same sort of audience filling in around the stage, ready to cheer on those who make them laugh—and skewer those who don’t. Around back in the cramped greenroom, there’s the same sort of nervy pre-show energy. Comedians pace back and forth, saying little, while others slouch on a well-worn couch, sipping coffee and rehashing their routines. No one touches the meager basket of tortilla chips and plastic cup of salsa the club’s manager has placed on a counter.
I can hardly sit still. I meander about the club, trying to gauge the vibe of the crowd, then wander backstage. Pete sits alone at the far end of the greenroom, illuminated by the harsh white bulbs of a row of makeup mirrors. He’s staring off into space as he prepares to go up on stage—his second official attempt at stand-up. Once again, he’s wearing a sweater vest.
As we’d planned, we’d finagled our way onto the lineup for the Montreal’s Just For Laughs comedy festival, the largest comedy event in the world. So far, no one has given us interlopers much notice—but that might soon change. The month-long festival involves hundreds of comedy shows, seminars, live podcast tapings, and film screenings at venues big and small all across Montreal. Tonight, the last night of the festival, the theme at the Comedy Nest is “As Seen on TV.” According to a sign on the wall, the comics who’ll be performing have all appeared on programs such as the Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and Conan. On the shuttle ride over from our hotel, a sitcom casting director tagging along to scope out the talent asked Pete what he’d been on. He had to think about it. “I was once on Channel 9 in Denver!” She wasn’t impressed.
Pete has spent much of the day by himself, going through his routine in our hotel room while I explored Montreal. Later, as we got ready for the night’s big event, he said to me, “If someone had told me two years ago that one of my biggest talks ever would be at the Comedy Nest at the Just For Laughs festival, I wouldn’t have believed them.” He’s taught hundreds of classes and presented in front of conference audiences numbering in the thousands. But something about the 80 or so people who can fit into the Comedy Nest feels so much more intimidating, so much more difficult.
“I’ve been thinking about the clown noses we wore in Peru,” Pete had told me, looking at the outfit he’d laid out for himself on his hotel bed. “When you put on the clown nose, you are the clown. When I put on this sweater vest, I’ll be a moderately funny professor.”
And now the professor’s here in the Comedy Nest greenroom, sweater vest on, minutes away from determining just how humorous he is. A Just For Laughs staffer armed with a clipboard approaches. “When do you want the red light?”
“Red light?” Pete looks bewildered.
The red light is the signal that your time on stage is almost up, explains Debra DiGiovanni, a bubbly comic who’s the night’s MC. A veteran of Last Comic Standing and one of Canada’s top female comedians, DiGiovanni takes one look at Pete and out come her maternal instincts. “Have you done any other shows?” she asks him.
“No.”
“Really, no other shows here in Montreal?”
Pete clarifies himself. “No other shows, period.”
The show soon gets under way. DiGiovanni takes the stage to warm up the audience before the first comic. A few minutes later, she’s back in the greenroom. “This is what you call a bad crowd,” she says, chuckling. Later, after she’s introduced the next comedian, she revises her assessment: “They’re terrible.”
It’s Pete’s turn. “Need me to do any set-up?” asks DiGiovanni as she heads out to introduce him.
“Just make them like me,” pleads Pete.
As Pete starts to follow her, I offer one last piece of advice. “This time,” I say, “try not to unplug the microphone.”
A couple of months earlier, Pete and I had begun preparing his routine. If our time studying what makes things funny had taught us anything, it’s that good stand-up requires practice. We knew that if we’d spent the whole year honing a few choice jokes, we would have ended up with some good material. But we hadn’t done that, because that wasn’t the point. People already know that in comedy, hard work pays off. We wanted to prove there’s another way—a method that involves a little less sweat and a little more science.
We started by making a list of all our expeditions, and what we’d learned from each about how to make things funny:
Los Angeles: Who is funny?
It’s not whether or not you’re funny, it’s what kind of funny you are. Be honest and authentic.
It helps to be an outsider. Be skeptical, analytical, rebellious.
Stand-up is experimentation. Write, test, repeat.
New York: How do you make funny?
Since most things aren’t funny, come up with a lot of ideas.
If solo comedy creation gets you nowhere, try the team-based approach. Two minds are better than one.
If you can’t be “ha-ha” funny, at least be “aha!” funny. Cleverness is sometimes good enough.
Tanzania: Why do we laugh?
Don’t be afraid to chuckle at yourself. It signals everything is okay and lets others laugh, too.
Good comedy is a conspiracy. Create an in-group with those you want to get the joke.
Laughter has momentum. Get the guffaws going as quickly as you can.
Japan: When is comedy lost in translation?
Complicated comedy is subjective, but bare-bones humor is universal. In other words, keep it simple.
Context matters. No one is going to laugh if they don’t know what you’re talking about.
Know your audience. Making something broadly appealing often kills the funny.
Scandinavia: Does humor have a dark side?
It’s easier to fail than to succeed—especially as comedy goes global. Tread carefully.
Making things funny means nearly going over the line. Learn to be a comedic tightrope artist so you don’t go too far.
Who’s the butt of the joke? Comedy can victimize, so be sure it’s not the person who’s supposed to laugh.
Palestine: Can you find humor where you least expect it?
Humor is hardy stuff, so no topic is off limits. It’s just a matter of finding the right way to make the violations benign.
The best comedy turns the world upside down. Make fun of yourself before others get a chance to do so.
Laughter is disarming. Make light of the stuff everyone’s worried about and you’ll negate its power—not to mention win over the crowd.
The Amazon: Is laughter the best medicine?
Comedy signals an escape from the world. Create a safe, playful space where folks are free to laugh.
Jokes can be a coping mechanism. Don’t be afraid to kid around about the harsh realities of life—people need it.
Humor is as important to the humorist as it is to the audience. If you don’t enjoy your comedy, no one else will, either.
Some of these takeaways were easy to put into action. Considering our travels, Pete and I had a lot of comedy fodder from which to choose. And as a professor scrutinizing the world of comedy, Pete was very much an outsider looking in. Plus, thanks to all we’d been through together, it was clear we had no problem coming up with material as a team.
Other rules were harder for us to implement. With our hectic schedules, it was difficult to find the time to generate joke after joke, knowing the vast majority would be nixed. Nor was it easy coming up with material dealing with taboo topics and harsh realities—stuff that toed the line—while finding a way to make it honest and authentic coming from a university professor. We also knew that to set the tone and win over the crowd, Pete would have to be confident and congenial, plus score a laugh right away. And if we hope
d to play to the audience and keep things simple, both of us would have to dial back our bad habits, such as Pete’s tendency to want to explain everything, and my predilection to use abstruse words.
Finally, to make sure nobody got offended, it would be best to make Pete the butt of the joke. That, we knew from experience, would be easy.
Since our checklist suggested that the best material often comes from collaborating with other humorists, once we’d pulled together a rough routine we asked a few of our comedy contacts how we could punch up our material. Be spontaneous, suggested Last Comic Standing winner Alonzo Bodden. As Bodden put it, “One of the illusions we project is that we just thought of the joke.” Meanwhile, Jordy Ellner, director of talent and digital at Comedy Central, took all his years working with comics and distilled what he’d learned into a single word: “Smile.”
Los Angeles–based comic Shane Mauss offered his own advice. “The benign violation theory might explain the basic mechanics of how a joke is done, but delivery is the practiced sleight-of-hand that makes the joke surprise and wow,” he pointed out. Take our punch lines, said Mauss—the “punch,” the funniest part of the joke, should always be at the end of a zinger, so Pete won’t step on potential laughs.
We decided to put the routine through a test run. A week before our trip to Montreal, Pete signed up for another Denver open mike, but this event wasn’t on the cutthroat stage of the Squire Lounge. Instead it was a low-key affair on the back patio of a scruffy Polish restaurant, a place known for letting comics try out material.
Surrounded by potted plants and dangling strings of all-year Christmas lights, Pete ran through his routine as a small crowd looked on. And you know what? He got laughs. A lot of laughs—significantly more than a few folks that night who’d performed at this open mike before.
A buddy of Pete’s named Terry came out for the performance, just as he’d attended Pete’s first stand-up attempt at the Squire Lounge. After Pete’s run-through on the patio, Terry came up to me. “At the Squire, I saw a professor trying to do stand-up,” he said. “But this time? I saw a comedian up there, not a professor.”
Pete and I were elated. We’d done it, we believed—we’d used science to build a better comedy act. From here on out, we figured, everything would be easy.
Then we got to Montreal.
Athletics have the Olympics. Film has Cannes. Music has South by Southwest. Comedy? It has the Just For Laughs.
The night before we arrived at the festival, I had a disturbing dream. When we touched down in Montreal, even though it was July, snow was everywhere. Everyone was in parkas, sitting around roaring fires in frosted ski chalets. And here I was, freezing in my light-weight summer clothes.
“Oh, my God,” I thought. “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
While there wasn’t a snowflake at the festival, that didn’t make it any less intimidating.
In the heart of Montreal, a large swath of downtown had been fenced off from cars and transformed into an open-air bacchanalia. Colossal stages showcased free dance concerts and magic shows all hours of the day and night. Quirky parades of huge pickle puppets snaked through the crowds. Giant balloon incarnations of Victor, Just For Laugh’s red-horned, green-snouted mascot, hovered over the revelry like Canadian castoffs from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. And aromatic food trucks lined the streets, offering up various international delicacies—including, I was surprised to discover, takoyaki, the balls of deep-fried octopus that were so huge in Osaka.
The next day, we forced ourselves awake just in time for a catered festival luncheon. “We’re turning into comedians,” cracked Pete. “Out of bed at noon for free food.” As we prepared to leave, we discovered a letter from hotel management by our door. Don’t expect much in terms of housecleaning, warned the note: labor negotiations with the city’s hospitality workers had just broken down. The city was packed with a thousand comedians with something to prove, and everywhere the hotel staff was on strike. Things would get messy.
So how did Pete and I gain access to this red-carpet hoopla? Did I use my crack reportorial skills to pull the right strings behind the scenes? Did Pete score VIP passes through sheer force of personality? Neither.
A few weeks after we first came up with our plan to storm the Just For Laughs festival, Pete received an e-mail. “I heard about your research,” wrote the author. “We gotta become connected.” It was signed Andy Nulman—president of Festivals and Television for Just For Laughs.
Nulman, a suave character who’s always the best-dressed person in the room, was just the sort of guy we wanted to be connected with. In 1985, Nulman joined the nascent Just For Laughs festival, then a small-time francophone event. By the time he departed, fourteen years later, Just For Laughs was an international powerhouse. Then, after founding the tech company Airborne Mobile and selling it for millions, Nulman came back. Now, as part of Just For Laughs’ thirtieth anniversary celebration, he wanted to innovate—and that included inviting as his guests two outsiders trying to deconstruct all of comedy. As he put it to Pete, “Our event is the playground for your research.”
Access to that playground came with a price. Nulman wanted us to present our findings at the Just For Laughs Comedy Conference. To keep it interesting, we’d be facing off against Kenny Hotz. Hotz is famous in Canada for his shock-and-awe brand of comedy. On one television series, he made a go at cannibalism and tried to convince a Jewish community to build a mosque. In another stunt, he ran afoul of the British Columbia Human Rights Commission by flying a banner over Toronto that read “Jesus Sucks.” But speaking to us over the phone before the festival, Hotz seemed like a reasonable guy. There was nothing to worry about, he told us; everything was going to go fine.
We believed him—right up until we got on stage with him at the conference. Pete hardly had time to go over his benign violation theory before Hotz pulled out the heavy artillery. On a video screen, he flicked on a comedy clip he’d put together linking the Pope and pedophilia. “Is that funny, and why?” probed Hotz over the mixture of groans and chortles in the packed conference hall. “Is that a benign enough violation?” Continuing on, he played a real-life video of horribly misguided New Age do-gooders crooning “You’re the Sweetest Thing” to a suffering denizen of an Indian leper colony. Hotz, for one, found this hilarious. So, he grilled Pete, how do you explain why, Professor?
“Yeah, um . . .” started Pete. The usually gregarious academic was at a loss for words.
But then Pete caught a break, courtesy of a video clip Hotz played of a neighborhood fireworks show gone horribly wrong. The seminar audience was mostly silent as the man filming the scene hollered in terror as his video camera captured fireworks exploding all around him. Then, halfway through, the cameraman exclaimed, “That was awesome!” In response, the crowd erupted in applause and laughter. Afterward, Pete seized his chance. “I don’t know if you noticed this, but one of the biggest laughs was when the gentleman recording this said, ‘That was awesome,’ ” he said. “I put this to the audience. Why did that moment in time get the biggest laughs?”
Immediately, people saw where he was going. “That’s when it became benign!” someone exclaimed.
The rest of the seminar went well, and conference organizers seemed excited and appreciative for our involvement. (“What are you thanking them for?” cracked Hotz. “I did everything!”) It’s not the first time in our adventures that the benign violation theory has come through in a clutch. If anything, Pete’s journey with me beyond the ivory tower have made him ever more confident in the theory.
Take the “violation” half of the theory, says Pete, the idea that humor is born from situations that are wrong, threatening, or disruptive. We witnessed this concept all over the world, from the Japanese manzai duos, where the dim-witted boke always started the joke by doing something incorrectly, to the clown mission in the Amazon, which was all about turning the world upside down and breaking social norms. And let’s not forget the comedy w
e found in Palestine: if that isn’t proof that humor arises amid threats and violations, we don’t know what is. Find something wrong, and you’re likely to find somebody joking about it.
Of course, our findings weren’t all doom and gloom. For Pete, it was clear from our travels that the “benign” half of his theory was just as essential as the violation, that humor can only take root when situations are seen as playful, safe, or otherwise okay. In New York, we’d learned from Todd Hanson of The Onion that even something as terrible as the 9/11 terrorist attacks can be joked about, just as long as the butt of the joke deserves it. In Los Angeles, we’d found that comedians do best in environments where audiences feel secure—such as dark rooms or in crowds planted with professional laughers, folks skilled in letting others know that everything is okay and therefore funny.
We found additional evidence for the “benign” half of the theory in comedy’s potential downside, in how it signals that the stuff being joked about is harmless and doesn’t have to be taken seriously. It’s how people get away with derogatory humor by claiming, “It’s just a joke,” and it’s likely why the funny sex-ed PSAs we created for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy might have been catchy but didn’t get the job done.
Finally, our journey proved to Pete that both conditions of the benign violation theory have to be perceived simultaneously—that timing does matter. It’s why most things in the world aren’t funny, and it’s why even so-called funny things are boring to some people and offensive to others. It’s hard to find the balance between what’s a violation and what’s benign, especially when everybody has a different idea of what’s okay and what’s not, what’s a horrible tragedy and what’s a ho-hum mishap. That’s why it helps to be diligent and observant like the stand-up comics we met in LA, not to mention creative and open-minded like the cartoonists we got to know in New York. All of those qualities are essential to landing your jokes in the comedic sweet spot.