[HN Gopher] The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)
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The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 129 points
Date : 2021-10-07 11:17 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pudding.cool)
(TXT) w3m dump (pudding.cool)
| lecarore wrote:
| I didn't completely hate the abuse of JavaScript in this. But
| still it's not as enjoyable as a simple responsive page of static
| HTML and images you could scroll.
| [deleted]
| stnmtn wrote:
| I loved the presentation of this
| shard wrote:
| It did not work for me on mobile. Multiple clicks with no
| response, threw me back to the first page once, I gave up a few
| pages into it.
| moate wrote:
| I hated it and stopped after about 3 prompts/clicks
| pboutros wrote:
| Yeah, that was fantastic
| tptacek wrote:
| This is impressive. But, those poor frogs.
|
| Snark aside, it also doesn't say that much; Ali Wong's biggest
| laugh comes in large part from the fact that all her bits are
| arranged to build up to it. Ok!
|
| If you're interested in this stuff, a good listen is Mike
| Birbiglia's "Working It Out" podcast, which is a little bit like
| Marc Maron's "WTF", but with an emphasis on workshopping bits in
| progress. Part of what makes it interested in this context is
| that Birbiglia is working out his next special (something that
| apparently takes years, which I guess shouldn't surprise me), and
| so talks a lot about the themes he's building jokes around and
| what he's trying to say overall.
| saltmeister wrote:
| she's not funny
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I have not seen a funny comic in such a long time.
|
| Maybe it my age, but I thought I had decent taste in comedy.
|
| I never thought Leno was funny. Seinfield was tedious.
|
| It just seems like the last two decades have been pitiful?
|
| I heard a convict being interviewed a few years ago. The
| interviewer asked him what he does all day. He said, "I try to
| figure out why Saturday Night Live is not funny, and ways to make
| it funny again." The lady looked at him like he was crazy, but I
| kinda understood what he was getting at.
|
| I think about some of my favorite comedians over the years, and
| they all had two things in common: were poor, or low middle
| class, griping up. And did a fair amount of drugs.
|
| Drugs that would get you fired these days.
|
| I'm not equating drugs with good comedy. I just don't know the
| reason. It couldn't be that all the material has alwready been
| said?
| dsr_ wrote:
| Humor is notoriously subjective and also dependent on mood.
|
| The Goes Wrong Show is reliably funny for me; the premise is
| that a small-town serious theater troop has lucked into a time
| slot on a BBC channel, and they do their earnest utmost to do
| theatre well. But -- it all goes wrong. There's a stage version
| and two (UK) seasons of the show.
|
| Whose Line Is It Anyway? typically manages a few howlingly good
| bits in any given show.
|
| Key and Peele did five seasons and I get something hilarious
| out of basically every show, but I also think they fall flat
| several times per show.
|
| Saturday Night Live has had good years and bad; they've always
| had a problem with knowing when to stop a sketch, but they're
| still worth watching, if not worth staying up for. There's a
| lot of survivorship bias with SNL: you can see the best bits of
| 45 years, and compared with that, how's this week's show going
| to rate?
| nkingsy wrote:
| Ronny Chieng
|
| Bill Burr
|
| Nate Bargatze
|
| Fortune Feimster
|
| Gary Gulman
|
| Just a few I was able to dig up who made me laugh a lot.
|
| I guess it depends what you like, but the art form has been
| really sharpened over the last 10-20 years, to the point where,
| similar to film, the majority of the content out there conforms
| to a style that everyone seems to agree is good.
|
| In comedy, that style is confessional, tagged storytelling with
| interwoven callbacks. If you don't like that, yeah, you
| probably don't like modern comedy.
| hguant wrote:
| Most cities have comedy clubs; don't go to those. Go to the
| bars that do weekly standup, those are the places the comedy
| show folks go to try out new material, or where newer folks try
| to break into the scene. You get exposed to a lot of things
| that would never be allowed on any sort of broadcast medium,
| and are often uproariously funny.
| almostjamboree wrote:
| Related (but with not nearly as creative a presentation), here's
| an analysis of James Acaster's Repertoire series on Netflix (with
| a brief reference to Ali Wong's special): [0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP3Gr-ZV0Tw
| glxxyz wrote:
| Saying that some/all other standups "just [tell] 100 individual
| jokes" is a straw man. She demonstrates textbook Stand-Up Comedy:
|
| From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-up_comedy : "Bits
| (linked jokes) and chunks (linked bits) are an arrangement of
| interlinked thematic units from within the set or routine. [...]
| Stand-ups structure jokes, bits, and chunks to end on climactic
| laughter. [...] A callback is a reference to a previous thing
| that was experienced by the audience during that set, designed to
| create an inside joke."
| [deleted]
| gkoberger wrote:
| If you like this, definitely go down a https://pudding.cool
| rabbit hole. There's some really amazing visualizations they've
| built out.
| iptrans wrote:
| Terrible presentation format. Exceedingly annoying on mobile.
| shard wrote:
| Likely it was not optimized for your browser. I had a lot of
| trouble navigating this site, multiple presses with no
| response, and I gave up a few pages through it.
| a1371 wrote:
| I respectfully disagree. I found it nice, engaging, and easy to
| follow.
| [deleted]
| logshipper wrote:
| [Meta] Looks like the article is from 2018, perhaps it would help
| to reflect that in the title?
|
| Another really cool Pudding project was the "How bad is your
| Spotify?" [0]
|
| [0] https://pudding.cool/2020/12/judge-my-spotify/
| [deleted]
| wonder_er wrote:
| I believe the humor and novelty and interestingness of this
| standup routine is related to the _density_ of information
| conveyance.
|
| I read this paper a while back, it was so good I wanted to make
| it more sharable:
|
| https://josh.works/driven-by-compression-progress-novelty-hu...
|
| The title is:
|
| Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains
| Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise,
| Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science,
| Music, Jokes
|
| And... it's really good. It argues that a common thread among
| many different domains (as listed in the title) is how much
| information can be compressed into the information stream, like
| the bit-rate. Higher bitrate, more interesting information.
| Yoric wrote:
| As a practitioner of improv comedy (including a little
| clowncraft), I'd argue that you can produce laughs from
| essentially doing nothing, repeatedly.
|
| So, I'm not really convinced. Maybe that principle can explain
| some cases of beauty, novelty, .... jokes. Definitely not all.
| dvt wrote:
| > It argues that a common thread among many different domains
| (as listed in the title) is how much information can be
| compressed into the information stream, like the bit-rate.
| Higher bitrate, more interesting information.
|
| Piet Mondrian, Philip Glass, Andy Kaufman would provide trivial
| counter-arguments to the idea that high-density = "better"
| (more interesting, funnier, etc.).
| dgb23 wrote:
| I only know of Andy Kaufman from your examples.
|
| Wasn't some of his work very much reliant on what he didn't
| say directly? An argument one could make would be that the
| information density is still high in terms of what is
| perceived or experienced. That would still be a kind of
| compression but it involves the context and audience to a
| very high degree. I think he sometimes made his performances
| so intense, that it would be unbearable not to engage with
| them.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| You might argue that work like Mondrian's _implies_
| additional information, in the form of implied commentary on
| centuries of art history (arguably necessary for his work to
| be considered interesting or "good"). You might then argue
| that this makes up for the lower explicit information
| density.
| peakaboo wrote:
| Guess I'm old because there is nothing funny about what she does.
| Just awkward and embarrassing.
| nkingsy wrote:
| You saw her special? Everything else I've seen of hers was
| cringey, but baby cobra was solid work. If you don't like it
| you likely don't like most "good" stand up comedy these days.
| Awkward and embarrassing is a pretty good description of the
| art form.
| suyash wrote:
| Love the interactive website, how does one make website like
| this? any pointers on tech used?
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(page generated 2021-10-07 23:01 UTC)