Is there something to get or is it an anti-joke:
It’s an anti-joke. Her awkwardness is the humor.
I knew it was going to be this when I read the thread title. It’s been trending.
Can you tell us the “joke”?
It’s a version of the “How do you keep a moron in suspense?” riddle.
I made myself a sandwich the other day
It was a PB & J
(Accompanied by extraneous patter)
She says in her 14 years in comedy it’s her best joke. And she repeats it slowly as if there is something the audience isn’t getting
No, that one actually has a payoff.
Maybe the joke is that the people listening paid to be there?
No, the joke is just a classic Confirm/Confound where she sets up an expectation and then subverts it. Exactly like she says.
The set up is not: I had a sandwich the other day. The payoff is not: It was a PB&J
The set up is: I’m about to tell you my best joke, I had sandwich, it was a PB&J.
What that sets up is our expectations for what happens when a comedian’s joke dies. In that situation the comedian is wrong and the audience is right. It is bad and awkward for the comedian that the audience didn’t laugh, they need to drop that gag and find something else that works.
What actually happens is that she starts berating the audience for not getting it, explains to them what a PB&J is because if they’re not laughing it’s because they don’t understand, goes back and repeats the joke because she knows it’s funny and they will see it too. They still don’t get it so she explains the mechanics.
This is a classic comedy character, the overconfident idiot who doesn’t know they’re an idiot. It’s the coyote running on air. It’s the Emperor in his stylish new suit, Malvolio is his gaiters.
It is actually pretty horrible to be in the audience when a comedian dies. The room becomes a big empty lonely hole and you’re trapped watching this person suffocate. This routine has the form of this horrible experience, but because it’s deliberate it allows the audience to safely laugh at it.
(Worth remembering that this is the end of a gig, she’s had ample time to demonstrate that she can and does make people laugh, the audience by this point likely are confident in her and can see that this is a performance of a bad joke rather than an actual bad joke, and go along with it. We, coming it to it cold and seeing it presented out of context, don’t have that confidence and find it more like an actual bad joke.)
All that said, I’ve seen this done much better by other comedians.
is there any way to get a video tracker so you can rewind at will?
See for example here,
I’d call it a shaggy dog story. And “comedy of embarrassment” - e.g. a character like Ricky Gervais’s David Brent in the UK original “The Office”. Sometimes they land, sometimes they don’t; some audiences just aren’t on the same wavelength.
Thank you, that’s really helpful.
Except not one word of that is accurate.
It is in the middle of a set, there is very little laughter ever even allowing for the tiny size of the audience. The whole set is just as bad as the viral clip.
I don’t walk out on things, but if I were in that audience, I would no longer be able to make that claim.
mmm
Huh, I swear in the clip on the OP she said she was out of time and this was her last gag.
ETA, yeah she says she’s almost out of time and will end on her best gag.
…and just looking at the sets in the two clips, it’s visibly not the same gig.
There’s really no difference between telling a bad joke and ironically telling a bad joke as the joke itself. The audience still paid money to hear crap jokes, or “jokes”.
This is only true if you think comedy is about telling jokes. It’s not.
It’s about making people laugh.
Jokes are one way to do that of course. But not the only way by any means.
I agree that the example in the OP isn’t a particularly good one, but there are plenty of comedians who can get laughs by making the humour about the performance rather than the material. If you look at the video I linked (admittedly longer but you can just dip into it) you will see that the audience is laughing throughout. And the way you tell if something is funny is : are people laughing? Then it’s funny.
I don’t know, I guess I get the premise, but that’s just not my thing. It was pretty painful to watch actually.
Comedy is about making people laugh. Standing up awkwardly standing next to an old record player listening to the theme for Mighty Mouse and singing along with “Here I come to save the DAAAAAY!” isn’t funny. it’s awkward. And being told your reaction to the awkwardness is what makes it funny doesn’t retroactively make it funny. It means you wasted my time on meta comedy commentary masquerading as humor.
The first thing I thought of when I saw that video was Andy Kauffman style done very poorly. If you don’t like Kauffman, you certainly won’t like that comedian.