There are British one-liner merchants Tim Vine and Milton Jones, and Canadian Stewart Francis, but they are rare as you say. These sorts of comedian really do blow my mind by how they manage to remember them all. But then… do they do exactly the same jokes in the same order each time? Would anyone notice if they didn’t?
Gary Delaney too.
Re Tim Vine:
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From 2004 to 2014, Vine held the Guinness World Record for the most jokes told in an hour: each joke had to get a laugh from the audience to count towards the total, and he set the new record with 499 jokes.
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Nearly 500 jokes in one hour, every one of which had to get a laugh. Yeesh.
And then someone broke that record.
Carlin was much different than most comics. At least most comics today. He didn’t riff. His routines were finely crafted monologues. Scripted to the word. The problem with that is before it was ready for a TV special it needed a lot of work in front of a crowd. He did do a lot of work in smaller comedy clubs. I’m a little surprised he was doing a work in progress show in a theater.
I’ve heard comics saying they are jealous of musicians. When a musician plays his hits the audience is thrilled. When a comic does it the audience is disappointed
A few years ago I saw a Renn Faire performance by a married couple. They were bawdy and bantery, constantly teasing each other and trying to get a reaction out of the other. Often, while the wife was introducing the next set, the husband would make snarky comments to throw her off her game, and she’d get annoyed and amused and get off track before going back to the script. It was pretty fun.
A couple hours later I wandered by their stage, and they were giving the performance again–and the banter was exactly the same. The husband said exactly the same things at the same moments to throw her off her game, and she was annoyed and amused in exactly the same way. He wasn’t throwing her off the script: that was the script.
I almost admired that more, their ability to convincingly feign improv. They’d given this same show hundreds of times, and they’d honed their banter and timing down to a science. It was pretty cool.
As a teacher, I experience that in a lesser way. When I get to give the same lesson to multiple classes, I hone my delivery in a lot of different ways. That includes the jokes: while I tell a lot fewer than a comedian, humor keeps the kids engaged, and I figure out where I can say something silly or surprising, and you can bet I’ll repeat a joke that lands with future classes.
It’s very different from conversational humor, where repetition is cringe.
Yup. Dylan was the worst concert I’ve ever been to. Salem VA 1991. He hardly performed any songs at all though. Just rambled on incoherently about the recent Gulf War.
I listen to a lot of ‘inside baseball’ type podcasts about comedy, so I feel like I know something about this. I skimmed through the thread so a lot of this has already been said I think, so maybe this can serve as a bit of a ‘Cliff’s Notes’ style summary.
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First, a comedian tries out new material in small clubs, or even just friends and family, to see how it works, bounce it off real people. This is where they learn which jokes, or parts of jokes, work, which don’t, or which need ‘punching up’.
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When the new material feels ready, they take it to whatever serves as their main audience. The bits continue to evolve as the comedian continues to get crowd feedback, and the energy of each crowd is different, so each performance is a little different.
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In this day and age of multi-platform social media, it’s difficult for a comedian to truly get sick of their own material, because they will regularly have to create new material to keep fans happy. I’ve heard many comedian interviews where they say they envy musicians who get to play most their hits at concerts and don’t have to constantly churn out new stuff with the same frequency as a comedian.
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There will be a few ‘classic’ bits a comedian will become known for, and, just like the Rolling Stones probably grimace and bear it when they have to play ‘Satisfaction’ for the 97 millionth time, a comedian will have to either decide to haul out the old bit to please the crowd, maybe put a fresh spin on it, or just say no. I think I’ve heard Jim Gaffigan say he dreads when someone in the crowd yells out 'Hot Pockets!".
I heard an interview with a celebrity who had previously worked as an usher at a concert hall. Liberace was playing a series of shows and he would claim there was a couple in the audience who had met a Liberace show 40 years ago and shine a spotlight on them, using the same words and the same story each night.
More relevant to this topic, I have been on a “tour” with a corporate trainer. Day long session in 30+ cities over three months. I was doing the technical side, he was doing the Organizational/Change Management side. He delivered the same presentation with the same jokes and anecdotes for 20+ days.
Then he was replaced by another trainer. A woman. Who also delivered almost the exact same material. The only changes were to adjust the gender of some people in the anecdotes (“my husband likes” vs “my wife likes”).
My piece varied a lot because my audience participation was genuine. Theirs was completely scripted. They had smooth segues but in reality the audience responses were very predictable and if they didn’t get the desired response they just carried on as if they did.
I suspect most of their bios were made up. This was before LinkedIn, so I couldn’t look them up. They were basically actors delivering a script. For three hours. It was very impressive in a way, and depressing at the same time.
Sounds kind of similar to what the Smothers Brothers did.
I saw Billy Joel when he toured with Elton John in 2001. At one point, during Joel’s solo set, he said it was his guitarist’s birthday. The crowd sang “Happy Birthday,” then Joel said the guitarist could pick any song he wanted and the band would play it. The guitarist chose “Highway to Hell,” and they did indeed play it. I thought the whole thing was pretty awesome at the time.
Seven or eight years later, I was catching up with an old friend. She mentioned she’d seen Billy Joel recently, and she proceeded to tell the exact same story. Guitarist’s birthday, got to pick out any song, he chose “Highway to Hell.”
Back to the point of the thread: when I was in my early twenties I went to a lot of comedy clubs. After a while, I realized that most comedians aren’t really that great. Because their entire act is scripted, and there is no spontaneity. If something throws them off-track, they don’t know how to deal with it, and lamely try to limp back to their script. There were a few, though, who were quick on their feet, and mostly fed off of the audience. They were the best ones - the ones who DIDN’T simply repeat the same jokes over and over.
A few years ago I was often in the audience for a monthly comedy show by local commedians for cancer patients and their families.
It was always a new group every month (except me), It was for them to work on their routines, as well as entertain people dealing with a difficult situtation.
I got to know the routines of the regular commedians and saw differences as they tried new things. I occasionally did some audience participation (heckling?) and a couple things became part of their routine at that place.
This was supposed to be their clean version of their act. A couple times someone let a “non clean” thing slip out, hopefully it was a mistake.
These two at least have the functionality to be constantly updated with new material that fits the bit. Hard to do with a story based bit.
I saw John Pinette at an Improv sometime in the 2000s. A heckler early on yelled out “You go now!” Pinette shut it down quick by saying “Don’t worry, sir. I’ll close the show with it.” This was when he was trying to get “I say nay nay!” to be a new catch phrase.
Yeah. I watched a vid of Ron White in a SRO concert hall a couple years after BCCT had run its course. As he entered the stage some yahoo shouted “Tater salad”.
He put on his disgusted face, looked out to the source of the interruption, rubbed his chin, and said something like “Don’t worry, it’s coming”.
Just one more occupational hazard / irritant of the job.
We went to see Barry Manilow in Las Vegas, and it just happened to be his real Birthday. I have heard about this show for many years and I took the Wife because she wanted to go, and happy Wife, happy life.
The show was as had been described, but during the segue between segments, the “staff” would interrupt him and give him gifts and a giant cake for his Birthday and we all sang. Now since it really was his birthday, I looked it up after we left.
Does the “staff” interrupt him every show for various reasons (not Birthday) or did I see something unique? I have no need to see Barry again not on his Birthday to find out.
LHoD touch d on it, but comedians and musicians have nothing on teachers. We do 5 shows a day, 40 weeks a year to audiences that range from the enthusiastic to the downright hostile. If you are a secondary teacher, it’s the same piece every show. You hone, polish, trim and adapt, but there are only so many ways you can cover stuff.
Ron White rarely writes new material. I’ve seen him a few times and his routine is always essentially the same. Same pacing, same inflections, same “accidents”. But he’s good at it and it’s funny. I’ve seen Denis Miller and it was similar. I saw Jay Leno and his whole set was new to me. They say he sleeps (actually) during his monologues. The hardest I’ve ever laughed at a live show was Rodney Dangerfield - that man was funny when not censoring himself for tv.
Add Gabriel Iglesias’s “Cuz You Can Smell It!” joke about the cop and the donuts.
Jimmy Carr actively works the crowd during his shows (look up his “Heckle Amnesty” videos) but it works well with his whole “staggering offensive”shtick. And he’s incredibly quick-thinking as well.
But of course he has his set bits in the show too.
In 5th grade my teacher was telling a story about when he was playing basketball. The opposing player kept elbowing him in the head. The teacher said something like “I told him to knock it off”. Some of us thought it was funny because It could be taken as knocking his head off. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that this was an intentional joke.
Robin Williams was well known as an improviser. He wasn’t following a script; he really would go off on strange tangents as an idea occurred to him in the middle of a performance.
But there’s a risk involved. If you’re giving a performance and a great line suddenly pops into your head, there may be a reason it was there in your brain. It could be a joke that you heard another comedian use last month.
Williams was notorious for using other comedian’s jokes. When he got in the zone and started improvising, he wasn’t thinking about where the jokes were coming from. To his credit, he acknowledged this. If another comedian came up to him and pointed out Williams had been using his material, Williams would apologize and then pay the comedian for the material.