OK, Dara Ó Bríain and Dylan Moran are NOT British. By any possible definition.
I agree that they’re laugh-out-loud funny and have nothing in common with the OP’s weird description of stand-up, though.
Ecoaster, you say you’ve only been to stand-up a few times, so it seems a bit premature for you to write off the whole form as crap. I’m with the others who say you need some better stand-up before you can decide whether you actually like it.
And yeah, I’ve laughed myself silly at stand-up.
I’ve only been to in person stand up once, in the early 2000s. I only laughed out loud once during the whole show, and even that experience was lessened because it was a (funny) joke about Pink Floyd, but because I was a known Floyd fan, all the rest of my party were turning around to stare at me, expecting me to be in stitches. And yes, I was drinking. Didn’t help.
The comedians you mention that I’ve heard are among my favorites. I’ll track down work from the others!
Completely agree with this - I’ve seen her live twice, and she was amazing both times. I’m always surprised that she’s not better known. Her delivery just kills me.
When I was growing up, comedy was really important to my dad, and therefore to me as well. Seinfeld was just about sacred in our house. Now I live about 3 minutes from a comedy club, so as you can imagine I see a lot of stand-up, both professional and amateur. Humor is really a mixed bag. There are plenty of comedians, both aspiring and successful, who make me cringe. But on the whole I love the stand-up genre. You may not. I personally think Mr. Bean is the most aggressively unfunny thing I’ve seen in my life, but plenty of people disagree with me.
There’s a radio station that’s new to KC called Funny 102.5. It’s a national syndication where all they do is play clips of comics sets all day long.
What I’ve found is that 90% of the comics on there just aren’t funny at all. These are professional and semi-professional comics and most of their routines do not make me laugh. They’re either taking the low hanging fruit of the joke, or they’ve got a good idea but haven’t really carved the “funny” out of it, or they’re just too ill at ease up on stage or something. But telling a good joke well is a really really hard thing to do, even for those who do it for a living.
What’s strange is that I like Rodney Dangerfield, I love George Carlin, and I enjoy Aisha Tyler on Archer, but none of them have made me laugh when listening to them over the radio. Maybe these are bad clips or maybe I’m not in the club drinking but something doesn’t translate.
On the other end of the spectrum, there have been a few comics who I’ve discovered through this station who are absolutely hilarious. Mike Birbiglia, Doug Stanhope, & Christopher Titus
There are other ones I’d already heard of who continue to make me laugh when I hear “new” stuff on the radio: John Pinnette, Jimmy Carr, Dimitri Martin, Mitch Hedburg.
The bottom line is that there are funny comics out there. But they’re rare and what’s funny to me may not be funny to you.
If this were true, then most, if not all, stand-up comedians would be considered equally funny. So do you suppose that people are actually conditioned to find someone like George Carlin to be very funny, and also conditioned to find Margaret Cho to be intolerable?
That is so offensive. Just because someone doesn’t laugh at any jokes made in the last sixty years, you blame them for the problem? You are totally a fascist.
Humor’s not hard to locate. You just make an X on Chelsea Handler, and funny will always be at the opposite pole.
Patton Oswalt had a routine about open-mic nights where he talked about the kinds of people who came up to perform. The smallest group were the people who, as he put it, “were really funny, and had a voice, and you could tell they were gonna go somewhere.” The second, much larger group, he described as, “They were funny, but who gives a shit? All their stuff was like, ‘Isn’t airline food crappy’, and ‘what’s the deal with blahblibbybloo.’” And of course there was a third group, “fucking lunatics.”
But that second group, that’s most of the comics working today, sorta scraping by, working the little clubs. They’re funny on a minimal level, just enough to get paid, but they’ll never stand out from the crowd. And when you say, “Let’s go to the comedy club!” that’s probably what you’re going to encounter.
I might not laugh out loud, but I smile really loudly.
I have never found slapstick funny - hated The Stooges, Soupy Sales pie-in-the-face and their ilk - (and don’t get me started on how unfunny circus clowns are) but have found some one liners from certain comedians will make me laugh out loud.
But I can watch a comedy special on TV, and have gone to comedy clubs, and maybe not laugh out loud, but smile enough to make me feel like it was worth watching/going to see.
I’ve seen Brian Regan and Jim Gaffigan in the past year and I laughed out loud a lot for both of them. And also for Brian’s opening act, who was his brother. Gaffigan’s opening act not so much with the funny.
I’ve only seen a few stand-up acts in person and no one famous. It’s always been a group of people deciding to go to the Giggle Shack on cheap beer night or something. But I usually laughed at the time. I think that, provided the act doesn’t entirely suck, there’s usually enough of a positive atmosphere and you’re looking to have a good time that you laugh at things you wouldn’t laugh at from your couch.
Same deal with music, really. I’ve seen a bunch of live acts and enjoyed most of them. But I’d almost never sit on my couch and watch a whole concert/show on TV. The vibe just isn’t there.
My point is that we are told when to laugh, it’s all set-up. Of course I don’t believe it is fully automatic, but as with many social expectations, we do as we are expected to one extent or another. People who are full-on bellyaching laughing are obviously finding something funny. But I suspect a lot of the little laughs are polite laughs and don’t have a lot to do with a genuine emotional reaction to a joke.
I don’t always go to stand up gigs, but when I do, I see Eddie Izzard. And I laugh hearty, my friends.
I used to go see the Borgota comedy shows when I was comped. It was a mixed bag. A few that I had heard of (Gary Valentine) and mostly ones I haven’t. Some were meh others were hilarious.
There is a good comedy club not far from here in New Jersey called The Stress Factory. Now I go rarely but when I do its for a headliner I want to see. The club is owned by Vinnie Brand. Vinnie usually opens each show. Everytime I have seen him his act has been 100% new. I don’t know how he does it. He is very funny and his crowd work is excellent.
Jim Breuer: I was never much of a fan of his on SNL. But as a stand up he is a master. He is not a joke teller he is a storyteller. Just about the best storyteller I have heard.
Christopher Titus. I hear he comes up with a new 90 minute show each year. I saw him last year. It wasn’t as good as Norman Rockwell is Bleeding but still damn good.
The last guy I saw was Dave Attell. Fantastic show.
If you haven’t seen good stand up yet try going to a better club that gets real headliners. You may have only seen journeymen and openmikers.
You just wish you’d made the joke first.
ecoaster, try listening by yourself, in a room, with no one around. I really kind of feel like you’re not getting the point of it. 
And I don’t mean that in a mean way. You think we are all laughing because we’re conditioned to?
Ok, how about this? What makes you laugh? Is it programmed or conditioned or do you laugh because it’s funny?
Just wanted to add that the OP mentioned never laughing at sitcoms and never laughing at standups. The problem might be you. Not everyone has a good sense of humor. Its ok. And its not about being conditioned. Sure its easier to laugh in a room full of people who are laughing. But big laughs come from surprise and the unexpected. Conditioned responses might get some chuckles. I have laughed at comics to the point I was in physical pain. That was not conditioning.
It’s true that, for the most part, people who make the effort to see stand-up comedy do so because they want to find it funny. They’re predisposed to laugh, because if they didn’t want to or expect to laugh, they wouldn’t be there.
It’s also true that a lot of what makes the comedy funny is in the setup, and the subtle cues that now you’re supposed to laugh. But (1) that’s true of pretty much any comedy, including the stuff you claim to enjoy, and (2) as Ravenman pointed out, if that were all there was to it, there wouldn’t be such a difference between the great stand-ups and the lame ones.
I’m glad someone mentioned Seinfeld. I wish I had seen him “back in the day.” But I did get to see him about 5 years ago at Ceasar’s Palace in Las Vegas, and he was hilarious. And he never has to curse to be funny.
I also thought Steven Wright was hilarious in concert. And I’m not ashamed to admit I saw Andrew Dice Clay at MSG about 20 years ago and I was crying laughing. And it wasn’t his famous, played-out sexual nursery rhyme routine that really killed; rather it was this totally non-PC (surprise surprise) routine that went off on the old and handicapped that did it. It was so wrong but F***ing Hilarious!
I love going to comedy clubs, and I think the crowd very rarely just laughs because “they’re supposed to.” In fact, when someone bombs, the place goes silent and it is quite painful for all involved. A great example was at the Dice concert referenced above. I believe Eddie Griffin opened for him. He bombed so bad that the whole crowd was chanting “DICE” during the whole 2nd half of his act.
When someone bombs it is soooo painful. I want to crawl under the table.
I think I was spoiled. The first comedy show I saw was when I was quite young. 13 maybe? I saw Bill Cosby right before his sitcom came on TV. He was at the height of his standup career and it showed. No one better than him at his prime. And this was in a decent sized arena not a club.
Dear ecoaster,
With all due respect - and all of the YMMV aside - you need to lighten up. Seriously. As some like to say - you are all up in your head - overanalyzing.
Yes, if you think about it hard enough all behavior of every living thing is just DNA expressing itself and attempting to replicate. Things like money and buildings and clothing and iphones and tv shows and whatnot are just outward manifestations of our need to reproduce <YAWN! Snnnzzzz…>…see where I’m going?
I hope you get better and learn to laugh.