Why Standup is More Theatrical Than Theatre

welcome to the show

i’m ollie double stand-up comedy is more

theatrical than most theater and

funnier too fact the first thing to say

is that stand-up comedy easily passes

what i call the peter brook test

in 1968 the great theater director peter

brooke published this book the empty

space

and in it he gives a profoundly simple

definition of what theater is

he says i can take any empty space and

call it a bare stage

a man walks across this empty space

while someone else is watching him

and this is all that is needed for an

active theater to be engaged

i mean stand-up comedy does way more

than that although it wouldn’t be much

of a show

if that’s all it did stand-up’s

so much better than that and in fact i’m

going to name six ways

in which stand-up comedians outstrip

conventional actors

one authorship hello i’m an actor and i

write all my own material

here’s the thing i’m working on at the

moment i call it king lear

the point is that whereas most actors

just interpret

other people’s material most comedians

generate their own i mean it’s true

there are exceptions shakespeare was an

actor for example

and some comedians worked with writers

but the fact is that rule is

mostly true also the scripts that

comedians produce

are really different from a play text

with a play text you can kind of

work out who the characters are what the

plot is and so on whereas

uh stand-up script is very very

different so josie long

is a young british comedian who broke

through in the early 2000s with a

delightful whimsical homemade style

really rooted in diy culture and left

wing politics

now what you’re looking at now is the

script essentially

for her show romance and adventure and

if you look at it

it’s kind of hard to make sense of it

there’s just these words everywhere it’s

a spider diagram with things like

lannok um and phrases like 2012 till

2015 spice girls branson plus ramjak

tesco i’m a hypocrite dolston champagne

waterski

what do these things mean i don’t know

not really and i saw the show

the only person who would know is josie

long and she might not even remember all

of it now

she would have done when she did the

show and that’s the point the script

comes from the comedian two acting

normally

actors play one character but comedians

play many because they people the stage

with their imagination creating

character set props

humans animals from the air all around

them using just

their body their face and their voice

the example i’m going to give of this is

richard pryor widely acknowledged as one

of the all-time greats of stand-up

he started out in america in the 1960s

with quite a clean-cut style

but then he radically reinvented himself

in the 1970s

with a much blacker more earthy style

sharing the private humor of the

african-american community with mixed

race audiences

his show live in concert is amazing

it was filmed in late 1978 and released

the cinemas in 1979

and it contains a scene in which he

shows you what happens when hunters go

out to the woods i’ll show what it’s

like it’s kind of like this

you can see it so vividly and you can

hear the crunching of leaves

and then he shows us a deer drinking and

being surprised

by the sound of the leaves crunching

and it’s amazing because you can’t see

him there it’s

clearly just richard pryor and he’s

barely doing anything he’s just standing

with quite a still body and quite a

still face but at the same time you can

actually see the deer so

vividly that it gets gales of laughter

it’s incredible

three audience

you gave him right good for sucking

[Laughter]

what’s that idiot saying over there

charming

stand up is more theatrical than theater

because there’s never

a fourth wall separating performer from

audience

sarah millikan is a brilliant comedian

from the north east of england she has a

very distinctive voice

it’s high pitched it has a strong

geordie accent and her style i would

describe it as warm confessional and

let’s be honest rude

one of the things she does is ask

audiences about their experiences

so she might ask them for example have

you ever broken anything during sex

and they come back with these amazing

stories about stuff they’ve broken like

for example

a lamp a bed a dessert table at a

restaurant and of course she’s very

funny reacting to these very quick on

her feet very quick witted

but also she builds the routine night

after night audience after audience

because as well as finishing up with a

story of her own

she’ll incorporate uh the reactions of

previous night’s audiences

in the current performance it’s a very

beautiful and liberating thing to see

people confessing to such intimate

things

in public like that four persona

in standard comedy there’s an inherent

ambiguity about who that person is that

you see on stage

it’s different with acting isn’t it

because you know there’s a difference

between actor and character

if you see hamlet on the stage you know

he’s not really hamlet you know he’s

really david tennant because you’ve seen

him on doctor who on telly right but

with stand up it’s persona it’s

sort of an exaggerated version of the of

the real person or

something like that we don’t know how

much that person we see on stage would

resemble

the person if we met them privately in

everyday life and that could be played

with in a really interesting way so

take the british comedian bridget

christie for example she used to work

for the daily mail

before she started in stand-up in 2004

with a delightfully silly style

which saw her do two edinburgh comedy

shows dressed as

charles ii then she changed her style a

bit more recently

so that she was not only delightfully

silly but also righteously feminist

and won the edinburgh comedy award in

2013 for her show a bic for her

okay so she really interestingly plays

on this thing of

who she is so for example after a rant

she’ll go uh here i’m not a character

comedian you know i’m not a spoof of a

1980s feminist comedian

i’m like this all the time and by

playing on the ambiguity it opens up a

space for her to say some really

important things

fun extra fact a few years ago a

well-known british newspaper

published a story about charles ii on

its website

and they used an illustration which

wasn’t actually a picture of him no

it was a photograph of bridget christie

dressed as charles ii

and what was that newspaper the daily

mail

five truth

actors and theater makers often talk

about truth in theater but actually

truth is far more interesting in

stand-up comedy

and that’s because the show never

pretends to be happening anywhere other

than the stage where it’s happening and

also the person that’s talking to us

appears to just be

a person talking to us not a character

i’d like

the difference between theater and stand

up to the story of zuccess and parasias

yes i’m going that pretentious so cast

your minds back

to 5th century bc athens where there’s a

contest happening

between two painters to prove which is

the better painter

and so they meet somewhere in the open

air with their paintings covered with

curtains and zucchinis goes first he

pulls the curtain back

and behind the curtain is a painting of

grapes so realistic that birds

fly down from the sky and try and peck

the painted grapes

and you think gosh he’s got to win right

but then it’s poracious has turned and

zucchini says come on pull back the

curtain

and bracia says no it’s not a kern it’s

my painting of a curtain

and the point is there that zucchinis

could fall

birds but bracias could fall humans

right and that’s like

theatre and stand up with theater you

might be taken aback by how realistic

the acting is but you know it’s acting

with stand-up you’re not sure what’s

true and what’s not and comedians can

play

with that in a really interesting way so

for example eddie izzard the trans

comedian

from the uk who became big in the 1990s

and still is very big

both in the uk and in america now his

1998 show

dressed a kill filmed in san francisco

has this brilliant routine about how

the singer engelbert humperdinck got his

name and

at the end of the routine he goes but

he’s dead now

do you hear that yeah i saw it on cnn

just before i came out yeah

that’s weird yeah and frank sinatra

as well he died recently so yeah

no it’s not true it’s not true

yes it is true

that’s not and then he goes through that

cycle of claiming it to be true and not

true

six more times every time he does it he

gets another laugh because it’s

outrageously playing on that ambiguity

of what’s true and what’s not i mean

it’s a bit like this right now

you know am i actually in front of a

virtual backdrop of a beach

or is it really a beach

it’s a beach no it’s a backdrop

no it’s a beach six

magic so if you put all that stuff

together

you realize stand up is this incredible

form it’s like magic

stuart lee started out in the british

alternative

comedy scene of the late 1980s before

becoming a tv star in the 90s alongside

richard herring

in the early 2000s he gave up stand up

to return in about 2004

and become to my mind one of the

all-time greats of the of the form

because he kept pushing at what it was

possible to do

with standup so in a recent show

he does a joke and the audience laugh a

bit

but not a massive laugh and he tells

them that they’ve given him the wrong

reaction

he says he’s been touring the show for

weeks and he knows exactly the laugh

that

bit should get and they haven’t given it

to him and he talks about the pressure

that audiences put comedians under

and he said audiences like you

you as good as murdered robin williams

an outrageous thing to say it gets an

outraged laugh

and then he says he talks about real

comedians that he’s known who’ve died

and he talks about historical examples

of comedians who who’ve died and

and uh he says it’s because of the

pressure that auditors put them under

and he says that when he walks out onto

the stage he’s surrounded by

dead comedians people he’s known he says

he walks out into a forest of

ghosts and he says the ones on this side

say

don’t let it get to you don’t let it get

you down but the ones on this side

say join us join us

join us it’s just so weird and spooky

so weird and spooky in fact that one

comedy critic

seeing him do that left the show to

tweet that she’d just seen stuart lee

having a nervous breakdown

i’m going to finish with this it’s a

quote from little tits

who was a british music hall comedian in

the late 19th early 20th century

and he was so famous and successful that

he gave a new word to the english

language even in his own lifetime

because the word titch meaning somebody

small

came to us from the music hall comedian

little titch

and he was very bothered by the fact

that actors get kudos much more than

comedians

uh you know for example in the honors

system and he wrote

an actor is an actor whether he plays

hamlet or wears the red nose and sloppy

trousers

of a vaudeville comedian i maintain that

on the score of individual ability

the variety star in other words the

stand-up comedian

is usually the better actor of the two

i agree thank you very much indeed and

good night

you