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
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