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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/magazine/the-tragedy-of-comedy-podcasts.html
Stand-Up Comedy Without the Stand-Up. Or the Comedy.
By PAUL BROWNFIELD
“I’ve really been in my head this last week,” a morbid-sounding comedian said on his podcast recently. “Every time I think I’m out of the woods with my depression and my self-obsession, I manage to backslide, and then that makes me even more depressed.”
The podcasting comedian (wait for it) confessed that a cable TV show he had co-hosted for many years was about to go off the air. He was frightened. “I’m afraid to admit to myself that I’m sad, and I’m scared that I’m not going to work again.”
But then (still waiting for it . . .) he made an insight about his depression. He spoke of his “fear that I’m not going to have enough money, which is connected to believing that I’m alone.”
This podcast, called “The Mental Illness Happy Hour” and hosted by Paul Gilmartin, is filed on iTunes under Self Help, even though Gilmartin is a comedian and many of his guests are comedians. And no wonder: the tone of the show plays to the trope that all comedians are in actuality broken people who are willing to expose their brokenness for our light amusement. Gilmartin takes this cliché seriously, creating a perversely safe place in which he and his guests talk about their fears, addictions and traumatic childhoods. As a result, “The Mental Illness Happy Hour” isn’t funny; if anything, it’s so unfunny that it takes a few episodes to realize that what you’re listening to is not a goof.
Go to iTunes, browse the comedy-podcast section and you’ll see them all hiding out there, like subtenants in an illegal loft building of show business: the stand-up comics with their podcasts. There are the alpha dogs like Christopher Titus (“Christopher Titus Podcast”); the antic radio theater of “The Pod F. Tompkast” from Paul F. Tompkins; Jimmy Pardo’s boasting, double-negatively, of being “Never Not Funny”; and the breakout comedy podcast “WTF,” hosted by Marc Maron and picked up by the Public Radio Exchange.
The paradox of the podcast explosion among comics is that it’s at once a minirenaissance for comedy and a retreat by comics further into themselves — a sort of talking cure for a group of people who suffer from something not yet covered, I don’t believe, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: a need, when not formally doing comedy, to talk about how and why one does comedy.
(This might be a good time to point out that listening to a comedian’s podcast is, almost without exception, free.)
On one hand, the appeal of podcasting to a comic is self-evident. There’s no time limit, no getting bumped, no pilot seasons, no standards and practices, no ratings-obsessed late-night wars. It’s just you and some recording equipment and maybe a few sidekicks for ballast. The audience? They’re imagined, in some separate, contiguous reality. Instead of urging them to tip the wait staff, you nudge them to leave a positive comment on your show page.
For a comedian, what a podcast lacks isthe relational frisson that makes live comedy so risky. But in place of a live crowd is something more unnerving — a vacuum.
The vacuum was what initially flummoxed comedians when the Internet revolution happened. Suddenly comics were in the discomfiting position of needing to relate to audiences outside the more hostile, and familiar, setting of a particular night in front of a particular crowd. Dane Cook, who embraced the “Hey, guys!” approach of building a brand on the Web, was scoffed at for his Internet people-pleasing. He even came to symbolize the end of stand-up comedy as a great antisocial art form.
But eventually comics, who tend to talk and talk and talk, who often write their material by talking, recognized the springboard of a podcast as a beautiful thing — Internet radio without the gatekeepers or, if you like, instant stage time in their down time. Half a decade into the trend, something like an establishment industry is starting to form, with little podcasting chieftains forming networks of shows under such banners as Nerdist, Earwolf and Ace Broadcasting, which belongs to the former radio host turned podcaster Adam Carolla. It’s no coincidence that this is all happening in Los Angeles, where comics move to work in TV and movies and stay to become ironic, insular and defeated about it.
The podcast boom is, on its face, reminiscent of the stand-up craze of the 1980s, which is how I discovered comedians. It was 1981, the cusp of the comedy-club boom, and I was 16 and going regularly to the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. Leno was around, as were Bob Saget and Garry Shandling. More than their material, what resonated for me was their deftness as social magicians, using humor and self-disclosure to turn shame into power. This made comedians an ideal object of transference for someone who, at 16, still could not sleep over at a friend’s house, much less go on class trips out of town, and was seeing a therapist to talk about my separation anxiety. In my life, bombing in front of my peers was a constant threat. So watching comedians exposing their neuroses, or merely their personalities, and triumphing in the process, felt like catharsis.
Unlike most other forms of performance, stand-up comedy begins as a mortifying social situation that the comedian has to surmount through consensual laughter. To do so, he or she employs some combination of personality, material and craft. Regardless, it’s the annihilation of the tension and near-avoidance of public shame (or for certain derelict entertainers, the exacerbating of it) that gives stand-up its thrilling veneer.
Last season, in one of the best “Saturday Night Live” opening monologues in recent memory, Zach Galifianakis, dressed in a red dress, lip-synched “Tomorrow,” from the musical “Annie,” while tearing pages of jokes about gay marriage and pot smoking, written with a Sharpie marker, from a giant drawing pad. Contrast that with another memorable incident of live comedic shame last year: the face plant James Franco and Anne Hathaway took hosting last year’s Oscars.
In one (Galifianakis), a shame-inducing moment was purposefully stoked by a professional comedian who had long dared to show this stranger side of his authentic self; in the other (Hathaway-Franco), two actors were trying to win us over by being funny, and failing, and making us uncomfortable in the process.
As for me, 30 years after dreaming of becoming Garry Shandling, I don’t consume stand-up live anymore; I download it onto my iPod, booking a comedian’s voice in my ear as I walk to work or try to fall asleep. This way of hearing comedians is at once totally dislocating (when was this recorded?) and more intimate than seeing him live; instead of the comedian’s act, you get the comic as extension of the act, the comic forever in the process of writing the act — the more anthropological half comedian, half human being.
Because of podcast overexposure, in fact, I fear I’m losing interest in stand-up altogether, or at least in the performance of it. Listening to a live show, performed in front of an audience, now feels inevitably deflating — the energy off, the crowd response interruptive, the comic now working a crowd, instead of just working you. That’s the appeal of the podcast: the comedian is broadcasting straight into your head, and you in turn are engaged with him, so that the both of you are practically sharing a thought balloon.
No comic does podcasting better, or seems to have a better intuitive understanding of what the transaction involves, than Marc Maron. Maron’s show, “WTF,” has become one of the hottest “rooms” to play in iTunes (the actual room being his garage in the Highland Park section of Los Angeles).
The story goes that only a few years ago, he was at the end of his tether — alone, broke and vaguely suicidal; worse, his manager was saying he’d become unbookable. “I started talking about myself on the mike with no one telling me what I could do or what I could say,” Maron said last summer at the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival, where he gave the keynote address about the success of his podcast. “I started reaching out to comics immediately. I needed help.” He had to gather himself before continuing. “I needed, uh, personal help, professional help. I needed to talk to people. So I reached out to my peers. And I talked to them.”
Maron was a doorman at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles in the late ’80s, where he fell in with that legendary Beelzebub of comedy, Sam Kinison; he has kicked around other comedy scenes as well. I was never a big fan of his “take all of me” onstage persona — think Ben Stiller’s self-immolating pedant in “Greenberg,” only louder and less emo — but I’ve rediscovered Maron as a comedian-who-podcasts, which is to say a comedian who talks about doing comedy instead of actually doing it.
For this he has a strain of brilliance. For one thing, he turns out to be a really good interviewer, in large part because of his tendency to relate everything back to himself. Rather than simply demand that his guest disclose, he makes his own disclosures, which engenders openness. A few weeks ago, Todd Glass (host of “The Todd Glass Show”) went on “WTF” to come out as a gay man, finally, in his mid-40s. Much of the pathos of “WTF” comes from this implied idea of community: that comedians, by connecting with one another about their fears, their damage or their secrets, come to realize that they also need one another.
The only other context in which I’d ever seen this expressed was at a memorial for the late Mitch Hedberg, the slacker-troubadour-comic who was often compared with Steven Wright for his absurdist bons mots (“Rice is great if you’re hungry and want 2,000 of something”). A compelling thing about Hedberg was how authentically small the gap seemed between his abashedness onstage and the wit that overrode his anxiety. The 37-year-old Hedberg died on the road (a hotel in Livingston, N.J.) in 2005 of what was ruled an accidental drug overdose.
Hedberg’s memorial was held at the Friars Club in Beverly Hills, of all places, and it quickly turned into a bizarro antiroast. A comic named Chard Hogan told of touring with Hedberg out West in a beat-up VW bus; another, K. P. Anderson, recalled doing mushrooms in Vegas with Hedberg and staring for hours at the volcano at the Mirage. But they couldn’t get through their “sets” without crying, as if heckled by their own unruly feelings. “Mitch was greased lightning, Mitch was the light,” a comedian named Randy Kagan insisted between fits of tears.
In a weird way, the Hedberg memorial anticipated the podcast phenomenon to come. It wasn’t comedy, exactly; it was comedians unburdening themselves while never straying too far from their bits. As an outsider, it felt wrong to watch, yet compelling, in the exact way that the best podcasts can feel as they explore that wonderfully wrong airspace between the hard joke and the hard cry.
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― Put another Juggle in, in the Juggalodeon (kingfish), Friday, 3 February 2012 23:48 (fourteen years ago)