The Perfect Shape for Comedy

Comedy is an industry that seems to intrinsically breed prejudice, shallow conceptions and false first impressions. It seems alsmost to come out of the ether. If you speak to comedians, they're always why there aren't more female comedians, and the public seem to express a similar opinion by and large. And yet, somehow, when you gather a large group of people into a room, female comedians, or anything out of the ordinary white male stereotype seems to be met with overwhelming hatred. Witnessing this hatred has an effect on my response when I encounter the ignorant opinion that all female comedians talk about is being a female comedian, or their vaginas. I usually advise these people to go down to their local amateur night, to see all of the shaken legged young nervous comics, and then to listen to the way that the female acts will get berrated with shouts of 'get your tits out' or 'show us your muff'.

This forces the acts into a corner, where the only thing they can do is address their gender and the perceptions of the crowd, particularly it's more vocal members. I've seen great female acts flounder when utitlising the vast comedy pool of the surrealist anthropomorphic animals, and very boring female acts achieve a great amount of success by taking on the sexist heckles with more sexual aggression. 'You couldn't handle it love, my vagina would spit you back out again'.

The case seems to be that if there is something that the audience can pick up on about you, you have to address it first. I think it was actually Jo Brand from whom I first learned this message; she's said something to the effect of 'some members of the audience were going to call me fat or ugly, so I thought I'd beat them to the punch.'

This was one of the first images that happened when I googled Jo Brand, so I honestly don't know what she's talking about.

 So this sort of thinking, has started a huge wave, (I say wave, waves don't last decades) whereby the first few jokes a comedian has to make is to say 'I know what you're thinking, I look like [blank]'. I think Stewart Lee has a long bit about this, I think he's trying to critique the cliche, but he really seems to just use that as a veil to get in jokes about looking like an older fatter version of Morrissey. So at any amateur night then, you can expect to hear 15 versions of the same joke from people who 'look like colnol sanders became an alcoholic' '...like Noddy from slade had a child with Phil Jupitus' 'like the boy from the sixth sense became..well...an adult version of Haley Joel Osment'.

I remember even having one myself that I tried for a little while, where I started by saying I look like a slightly older version of a child from the 1940s. Unfortunately, it was met with a resounding 'huh?' because it turns out the secret to 'I know what you're thinking jokes' is that it has to be an actually fundamentally recognisable thing. The problem for me, I remember thinking, was that I looked far too generic to resemble anything in particular. I remember cursing my distinctly average looks, and lack of noticeable physical deviations from the norm. 

Turns out, my problem wasn't my generic face, but my generic writing. And as a white male stand up, I at the very least had the choice and the freedom to explore whatever topic I wanted. Be it surrealism, social comment, relationships, I belong to a group that isn't given the same immediate prejudice that many other stand ups have to experience. I think it might have been Jack Dee, though I may be wrongly attributing this, who said that being a male white comedian is like having a blank canvas that you can draw whatever you like upon. Meaning conversely that being female or any other ethnicity the outlines are already drawn rigidly for you, in bold, and breaking free of them is an uphill battle that requires a great deal of effort.

Although, this was one of the first images when googling Jack Dee, so I honestly don't know what he's talking about

However, and this was the point that I wanted to get to after what I'd intended to be a short opening paragraph, gender and ethnicity are not the only prejudices that you face as a stand up. Perhaps prejudice is too strong a word, but first impressions are obviously crucial in stand up, because you have only a fraction of a moment in order to win over a crowd. This is certainly exacerbated during amateur nights, when your time on stage, as well as the crowd's expectations are much lower. The actual time you have to win a crowd over is an inexact science, from 10 seconds, to 30, to 60. Often it's said that you just have to have it the minute you walk on stage, the confidence to know that you don't need to win them over, in fact they're already yours. But the fact remains, those first few moments are essential, and there are many different things that can make a person instantly decide that they're not going to like you before you even start talking.

One particular example, that I believe I have witnessed and want to discuss, is actually looking too cool, or attractive. I'd like to point out that I certainly don't believe that this has happened to me because I think I fall into the camp of almost unattractively average looking, but I have definitely seen some beautiful men and women go on stage and die on their arse and I think this happens for a number of reasons. Partly because comedy is a medium for complaining, critiquing and exposing the world around us, in order to do this, I firmly believe that in some capacity you have to exist outside that world. Either you're not from the country, you've got no friends, or you're a bit weird looking. 

When incredibly attractive people come on stage and try to tell us that they exist outside of this world, or that things are hard for them, we just don't believe them. What can they know of difficult relationships? They're gorgeous. Great relationships are probably ten a penny to them. Last month I saw Daniel Simonsen sum up this point quite succinctly by saying that the reason we don't like attractive comics is because all so often it sounds like they might as well be saying "Oh boy, it's so hard. Getting all the pussy".

Although I googled Daniel Simonsen anOKAY I'LL STOP.

And even in the greatly underrated classic comedy that is Chris Rock's 'Down to Earth' Chris quite rightly says, 'you don't want to laugh at someone who can whoop your ass'. And this is where the comedy scene is even disproportionate towards people who are out of shape. For comedy, fat is in. It's well in. By saying that, I'm absolutely not putting down the work of hard working overweight comedians, of which there are many. However, I have witnessed a man win a comedy competition because he could do a truffle shuffle. I'll be honest, he was funny as well, but it came down to a dead heat between him and another talented performer, and he tipped the scales by performing the truffle shuffle and sending the crowd (and the clapometer) wild. Fat guys, and I say guys because part of me believes this formula works most favourably for men, get a warmer reception the moment that the step on stage. Their is an ingrained cultural perception that fat guys are funnier, and so the crowd get ready to laugh more, and then do. Maybe the difference isn't huge, but because of that crucial first impression, the difference in results is huge.

So there, most of what I wanted to use this post for was to vent about the cruel punishment I suffer because of my metabolism. Which would be a great example of me absolutely not learning the lesson from before, about cursing my generic face. These things can be overcome, being distinctly not remarkable looking, is far from the biggest hurdle anyone has triumphed in the face of. The bottom line as always is work hard, be exceptional.