During last week’s episode of “Real Time”, one of Bill Maher‘s guests Esai Morales made reference to a documentary called “American Drug War”, which asserts a government interest in the distribution of drugs. Maher quickly called it a conspiracy theory. (And it does sound like one, when its so briefly described.)
A regular viewer of Maher show is Kevin Booth, the director of “American Drug War,” who’s a little bothered by having his work being just dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Booth was also close with the late Bill Hicks, producing much of his early albums and recording many of his live shows. He’s continued his involvement with comedy through his production company Sacred Cow, working with such Hicks-worthy successors as Doug Stanhope and Joe Rogan.
The drug war is a little outside the scope of my site here, but Booth made the point that I’m going to focus on here. The director said this in an email to his Sacred Cow members about Maher’s dismissal of the documentary:
I wonder how many people remember Bill Maher’s famous routine that got him fired from ABC -
“Who is the real coward ? when the United States is launching missiles from floating Iron Islands 200 miles away”
as first being performed by non other then Bill Hicks back in 1992
I don’t have encyclopedic knowledge of Hicks’ work, so I can’t verify exactly what album/performance Bill said this at. But what’s interesting in that it’s probably not necessarily a punchline, but an applause line. A piece of clapter in Tina Fey‘s vernacular. It kind of opens up another target as well as a defense of joke stealing.
Can making a simple observation of the truth as one sees it really be called stealing? Good comics are supposed to see things as they are, can you fault two for sizing things up exactly the same way? When I think about it, I don’t necessarily think of the punchline of the infamous Carlos Mencia‘s “Who going to build the wall?” joke stealing controversy as necessarily funny inherently. People would say the same thing without it being a joke. It’s an insight, a truth. Jokes are exaggeration - stealing an exaggeration seems far more egregious to me ( as evidenced by the subsequent reveal of the Cosby vs. Mencia son playing football routine).
In a sense when a comic is pointing out a repressed fact like these, they’re getting a laugh because of the tension of how we can’t acknowledge that truth in polite society. But everyone who’s hears it and laughs it, has thought the same thing - even subconsciously. Can you slam a comic for saying the unsaid thing second?
By the by, Booth says he really does like Maher’s show, describing himself as a “huge fan” of Bill Maher. He even mentions he just bitching a little to get his attention, obviously to get the documentary seen by more eyes. (It currently plays on Showtime.)
I haven’t seen American Drug War, but I did what Esai suggested and searched YouTube for it. From what I’ve seen, it’s an interesting treatment of the subject, more focusing on the “Prison Industrial Complex” and the corporate interest in the drug war in the clips I’ve viewed. Plus, it’s got comics - besides the afforementioned Rogan - there’s also a lengthy interview with Tommy Chong and a conversation with Tom Rhodes about Amsterdam and its drug laws. They’re in there, doing what good comedians do - telling truths that go unsaid.
“Laughing with Hitler” is a fascinating documentary on what happened to comedy and humor in Nazi Germany prior to and during the war. It looks at both at the jokes from comedians and the jokes told by the general public, which are a strange barometer for the truth when public expression is extremely circumspect.
Comedians deny their jokes have any power, but the fear oppressive regimes have of them shows that dictators certainly don’t believe that. But the diminished power of a joke is partially, thankfully, because of the society we live in today. One phrase in the documentary that rings especially true to me:
“In those days, you took a tiny hammer and hit a small bell and it went whhoong. And today, you hit a huge bell with a huge hammer and it goes ting.”
Last week was fueled with speculation about who would play Barack Obama on Saturday Night Live’s first post strike show. After some speculation about some rising African American comics joining the show specifically to play Obama, when Saturday rolled around, Fred Armisen was in the role.
From my eye, Armisen didn’t really seem to have Obama down, but I don’t think that’s his fault. The problem is there’s no good (or lame) joke about Obama yet - where Obama is the target.
During the 2000 campaign, the New York Times ran a fascinating article about how late night jokes contribute to the perception of a candidate. The title: “The Stiff Guy vs. the Dumb Guy.” Essentially a candidate gets at least one word - often exactly one word - which becomes their comedic persona. They become a kind of a shorthand for jokes that time-presseed monologue writers can be sure will land.
Because comedy writers don’t have that shorthand yet for Obama, there’s no comedic trait to attribute to a Barack Obama impression. Once a trait is found, that influences everything from the mannerisms. Hillary Clinton has a comedic trait - that’s she’s false. It makes a building block for Amy Poehler‘s spot-on replication of Hillary’s laughter. (It’s arguably the chicken and the egg here - Hillary’s laugh helped create the “false” trait.)
It can be argued that the writers strike helped Obama. For a whole month he was in the public eye without comedy writers searching for a joke to make about the candidate (the few writers who were working for Letterman and Fuergeson didn’t find one during that time either).
If you scour a month of the Late Night Joke Archive, you won’t find a single joke in there where Obama is the target. He’s mentioned in the jokes, but they’re mostly to make a joke about other candidates… often Hillary Clinton. Hillary has lots of comedic hooks and you can find many of them in the archive. Besides the notions that she’s false, there’s regular jabs at her femininity with increasingly stale pantsuit jokes. She’s also the butt of Bill Clinton as Lothario jokes. On rare occasions a joke will be so thinly veiled that the writers might as well used the word “bitch.” John McCain also already has at least one of his comedic traits defined - his advanced age and the senility that comes with it.
Not that Obama will be hurt by whatever comedic trait he’s labeled with. Sometimes this shorthand joke label can help. I believe that joking about Bush being stupid helped him, minimizing expectations of his debate performances and playing into his black or white worldview. It decreased public awareness that the man was a shrewd politician and made him more of a regular guy. A caricature of arrogance and ego would have done far more on target description, although it’s obviously a harder position to tell jokes from. But it was fertile territory against at least of his opponents. Gore contented with jokes about arrogance in 2000, thanks to missteps that got turned into the fertile comic territory “I invented the Internet.”
Obama has demonstrated some political jiu-jitsu with attacks, but eventually in public life he will be pined down and given a comedic trait. What will it be and how will that perception affect his candidacy? Perhaps the argument shouldn’t be that he hasn’t been vetted, but that he hasn’t been satirized.
A reader named Chase turned me on to this. Earlier this week at the 2008 Grammys, George Lopez did a joke that seemed very familiar to fans of Dave Chappelle. The joke revolves around how a minority candidate can protect themselves from assassination. Here’s the video:
It looks pretty similar and Dave Chappelle definitely did it first. But, considering the race for the Democratic nomination, I can see an argument could be made that this is a joke that any comic could observe. It is in the realm of current events now.
The extra wrinkle on this is that George Lopez has been an outspoken critic of Carlos Mencia, who Lopez once accused of lifting nearly 13 minutes of his material for Mencia’s HBO Comedy Half Hour. He even went to the extent of having a physical confrontation with Mencia at Los Angeles’ Laugh Factory. (Though Lopez made the accusation, no comparison video between their material has ever been made.) If you’re accusing other comics, you probably should be very aware of where your material might intersect with another comic, particularly a prominent one like Chappelle.
I think also should be noted that we can’t be sure this was Lopez’s material. The Grammys were allowed to use WGA writers and perhaps one of them scripted this line. I think this is unlikely - Lopez is a good comic and can easily bring in his own material. But it’s still possible that someone else scripted the line for Lopez.
So what do you think? Is this joke stealing? Or just a current events joke?
Comedians are not typically known to be fashionable, but the essay “The Piracy Paradox” about the fashion industry in a recent issue of The New Yorker struck me for having some parallels between knockoffs and joke stealing. The essay talks about how fashion designers don’t have much legal protection from their styles getting co-opted by department stores and knock offs. But, the essay puts forward that this has been beneficial to the industry as a whole because fashion is always about the latest style, creating a constant demand once something has filtered to the mass market. Innovation becomes a prime motivating factor in fashion.
Now the economic parts of it I don’t necessarily see as parallel to stand-up, but I found myself thinking that while joke stealing stinks for the original joke teller, what it does is force that same level of innovation. As we’ve seen, a lot of stolen jokes, save for the most egregious examples, are fairly generic. They can cut and paste into people’s acts because they don’t rely of the teller’s performing style or persona. Anybody who has material stolen is forced to push harder, to create material that’s not only uniquely their own but also, as soon as you hear it, could not possibly come from somebody else. They put a personal trademark on a joke rather than a legal one.
The legal aspects of applying copyright to fashion are also applicable. In the essay, the writer speculates that innovation would be restricted if something like pinstripes were the sole property of one designed. I can easily see this applied to comedy. To a lot of people, even broaching the same topic as another comedian means you’re stealing from them. If copyright laws would applied to jokes, only one comedian’s perspective on a joke target would be the only one we’d ever hear. Whole realms of experience could be out because one comic owns them. Sure, that would probably have stop the spread of hacky targets like Viagra, but it’s not the subject matter that’s the funny part, it’s the comics’ viewpoint. And I don’t think you could copyright format either… the crippling effects on humor by giving ownership to one person of “the rule of three” are unimaginable.
Copyrighting the viewpoint of a joke seems impossible as well. While all people are unique, the shadings that make them so are sometimes at first, microthin. So jokes naturally have to be from the common place at first before they go to a unique take. So to get to a comic’s unique take on a target, you may have to put up with some observations that are awfully similar to other comics at the beginning of the bit. Because you have to bring an audience along from the common to the specific. Overlap is inevitable because you can’t just launch people into the way you see things. You have to persuade them… have them follow your comic logic from what they already know.
Am I out on a limb here looking for similarities in the industries of haute couture and fart jokes? Or do you see more parallels between joke stealing in stand-up and knockoffs in the fashion world?
TV writer Jane Espenson had a very smart take on how the media gets jokes wrong. At issue is the Sarah Silverman jokes about Britney Spears at the VMAs. The material is definitely harsh, but the way it’s reported does it make sound harsher. What Jane notices is that they don’t put the beat in with the joke. So it’s printed like this:
She is amazing. She is 25 years old and she’s already accomplished everything she’s going to accomplish in her life.
Not even seeing the bit, Jane knows that there’s a small pause in there that changes it from something that just sounds mean to something that’s a mean joke. (And yes, there is a difference.) And she’s right. You can see it for yourself here:
(An aside, I’d happily use the MTV embeddable player - but it doesn’t play the VMA video. It makes go to MTV’s site to watch it. So I can’t prove my point right here. Why make an embeddable player for videos that you won’t allow people to play?)
So how print media should report the joke is:
She is amazing. She is 25 years old and she’s already accomplished… everything she’s going to accomplish in her life.
It’s a world of difference. That pause is what allows comedians to get away with saying some of things they say. Even if they are speaking a truth, or even just something that we all would admit to privately, that pause gives the social function of saying “we don’t mean that.” It often preserves the dignity of the target of a joke because that pause says, “This is a joke. It’s not meant to be taken to heart.” (Although reportedly, this was not the case here with Britney Spears supposedly crying after hearing Sarah’s routine.) I don’t think what Sarah Silverman said were the nicest jokes, but they weren’t anything that anyone reading the tabloids hasn’t thought about Spears over the past year. Putting the pause in there let us acknowledge our thoughts but not own (and condemn) someone to that judgment.
Jane puts the word “beat” in between the above clauses, which is typical in screenwriting. I don’t think it’s necessary for the general public, a simple ellipsis should imply the pause. But being that overt is sometimes necessary… it’s hard to be funny in print than anywhere else because you’re dependent on the reader’s sense of comedic timing in some ways. Their own brain has to put in the breaks. Particularly with transition something like stand-up to print, which a lot of time isn’t necessarily funny just on paper without the cadence and persona of the performer.
It’s one of the things I’ve been struggling with in the Stand-Up Comic Database. Many comics have great one liners that apply themselves to the page (or, in this case, screen). They just work. But a lot of other comics don’t transfer well. I hope a lot of time that if I put a pause (...) here or an emphasis there, that I’ll be giving a heads up to visitors about how that comics hits that line and lands the joke. If there’s a joke in there that’s not set up right, please feel free to inform me about it on the appropriate comic’s feedback page. Because I don’t want to be like mainstream media and not get the joke.
After posting about “Comedy By The Numbers”, I discovered a piece of Albert Brooks 1972 directorial debut online, a short called “The Albert Brooks Famous School for Comedians.” This clip setups the ideas and goes into “the take”, mostly the spit take (numbers 143 to 148 in Comedy By the Numbers).
Man, that canned laughter sure sounds false - almost excessively so. I think that’s intentional - but I may be giving Brooks too much benefit of the doubt. I’ve never seen the whole film, but I’d love to. If you have a copy, .
The film was precipitated by a 1971 essay Brooks did for Esquire Magazine of the same title. That’s not online. But in 2002, Bob Odenkirk and David Cross did their own version/homage for Esquire - I have a copy of the article someplace. Until I can find it and get some scans up, here’s a text version, lacking some of Bob & David’s great visual aids. Here’s an excerpt:
What’s so funny about Q-Tips? Nothing ... yet. But what if you were to write some quips about them? Still nothing. Now try spitting out those quips with real venom. Starting to get funny, right? We’ll show you how to use recovered memories of traumatic childhood events to throw onstage tantrums about any and every little thing (the smaller the better). Here’s a bit to try on friends and lovers:
(But first, imagine your mother was raped and killed in front of you. Now use that and commit.)
“What the fuck is up with Q-Tips?! I mean, seriously! Have you seen these fucking things? It’s fucking cotton on a stick, people! And what the fuck is a ‘swab’? Isn’t that something that sailors do to the deck of a boat?! [Grab ear and pull it toward audience.] People, this is not a boat! It’s my ear! I hear through it! Hey, Johnson & Johnson, get your bastard cotton sticks outta my head, matey! No justice, no peace!”
Of course, Odenkirk is directing those SuperDeluxe shorts of “Comedy By the Numbers.” Hmm… if they do a promised second volume of their book, “Comedy by the Numbers” might want to start rule 170 with comedies about comedy.
Update: Eagle-eyed reader Dan Fiorella pointed to a link that explains how the bizarre laugh track got in this clip. The film here is shown as it aired on a Milton Berle talk show focused on comedians and how they make people laugh. Apparently when they ran it, they added the laugh track - which says more than a little about how they didn’t really get the short in the first place. (My apologies to Brooks for doubting him.) The writer Mark Evanier also details that Berle interviewed Albert Brooks for the special and Brooks ran circles around ol’ Uncle Milty. That segment might be worth an upload too.
Reportedly: SuperDeluxe to be folded into AdultSwim. SuperDeluxe did some brilliant stuff - hopefully some level of web content will continue under the AdultSwim brand.
Comix publicist Kambri Crews foils a scammer posing as stand-up Todd Barry. Con man, as Barry, claimed he needed money to get his car out of the impound lot. Barry does not even own a car.
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, “Comedy by the Numbers” might want to start rule 170 with comedies about comedy.
