It’s not a novel thesis to say that mediums change content. But I wanted to examine that idea in the light of comedy performance.
Ignoring
the vast realms of visual and written comedic works – for which, of course, the
same thesis applies – formal performance comedy begins, I suppose, with
theater. The works of Aristophanes are specifically linked to the theater
medium, as seen best in The Clouds, when the play’s author walks on stage and
argues with the audience.
For
centuries, comedy performance was relegated to the stage, from Juvenal’s
satires, to Italian opera buffa, to Oscar Wilde. All of this comedy was
subsumed under the category ‘theater’ however. The only other performative
comedy was comedy songs – a tradition that was anything but formal. While La
Donna e Mobile may have enchanted Verdi’s audience, most comedic songs were
more at home in taverns and were generally regarded as informal entertainment,
not far removed from an American hootenanny.
Entering
the 20th century, radio and recording technology began to change all
this, along with the advent of film. Comedy song, in particular, made a big
leap, as you could now buy comedy records – initially humorous songs, and
eventually 45s. Already by the 1920s artists were professionally recording the
previously informal songs about moonshiners, cuckold husbands, and other
classic tropes. Radio, meanwhile, is where the first situation comedies arose –
consider Fibber McGee and Molly, which began broadcasting in 1935. A few years
into the show there was the now-iconic audio joke of opening the hall closet,
only to have the foley artist’s mountain of sounds fall out and bury the luckless
door-opener. How many times has that joke been referenced in American comedy
since?
A
later, televised, version of the gag
Besides
sitcoms, radio also provided more general radio shows. Les Paul and Mary Ford,
by 1950, were recording musical comedy sketches, but this tradition goes back
to the 1920s, and vaudeville. Burns and Allen had made comedy films since 1929
(notably Lambchops) and performed on the radio starting the same year, becoming
regulars in the mid-30s.
George
Burns and Gracie Allen bring their vaudeville routine to film in 1929
Vaudeville,
basically, was where stand-up comedy started, alongside variety shows and
revues, such as the Ziegfeld Follies. The growth of vaudeville was a decades-long
process, from local concert halls in the mid-1800s to national fame by the
turn-of-the-century. Some of these later comedians, like Burns and Allen, Eddie
Cantor, WC Fields, Will Rogers, and the Marx Brothers, made the jump to the new
formats, like film and radio. But film was already quickly developing its own
rules. Movies were replacing comedy nickelodeon shorts, and silence didn’t lend
itself to standup, anyway. Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Kops –
these films were embracing what you could do with a camera, and were a far cry
from the stand-up performances given on stage.
Television
helped resuscitate stand-up comedy. Of course, sitcoms were copied from radio,
but variety shows and late-night television emerged quickly, already in place
by the 1940s. Hosts like Bob Hope and Milton Berle ushered in this new comedy, with
proper late night, as a platform for standup, emerging in the 1950s. Here was
the new comedy performance stage, presented in a way that worked well for
introducing Borscht Belt humor to America. By the late 1950s standup had found
a television home, and, with mass audiences, new cultural relevance and power.
Bob
Hope roasting Frank Sinatra in 1950
Simmering
in the background of all this was the continuing development of comedy songs.
In 1948 the LP had been introduced, and so novelty songs gave way to
full-length comedy albums, initially comprised of songs, such as Tom Lehrer’s Songs
by Tom Lehrer in 1953. Spoken comedy followed, with the first live comedy
album in 1958, recorded by Mort Sahl.
A song
off of Lehrer’s full-length album
Soon
comedy albums hit their stride – in the early 1960s comedians like Bob Newhart,
Vaughn Meader, and Stan Freberg made popular full-length spoken comedy albums. Comedy
songwriting, now blended with standup elements, continued with the works of
performers like the Smothers Brothers – who eventually, like Newhart and the others,
also jumped genres to television.
Newhart
and Dean Martin in the 1960s. Standup comedians began working in the sitcom and
sketch format that leant itself so well to television.
‘My Old
Man’ parodied by the Smothers Brothers in the 1960s
Within
these two mediums, LPs and television, standup comedy flourished for decades.
Boundaries were pushed, counterculture embraced. Some acts were improvisational
(Firesign Theater), some captured live audience energy (Steve Martin’s 'A Wild
and Crazy Guy'), others were carefully rehearsed monologues. Richard Pryor, in
the 1970s, presented the next big leap forward, with his concert movies. By the
end of the decade HBO began making George Carlin standup specials. These merged
into a form of standup performance that came to dominate the next twenty years.
A
famous scene from Pryor’s 'Live on the Sunset Strip', 1982
By the
1980s radio was a largely defunct medium, but television soldiered on,
providing late night as a standup haven. For comedy musicians, the MTV decade
was a blessing – this was the era of Weird Al’s stardom with his parodies and
parody music videos.
Eat It,
1984
The
next big innovation, in terms of medium, was with the internet, although its role in
performative comedy was actually fairly slow, given that audio and video were
so demanding for 90s-era computers. Basically, then, it’s the advent of YouTube,
in 2005, that ushers in a new era of comedy performance, blending video and
film techniques to provide comedy material. That said, YouTube – which was
great, not incidentally, great for comedy songs – remained mostly a skit and
sketch venue.
2006 – ‘Shoes’
by Liam Kyle Sullivan. An early iconic YouTube song/skit.
So,
too, with the other popular video apps that emphasized short bursts of
observational humor: Vine from 2013-2016, and TikTok, which launched a year
after Vine’s demise. Comedy and standup specials were still largely relegated
to HBO and Comedy Central, but a new platform emerged from the internet to
help, and help transform: Netflix.
In 2012
Netflix launched it’s first exclusive special, Bill Burr’s ‘You People Are All
the Same’. Initially, Netflix was just a new home for concert-style comedy
specials. But an older tradition of comedy began to merge with standup
specials: the one-person show.
One-person
shows have been around for ages, developing a niche in the world of theater.
Hal Holbrook, famously, created Mark Twain Tonight! in 1954. Lily Tomlin found
success in the 1980s with The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the
Universe, written by Jane Wagner. In the 2010s comedians like Colin Quinn
carried on the tradition, with shows like Long Story Short, written by Jerry
Seinfeld. It was shown on HBO – a rare honor for these usually Broadway-bound performances.
An
excerpt from 'Long Story Short', regarding Canada
The
tradition, in theater, continues. Heidi Schreck’s Pulitzer-shortlisted 2017
play ‘What the Constitution Means to Me’ is a fine example: but on Netflix it
began to merge more with comedy. 2017 also saw Hasan Minhaj release ‘Homecoming
King’ which was part one-man show, and part comedy special.
From 'Homecoming King'
This
was a banner year, because 2017 also saw the release of Hannah Gadsby’s ‘Nanette’
on Netflix. Here was what appeared to be a concert movie, but which took a wild
turn into raw, vulnerable, performance. Gadsby pushed the boundaries of what a
standup special was, just as Minhaj had, but in a very personal, very
challenging way.
From 'Nanette'
These
lines continued to blur when, in 2020, Dave Chapelle released ‘8:46’ directly
to YouTube. Filmed during the pandemic, and shot outdoors, it’s hard to
classify it as standard standup. There’s a lot of real rage and pain in the
work. There are jokes, but they seem almost auxiliary. Here is a further step past
‘Nanette’ even, into the realm of personal struggle, anger, and hurt – while still
being a performance that, on the surface, looks and sort of feels like standup.
Tackling
these subjects isn’t new, of course. Pryor, Carlin, Hicks, CK – this sort of
introspection mixed with commentary and tinged with anger and/or depression has
been around a long time. But now it was as though the medium of a standup
special was being used to monologue and chasten, to wake people up, or just to
express their pain. (Gadsby addressed this in her 2020 show ‘Douglas’.)
Clearly, standup comedy is in an unusual place.
Netflix/YouTube’s
8:46, in its entirety
And
then along came Bo Burnham.
* * *
‘Bo
Burnham: Inside’ is something new. In the Netflix special all the concert
elements are stripped away – because he’s stuck inside. Just as we all were during
the pandemic. Burnham has to deal with this new reality in a way that’s still a
comedy special. Blending the emotional honesty and rawness of Gadsby and
Chapelle, and the one-person show aspect in a non-traditional special, Burnham
provides a truly remarkable experience. Seemingly cobbled together (but
meticulously edited) over a period of more than a year we watch Burnham’s hair
and beard grow, his adeptness with technology increase, his mental
deterioration, his challenges confronted.
For fifteen
months late night hosts have complained, like Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers,
about doing a show without an audience. But for standup, this experience of
loss provided a whole new field of material for Burnham to explore, which he
does on ‘Inside’. Loneliness and isolation, the dark side of technology, mental
health, the need for audience approval – all had been covered before in
standup, in a joking way. That said, you can’t actually convey these concepts very
well in front of an adoring, sold-out concert hall crowd. But stuck inside a
room for a year you can. Burnham makes this clear right from the start, as he
focuses on what it means to perform for just a camera lens. Each of these heavy
themes now becomes all the more apparent due to our witnessing the actual lived
experience of them. This isn’t standup storytelling – this is standup viewing.
I never
had watched Burnham before, and had ignored his comedy career in the early
2010s. It’s a style of comedy that focuses on music – and the songs of ‘Inside’
are superb. This sounds like Tim Minchin’s best comedy music, only a little bit
better, and deeper. The songs are where he parodies our times: sexting, Instagram,
internet addiction, and so forth. The many interludes between songs show us the
deterioration and struggle (although this is present in some of the songs as
well). The final layer is a different type of parody, where he searingly makes
fun of common videos – reaction videos, watching people do playthroughs on
services like Twitch, and the like. All of these layers merge into an
incredible document of our times.
Welcome
to the Internet, from 'Inside'
Will
this special, ‘Bo Burnham: Inside’ stand the test of time? Some of the great
milestones of comedy are terribly dated now – relics that we watch or listen to
as epitomizing a moment. Meader’s comedy LP ‘The First Family’ won the Grammy
for Album of the Year – lampooning the Kennedys. After Dallas, his career, and
his album’s fame, were over. Comedy that’s focused on the zeitgeist and trends
has a short shelf-life. Lenny Bruce is too much of a hipster to watch today, as
is the topical humor of Mort Sahl, or the increasingly-stale stoner jokes of
Cheech and Chong.
Lenny
Bruce being hip in 1965
Will Burnham’s
references to sexting and YouTube ensure that his performance not last? I don’t
know. But whether or not we’re watching ‘Inside’ in thirty years, it’s still a
worthwhile special for right now. We all experienced ‘Inside’ to differing
extents, during the pandemic. I think ‘Inside’ is likely to become the
definitive statement on life during this particular moment in time, the strange,
reflective, and deeply troubling, start of this new decade. And it is, undoubtedly, one of the more interesting developments in the long story of how medium changes content.
Let's end this tour with a lighter moment from the show
