WHAT ARE YOU LAUGHING AT?
AN UNPUBLISHED BOOK PROPOSAL
PRE-AMBLE
This book is about a unique relationship. It’s a relationship that can only be had in person in the company of strangers. It can be a one-night stand or something more enduring. It’s the relationship between a stand-up comedian and an audience.
It’s forty-five years since I first stood up in front of an audience. (See, ‘Quantock: The early Years’ Vol 2. Published by some Murdoch outfit.) I don’t remember the jokes I told that night, but then I never could remember jokes - I remember not remembering jokes when I was in primary school - but I do remember what the jokes were about. (Ibid)
Invariably what the jokes are about is something. This is a book about that something, a book about what stand-up comedians talk about when they’re alone in a room with an audience.
It’s a book that stitches together Interviews with stand-up comedians, nostalgia, the ephemera of fan letters and ‘hate mail’, and, with selections of their routines past and present to light the way, ‘What Are You Laughing At?” is part in-their-own-words, part nostalgia, part love story, part cook book, part celebrity hot goss and part anything else you think might come up in an Google search.
A cumulative 132,437 hours and 11 minutes on stage have taught me that what comedians talk about is the foundation of their relationship with an audience. They must come together on the common ground of mutual knowledge. No matter who the comedian, if the audience has no idea what they are talking about or if they find it offensive, irrelevant or boring they won’t be back and they will tell their friends. Bastards! (You know who you are.)
(NOTE: If the only thing you have in common with an audience is breathing you’ve either got to get a new audience or work-up a lot of breathing material.)
(WARNING: With the best will in the world, a stand-up career built on breathing is doomed to be lonely, silent and short.)
(That’s a lot of bracketed paragraphs.)
(I’ll have to watch that.)
Fortunately life is stuffed with stuff to talk about. There’s so much stuff that no one comedian could talk about it all. So consciously and unconsciously choices have to be made, filters applied. The field whittled down.
Some talk about themselves. For others it’s the minutiae of the day-to-day or the follies and foibles of humanity or the ephemera of politics or the demons of religion or the biology of front bottoms and dangly bits or what was on TV last night or a mix of them all and more.
The stuff comedians choose to talk about says a lot about them, their audiences and the world outside. Over time, what they talk about becomes a diary of their changing concerns and a chronicle of the times they live in.
Lady Di, my husband/wife, Jurassic Park, the First Iraq War, our first baby, Buffy, Popes, paedophiles, seagulls, Bob Hawke etc have all been the stuff of stand-up comedary©. (Comedary: comedy + commentary. It’s like Who Weekly meets The New York Review of Books.)
Onwards.
INTRODUCTION
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a stand-up comedian as ‘a comedian whose act consists of standing before an audience and telling a succession of jokes.’
Oh, if only it were that simple Oxford English Dictionary, if only it were that simple. And while we are at it, Oxford English Dictionary, stand-up comedians don’t “tell jokes”. Comics “tell jokes”. Other people’s jokes!
Stand-up comedians on the other hand, spin threads of comic gold from the dramas and drabness of Life. They bring hope to the hopeless, joy to the joyless, hap to the hapless, discomfort to the comfortable and dollars to the Victorian economy.
Stand-up comedians do something that, according to the Bureau of Statistics, would turn 99.00027% of Australians to stone; they stand alone, as ‘themselves’, on a stage, in a spot-light, with only a microphone stand between them and the audience, and not even Steve ‘The Stick Insect’ da Silva* could hide behind a microphone stand.
(*See, ‘The Stick, A comic life’ by R. Quantock, eBook and Limited Edition Morse Code versions available.)
The best stand-up comedians make it look easy. And in lots of ways it is easy. There are only two essential requirements, four basic elements, six maids-a-milking and that certain je ne sais quoi, that makes a stand-up comedian a stand-up comedian.
CHAPTER 2: The Two Essential Requirements Introduction
The two essential requirements are:
1/. A common language
2/. A shared cultural vocabulary*. (*See Chapter 5, “Culture, context and deconstructing comedy”.)
CHAPTER 4: The Two Essential Requirements: Part 1
The need for a common language speaks for itself, but I’ll say something about it anyway, and don’t anyone try and stop me.
I have the distinction of being the first stand-up comedian to have performed in the Kraft Foods Factory Staff Canteen. (No prizes for guessing who was the last.). The Canteen was the size of the deficit and I did three shows because the Canteen had three sittings, each of 400 recently arrived non-English-speaking immigrants from 38 different countries, plus six men in suits from the front office.
My performance was entirely based on the spoken word and I think it is fair to say that while the six men in suits from the front office who spoke English enjoyed the first show, the non-English-speaking 400 were left wondering if Australia was the best place to bring up their children.
The second sitting was a different audience of 400 recently arrived, non-English-speaking, immigrants from 38 different countries. When deprived of the spoken-word, as I was, a stand-up comedian can ask to be taken home or resort to mime or, worser, clowning. I’m ashamed to say I clutched at the latter and smeared myself in Vegemite and frisbe-ed Coon cheese slices into the void, wounding many and killing others.
For the third sitting I organised a strike and we all walked off the job and had a great time picketing in the car park until the police arrived and beat us up.
Anyway, you all have to speak the same language. But that on its own is not enough.
CHAPTER 5: Culture, context and deconstructing comedy”.
CHAPTER 3: The Two Essential Requirements: Part 2
Thirty-years years ago I was invited to perform at a football premiership breakfast in Launceston. This time we all spoke English but that was all we had in common; there was a chasm of ignorance a kilometre deep between their earthy footballiness and my urbane, cosmopolitan sophistication. Language alone isn’t enough.
(You’ll be glad to know the morning was saved by the local Liberal M.P., who drank his way through an impromptu comic turn liberally sprinkled with obscenity, sexism, racism, capitalism and mainlanderism, but mostly obscenity, and a good time was had by all, and I cut off an ear.)
CHAPTER XXIV: The Four Basic Elements
The four basic elements of stand-up comedy are, in no particular order:
1/. A microphone to talk into,
2/.A comedian to do the talking,
3/. An audience to talk to.
The microphone speaks for itself. If you have to yell to be heard you may as well go home because you can’t yell a stand-up comedy routine. (I’ve tried, and I’ve got a megaphone.)
Next to a microphone, a stand-up comedian’s best friend is the audience: You can’t be a stand-up comedian in an empty room, no matter how good the p.a. (I’ve tried that too.)
The relationship invariably begins on a try-out night at one of the snug comedy rooms in an inner-city bar or pub. Audiences are experienced. There is no baptisms of fire, no blood on the walls anymore. (See Chapter 6: Blood and fire: The Golden Age of Heckling.) First-timers get five minutes to make it with the crowd.