The Sad State Of Standup Comedy As I See It
I got an email yesterday from someone telling me that attacking other comedians in my work and videos is classless, amateurish and breaks the unwritten code of comedians.Wait, as a comedian I can make jokes about AIDS, rape, abortion, child molestation, the church, retards, midgets, the President, Britney Spears, Jesus or any combination of these on stage and it's fine.
But I can't make fun of another comedian?
Where in the fuck is the logic in that?
And what kind of ball-less, can't-take-a-joke, heads-up-our-own-asses bullshit circus are we running here if we can mock the entity that supposedly offers our souls eternal salvation when we die but we can't describe some shitty comic's act as trite without incurring the wrath of the comedy tribe's elders.
Fuck that.
If we can make fun of everything else under the sun as comedians we ought to be able to make fun of ourselves and each other once in a while.
If not we're just as big of hypocrites as the politicians, religious leaders and the other scumbags of note whom we ridicule in our acts.
Am I wrong?
posted by Dan Bialek at 4:03 AM
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3 Comments:
I respectfully disagree. I'm not a comedian, for the record. I'm a cartoonist. But it's unprofessional to mock your peers publically.
Also, it tends not to be funny, except to other comedians. Like a joke about the hassles of driving a bus would tend to be mostly funny to bus drivers.
I say lay off. Write a textbook on doing standup, or something, if you want to critique the craft.
I think its a bit of a catch-22. I strongly agree that, in an industry built on making fun of everyone and everything, there seems to be a whole lot of serious thinking.
The big problem I see in concentrating in the shortcomings of our brethren is, worrying about what everyone else is doing can cause your own jokes to suffer.
I've feel your pain and I doubt I'll stop bitching about everyone else. Its fun to get folks all worked up. Keeps the blood flowing.
So politicians can do it, but comedians can't?
It's not really about "respect," it's about most comedians being too worried that they'll run into (or have to work with) the person they trashed, or that making fun of another comic might have some potentially negative career implications at some murky point in the future.
We can sure dish it out, but most of us can't take it.
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