THE SHAPE OF A JOKE

COMEDIAN CHRISTINA CATHERINE MARTINEZ CONSIDERS THE INVISIBLE LABOR OF MAKING PEOPLE LAUGH.

By Christina Catherine Martinez

I came to stand-up through the art world, so I am sometimes labeled as a performance artist. I did not come from performance art. I came from writing. I wanted to be in front of jokes. I write on index cards that I shuffle around on the floor and re-pack into a neat deck when the order feels good. I write on my hand. I write on scraps of paper that are kept in a Hermès box under my desk. I write on the computer when longer sets start to materialize. It’s not unlike any writer’s process. Writers of literature eventually find relief as their words settle into a specific shape, on a screen or a page for the eyes of a reader. A comedian’s writing is always approaching the ever-receding horizon of its final form.

English comedian Stewart Lee gave a talk at Oxford in 2013 where he blew the lid off the process, getting to the heart of stand-up writing disguised as non-writing. “If the writing process is at all noticeable in stand-up,” he said, referring to the popular image of the stand-up comic as an improvising soothsayer, “it may be assumed that the comedian has, in some way, failed.” Even this is an unstable observation, given that in 2013, at least in the United States, many alternative comedians were reading jokes off their phones and many audiences found it entertaining (for a while). Stand-up comedy in the US and UK developed into similar forms in tandem, but for opposite reasons—both having to do with money. In the former, the comedy club boom of the ’80s scooped up confessional auteur comedy of the ’70s, creating a Fordist model of stand-up for a newly flush middle class. The simplicity of the stand-up context meant that, for a two-drink minimum, you could watch a steady stream of comics express their unique worldview that happened to be the same. The vacuum of dwindling arts funding in the UK caused theater-driven artists of the ’70s to pare down their acts to the barest of productions: a stage and a microphone.

One style emerged from excess, the other from scarcity. You can thank Reagan and Thatcher for all that. UK-style stand-up comedy is still characterized by storytelling as opposed to the lingering, dominant US style characterized by a salvo of punchlines. Lee is explicit about the relationship between writing and money, how economic and social conditions literally shape literature. Any historical materialist will tell you this, but it is rare for the comedian to acknowledge it; or rather, comedians, like any of us, can be so blindly immersed in the historical process they take the conventions of their milieu as a universal reality. Have you or someone you love ever heard a comedian dodge analysis of their work by saying, “Funny is funny?”

One hazard of writing stand-up is exhaustion. It is text to be performed, not read. It requires the present body of the comedian to be fully perceived. Comedians are bursting with text—only we don’t call it that. We call it material. When jokes multiply, they’re combined and ordered into various shapes. Just as a tarty dress, a kitchen curtain, or a handkerchief can be instantly recognized as coming from the same bolt of fabric, so does a comedian’s material become simultaneously varied yet signature. While this is a feminized metaphor, I like knowing that even the most humorless, stool-humping misogynist hack—if they are committed to what they do—is essentially sewing little dresses in front of the audience.

It’s hard to explain. Writers say, “I have 20 pages of writing.” Comedians say, “I have 20 minutes of material.” Performing my material is different from reading any other kind of text. When I’m asked to do a reading, I can calculate the ideal word length of the piece I’d want to read based on the number of minutes I’m given. When I’m asked to do a comedy show, I can approximate what will fit in the allotted set. But the content is still a dynamic, living thing inside me. When I go onstage, the jokes are swimming in my head like fish in a bowl. If I am alert and present and well-fed, I can pluck them out and create the set that is needed that night for that audience. (When I am not present and alert and well-fed, I’m splashing around and not really catching anything and it is very bad to watch. This is called ‘bombing.’)

The sum of my material is several hours at this point, but nowhere does it exist in a complete, written form. I have scraps and notebooks and spreadsheets, but it is my voice and my body that renders it all legible. I write onstage, a process shared by many comics. A joke nearly always begins as an idea that I talk through in front of an audience which I record as a voice note and listen to later on long walks, muttering to myself like a bag lady. Parts of my material might make it onto the page, but its cardinal mode is improvised speech, which allows it to appear improvised—or at least natural, or allows me to be deliberate about making it appear unnatural, if that is what I want to do. The writing that I am doing at this moment could never be performed in a way that would make it seem like anything other than an essay. Writing onstage creates text that, however refined and rewritten, will always have a little blood in it.

This is new. Every art magazine that tries to talk about comedy begins with a reference to the jester or commedia dell’arte and makes me want to peel my face off. Yes, laughter is ancient, but stand-up comedy as we know it didn’t quite emerge until the ’80s. It’s a very modern art form, one that doesn’t actually adhere to the modernist injunction form follows function. By the time Lee was able to articulate what stand-up had become, he was already behind. In the US, he registers as a shape and a collar, maybe because he freely adopts the intellectual persona the public projects onto comedians—and we pretend to not love it. Comedy in the UK seems to be about being book-smart, and comedy in the US is about being, like, can-drive-a-stick-shift and program-the-VCR smart.

The ’90s seem like the last time avatars like this were proper shapes for ideas about what stand-up is. We can’t agree on the function (Is it merely laughter? I don’t think so.) And so the form is petering off, unaided, into uncharted lands. The comic-as-writer might be shifting to comic-as-entrepreneur. It’s been over a decade since Lee concluded, “If I was a teenager wanting to write today, I don’t think I’d look at stand-up comedy and think it was a place where a writer’s instincts are needed or required.” My journalist peers complain that being a writer these days means being alternately a filmmaker, marketer, strategist, and designer. I don’t disagree. It’s why comedians were such nimble adopters of new forms like Twitter and Instagram and TikTok and—for a time, out of sheer necessity—Zoom. But I am the final form of my material, a soft sack of flesh and hair and dwindling teeth that can hardly hold all the joys and dejections of my own discipline. The hazard of writing stand-up is displacing the text that once lived in the comic herself.