comedians talk about comedy 

“I’m up at the lake, and my cell phone reception’s going worse than North Korea’s missile testing,” says comedian Bob Marley.

Uh-huh . . ..

“The girls I date are way too young,” says Bob Saget. “I’ve gotta date older women. I need to date like a 60-year-old. I need to go to the nursing home and get one right before she dies and inherit everything.”

I don’t really know where that one came from . . ..

“To me, there’s nothing funnier than a woman leaving the bathroom with a piece of toilet paper stuck to her shoe,” says Paula Poundstone. I’d asked what she found funny; what inspired her humor.

It can be tough talking to comedians. They’re almost always on; always trying to impress; always going for the laugh. It’s their job; it’s their art; and, if you hang on long enough, you can get them to talk about it in those terms, with the respect people afford any art form.

People assume being a painter or a musician is hard. Those are clearly learned forms of expression; no one is born with a clear understanding of perspective and brush stroke or chord structures and time signatures. When it comes to standup comedy, though, the common opinion is it’s something you have or you don’t. Standup comedians are naturally funny people who are able to mount a stage and effortlessly spit off punch line after punch line, sending the audience into fits of riotous laughter with their god-given ability to point out the ridiculous nature of everyday living. Everybody knows a joker; give a joker a microphone, and you have a standup comic. It’s a misconception even successful comedians operate under when they first start out.

“I just assumed everything (comedians said) was spontaneous,” says Poundstone. “I was quite disappointed to find out it was all prepared.”

It is the ability to rigorously prepare material—finding the right timing and precise combination of words to elicit maximum laughs—and still manage to make it seem fresh and effortless that separates professional comics from the hacks bombing at local open mikes.

“The trick is to make it all look conversational,” says Marley. “Otherwise, the audience knows immediately. They know if you’re comfortable or not.”

Marley talks about “trigger phrases” setting off chains of jokes, joined together smoothly by barely noticeable segues.

“It should be seamless, like drywall,” he says. “Sometimes you see drywall, and you can notice little gaps. That’s because the guy who installed it didn’t know what he was doing.”

With a number of top-shelf comedians coming to the area this summer, Seacoast audiences will get to experience firsthand how comedians practice their craft and smooth over the gaps.

The Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom seats 1,800 people when it sets up tables for a comedy concert. With these numbers, the Ballroom is a very large venue for comedians, who spend most of their time performing at small clubs before graduating to the theater circuit.

“Lots of times, we’re a comedian’s first major venue after they’ve been playing at clubs like Boston’s Comedy Connection,” says Andrew Herrick, director of marketing for the Casino Ballroom.

Herrick talks about booking comedians the way he would talk about booking bands.
“We watch the trends, see who’s big in the area, see who’s doing what, who’s got a movie coming out. It’s a guessing game, though. The higher the risk, the better the reward. Or the other way around.”

The Casino Ballroom regularly hosts nationally touring comedians. This season’s schedule includes performances from George Carlin, Brian Regan, Jim Gaffigan, Kathy Griffin, and Lewis Black. For Carlin, Regan, and Black, this season marks a return to the Ballroom.

“They start playing to smaller crowds and build it up over the years,” says Herrick. “That’s what happened with Lewis Black.” Herrick sees similar trends in attendance for Brian Regan, and hopes Jim Gaffigan will have comparable success. “I think he’s one of the funniest guys out there right now,” he says.

On Saturday, July 8, the Ballroom hosted Bob Saget. This was Saget’s first time at the Ballroom, and ticket sales were strong, with over 1,000 people attending. Saget first shot into the public eye on shows like Full House and America’s Funniest Home Videos. Since those two series ended, he has found success as a touring standup comic. The pleasant—or shocking—surprise, though, is that Saget is one of the filthiest comedians out there. On stage at the Ballroom, Saget delighted in talking to audience members about testicular shaving and his sexual escapades with cast members of Full House (Saget admits he was never involved with his costars. It’s still funny, though.). After a lengthy absence from the standup circuit, Saget is enjoying his triumphant return.

“I’m on stage a lot now, and I love it,” he says. “Standup is the oldest form of comedy; it’s one person on a rock, telling people stories.”

Saget’s comedy is fairly split between stories of his experience on television and his personal life. “I got divorced nine years ago, and I’ve got a good relationship with my ex-wife,” he says. “My parents are old—my father almost died of a heart attack recently—but they’re both doing well. I have three daughters. That’s just three subjects, and it’s an hour’s worth of material.”

When it comes to analyzing his comedy, Saget is reluctant to put it under the critical microscope.

“Funny just hits,” he says. “People who are in comedy or who are savvy will say, ‘Oh, that’s funny.’ But if you don’t laugh, it’s not funny.”

Comedy isn’t any one element as Saget sees it, but the overall effect of the performance.
“It’s in the delivery. It’s in the material. You can try to figure it out, but that only helps so much.”

However he does it, Saget’s got something right. From the moment he hit the stage Saturday night, he had the audience rolling with laughter, whether it was from discussing the selection process for America’s Funniest Home Videos, his daughters’ underwear preferences, or singing a song entitled “Danny Tanner Wasn’t Gay” (sung to the tune of “I Want It that Way” by the Backstreet Boys).

And when it was all over, eager fans lined up to get their pictures taken with Bob Saget. Saget happily obliged.

Jonathan’s in Ogunquit, Maine, is a restaurant downstairs and a small nightclub upstairs. Twenty or so tables are scattered throughout a room with an 18-inch tall stage in the corner. There’s a piano on stage for those performers who need it. Bob Marley isn’t one of those performers.

“I don’t even play the piano, but I request one everywhere I perform,” Marley joked during his performance on Friday, July 7. “I just like to see the guys lug it up here.”

Marley took the stage dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, sporting an absurdly thick Maine accent. For more than an hour, he kept the audience of 80 laughing with stories about water skiing and ordering dinner with his wife, as well as observations of the eccentricities and oddities of life in Maine.

“You don’t just throw something in Maine,” Marley said. “You can chuck something; you can huck something; you can wing something; or you can heave something. And you don’t run; you book it. You book it wicked fast.”

Marley has been performing standup now for 15 years. In that time, he’s gone from an unknown comic from Portland to one of the top touring comedians in the country, appearing at venues of every size across the country, as well as movies, TV shows and television commercials. At the end of August, Marley will be taping a half-hour special for Comedy Central for their Comedy Central Presents series. This was Marley’s first performance at Jonathan’s.

“I still do every size venue,” says Marley. “I think that’s how you get new fans. If you want to stay connected to your audience, then you have to play affordable venues.”

In 15 years of standup comedy, Marley’s approach to humor has changed pretty drastically.

“When I first started out, I’d try writing jokes, and I’d ask myself, ‘What’s funny?’ I was basically just sitting in my apartment trying to think of things. I came up with some wacky jokes about doorknobs and light bulbs.”

When this concentrated approach didn’t yield much, Marley began drawing more on his daily experience, examining those things that affected him.

“Every time I get upset or pissed off, I go and get a pen and write it down,” he says.
Oftentimes, comedians will take their own lives and discuss those specific details that they find funny or upsetting. The hope (as with other art forms) is that through exploring the personal and the specific, one can establish universal appeal and a connection with the audience.

“You have to get people to step outside of their everyday life and see how it’s funny,” Marley says. “People have to buy into what I’m saying enough to go with it for an hour. I need to have a degree of reasonable doubt in my stage persona.”

It is a comic’s believability and ability to convince an audience of the humor of what he or she is saying that makes up the artistry of comedy. A comic must get the audience to suspend their disbelief—and, in some sense, their sense of themselves as an individual—so they accept the comic’s words as truth and as truly funny. This takes a lot of practice and a lot of time devoted to developing a stage presence.

“Once you know who you are, it’s a lot easier to convince the audience you’re funny,” says Marley.

Beginner comedians develop material and stage presence through open mike performances. The most important thing for a developing comedian is stage time. It’s a process of trial and error as they try out new jokes and new approaches, finding out what they should keep and what they should throw away. A typical open mike performance slot is five minutes long. As comedians find material that works and welcoming audiences, they begin to link these five-minute segments together. Headlining comedians must provide 50 minutes to an hour of solid material.

“I have one hour of material that just rips,” says Marley. This hour-long performance is usable across the country, but Marley estimates he has at least three additional hours’ worth of material he can perform in New England.

“Most of my act is about my wife and kids,” he says. “The regional stuff doesn’t really work nationally. No one in Kentucky gets ‘camp’ (what Mainers and New Englanders generally will often call their rusticated vacation spots). Some places I go, they don’t know what a keg party is.”

Some young comedians will turn to courses offered by standup clubs like the Comedy Connection in Portland. Marley doubts the effectiveness of these classes.

“Trying to teach someone to be funny is like trying to teach someone to be tall,” says Marley. “You can study it. You can sit in the back of comedy clubs for hours, like I did. There are certain rules you can try to follow, like the rule of three (taking a funny idea and playing it out in three different scenarios or explaining it three different ways), but everyone’s so stylistically different. The good ones do it without even knowing it. It’s like music; B.B. King can’t play guitar and sing at the same time, but are you going to say he’s doing it wrong?”

Marley has basic advice for those who would consider a career in comedy and brave the stage and mike: “Write your jokes, get on stage, and don’t listen to anybody.”
With his career going strongly and his popularity growing, you’d be hard-pressed to fault Marley’s approach. The audience at Jonathan’s didn’t find anything wrong with it.

“I believe there’s a magic to comedy,” says Paula Poundstone. “It’s the magic of human interaction. Not that what you say isn’t important, but it’s the connection with the audience that really matters.”

Poundstone has been a presence on the national comedy scene for almost 20 years. She has appeared in numerous comedy specials and TV shows, has written books, and is a regular panelist on NPR’s game show Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! She is praised for her quick wit and ability to think on her feet. Her standup shows are characterized by the way they pass from jokes to conversations with the audience, with Paula riffing off of everything audience members say. She will establish a theme at random and return to it throughout the course of her show. Comedy Central ranked her 88th on their list of the 100 Greatest Standups of All Time. She says that her current approach to comedy wasn’t something she started out doing naturally or easily.

“Spontaneity is sort of a muscle you strengthen. I started doing it (thinking up material on the spot) because I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to say for the life of me. I’d be busing tables, going over the same five minutes’ worth of jokes in my head again and again, preparing for an open mike. Then someone would say something that would throw me off. Then I discovered that’s really the fun of it.”

Poundstone describes her shows as a sort of journey with the audience; once you establish a rapport with the audience, she says, they will follow you almost anywhere.

“There was this one night, I was at some club—I don’t remember where—and there was this rubber trash can on stage. I don’t know why it was there, but something made me hit the microphone on the side of it, and that sound reminded me of elementary school, when you used to bring your lunch tray to the trash can and bang it on the edge to get everything off. There was nothing funny about this except to me. The audience laughed, though. No one ever said, ‘Hey, do that thing with the trash can,’ but we’d come to a point together (where we could all laugh at that).”

Poundstone began her career doing open-mike nights in Boston before moving on to similar events in San Francisco and eventually establishing herself as a headliner doing national tours. Poundstone’s early career wasn’t like that of many other comedians who find their solid five minutes and stick to it.

“When I first started doing it, I thought I was supposed to change my performance every time,” she says. “What happened was that I would have five minutes that worked and five minutes that didn’t. Now I have a huge Rolodex of stuff in my head that I can pull from.” Despite the amount of time she has put into honing her craft, Poundstone is quick to downplay the effort it takes.

“Oh, it’s shamelessly easy,” she says. “It’s just awful. The actual doing of my job takes almost no effort. (A performance) is a little like going to a cocktail party; you repeat some old stories, you talk about how hard it was to find parking. Sometimes people come up to me and tell me something I used to say, and I think, ‘Wow, that’s really funny.’”
When it comes to comedic pacing, Poundstone doesn’t stress about it the way some of her peers might.

“You get some comics who talk about LPM’s (laughs-per-minute),” she says. “I have kind of a loping pace. I don’t usually get funny until people have been in the room for far too long. I call it survivors’ humor. That’s the hard part of the job; keeping people laughing. A lot of people come up to you and say, ‘Oh, your job is so hard. I could never do what you do. I couldn’t get up in front of all those people.’ Apparently, though, public speaking is the number one fear among human beings. I could think of many other things to be scared of; my children being shot for one thing . . ..”

Then I realize that Paula Poundstone is in the middle of a bit, and I’ve heard this one before on an HBO special she did in 1990. But I don’t stop her. It’s a privilege to hear a master at work.