DYING LAUGHING B-
Great Britain (89
mi) 2016
d: Lloyd Stanton and Paul Toogood
Comedy is purely a
result of your ability to withstand self-torture. That’s where you get great comedy. Your ability to suffer and go, ‘That damn
thing still doesn’t work. I’m gonna
write it again; I’m gonna try it again.’ And If you’re willing to do that, 85
times for a stupid joke, over the course of many years, great jokes get
written.
—Jerry Seinfeld
A British documentary on the art of stand-up comedy, viewed
through the lens of current British and American comedians speaking about their
craft, interviewing more than 50 comedians overall, though the film refuses to
show actual clips of them performing their routines. While it only superficially examines the
surface, the basic premise explores a comedian’s first moments onstage, how
it’s not at all what one expects, as it’s rarely a laugh riot, instead it’s a
brutally harsh environment where judgmental behavior can instantly go awry,
leaving you exiting the stage in a cold sweat, swearing you’ll never try that
again, as it’s such a personal rebuke of who you are as a human being. Unlike other industries or mediums, there is
no filter in this profession, where it’s about as personal as it gets, with
nothing to protect you from drunken hecklers or a vehemently disinterested
audience that simply refuses to laugh at your material and instead calls for
you to get off the stage. The personal
nature of the rejection, cries of “you stink” coming from the audience, pierce
through a comedian’s armor with often devastating results. These are painful moments in the life of
every starting comedian, yet that wall of negativity is what must be overcome
if you wish to remain in the profession.
According to Jerry Seinfeld, “The first time you go on stage, you don’t
realize how harsh of an environment it actually is. When you watch comedians, when you don’t know
anything about the context, it seems like the audience is kind of having a good
time anyway. That’s not what’s happening at all. What’s happening is nothing. Absolutely nothing. It’s dead, solid quiet from a room of unhappy
people…and you have to start from that.”
You must experience the silent indifference and epic emptiness of the
low moments before you can rise to greater heights, rewriting and reworking
your material, being better prepared next time, intentionally targeting that
wall of silence. Shot in black and
white, with cameras pointed at a series of comedians who each answer one at a
time, recalling their worst experience onstage.
While most have the ability to keep it light and funny, others are
visibly hurt by the extent of the personalized pain, suggesting that is
something that never goes away. While
there is a long list of mostly recognizable figures including Jerry Seinfeld,
Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, Kevin Hart, Jamie Foxx, Cedrick the
Entertainer, Steve Coogan, and even Jerry Lewis, among others, including some
unfamiliar British faces, the personalized nature of their experiences makes
this uniquely interesting and hilariously funny at times, but the material
grows thin after a while and loses its cutting edge, continually repeating
itself, where you get the feeling it’s drifting, never really going anywhere.
While several of the remarks are profoundly moving, offering
a sense of tragedy, the filmmakers never follow up to explore more deeply,
content at providing a generalized overall view, while the film may actually be
a self-help guide or an instructional kit for what to expect when you embark on
your new career as a comedian. We do get
a sense that many comics start by copying others, doing imitations, stealing
each other’s jokes, but that the best laughs come by telling true stories,
something that is authentically your own, as this is something that’s never
been heard before. Chris Rock claims
“Only poetry comes up to the same level.
We’re the last philosophers,” claiming they are the last remaining group
that is totally allowed unconditionally to speak freely. “Everybody now that talks is reading from a
preapproved script. Even our alleged
‘smart people’ are corporately controlled.
So there’s only one group of people that kinda say what they want to
say.” Without delving into the art of
comedy or what makes something funny, the film is actually more interested in
the painful moments, where each is asked to relive the most brutally painful
experience they’ve ever had onstage, including when they’ve bombed, where
there’s a large segment devoted to hecklers, where some face them head on,
refusing to allow others to wrest the power from their microphones, while
others recall racially tinged hecklers that simply stopped the show altogether,
forcing them off the stage, never to return to that location ever again. There seems to be a difference in American
and British comedians, as Americans have a tradition of going “on the road,”
indicating a willingness to accept a certain amount of rural desolation, far
from anyplace recognizable, where they’re booked into an endless series of
nights in small towns along barren highways with bad food and no name motels,
where the isolation is crushing, far from your family and everything you’re
familiar with, completely alone, not knowing anyone in town, yet you’re
supposed to be funny in a room full of strangers, with some reporting the
audience is the first conversation they’ve had with anybody else all day. British comedians usually play in large metropolitan
towns, where there’s no sense of the utter isolation that Americans are forced
to experience. Sometimes you perform in
bars, where they turn off the TV when you begin your act, but some patrons are
personally invested in whatever sporting event was being shown, screaming for
the TV to be turned back on, getting pissed off and angry, but then the
comedian is supposed to fill the room with laughs.
The film never revisits history, but traditionally, in the
old vaudeville halls, comedians were used to entertain the crowd before the
dancing girls came onstage, where they were routinely booed off the stage or
stopped in mid act to bring on what the audience came to see. Similarly, Keenan Ivory Wayans remembers
playing a set in the remote wilds of Alaska, where the venue was a strip club,
with an audience full of men packing guns who’d been working out in the
wilderness for the last six months, who had no interest in his jokes, as they
hadn’t seen a naked woman in several months. Unfortunately, there is too much
unnecessary filler material, comments from people we don’t know or like, who
are basically echoing sentiments we’ve already heard earlier in the film by
somebody else. While the British
comedians probably play well in England, and the Americans in the United
States, only a few are popular on both continents, which means audiences from
both nations will be expected to hear unfamiliar voices that may affect one’s
appreciation for the film. Ultimately
what stands out is that the career of comedians is hardly glamorous, and more
often grueling and disorientating, especially being in unfamiliar places, where
black female comedian Cocoa Brown reveals, “It’s lonely. You know, I can be onstage in front of 5,000 people,
get a standing ovation and go to my hotel room to complete silence. And I’m looking at the money on the bed, and
the room service I just ordered, but I have no one to call.” According to Amy Schumer, she felt lucky if
there was free yogurt and orange juice offered in the lobby in the morning,
while Royale Watkins is reduced to tears recalling his worst show happened with
Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson in the audience, making it even more
excruciatingly painful, as in those moments you don’t get a second chance, so
despite hundreds of successful shows, this is the one that sticks with
you. While searching for that magic to
click onstage, something Jerry Lewis describes as “the hallelujah moment,” the
film seems to fixate on the dark underbelly of the profession, recalling
heartbreaking moments onstage, where depression also follows you in the utter
isolation of being on the road, forced to confront hostile and indifferent
crowds, where all it takes is one inebriated heckler to ruin it for everybody
else. Following the recent suicide of Robin
Williams (two years ago), it reminds us of the unseen psychological toll that
follows these comedians throughout their careers, even after considerable
success, where a part of their emotional world always feels damaged, leading to
increased anxiety, insecurity, and in some cases substance abuse. Dedicated to Gary Shandling, who also died
less than a year ago, the film is a testament to what it takes to survive.
