Dying Laughing

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. 

Top Five

TOP FIVE                   B+           
USA  (102 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Chris Rock        Official site

Chris Rock, named the heir apparent to Richard Pryor early in his career after his HBO stand-up special CHRIS ROCK:  BRING THE PAIN (1996), while at age 34 he was also named “the funniest man in America” in September 1999 by Time magazine, Seriously Funny - TIME, which places a lot of pressure on a guy to have to be funny all the time.  With the recent suicide of brilliant comic Robin Williams, who often joked about his addiction, or before him Freddie Prinze, or Richard Jeni, one looks at the troubled childhoods of so many comedians who learn to make fun of themselves at an early age, developing a unique ability to make others laugh, often to protect themselves from real life traumas that haunt them throughout their lives.  But imagine the weight on one’s shoulders to be labeled the funniest man in America, where the spotlight is always going to be pointed at you even when you least desire it.  Rock has always handled his stardom admirably, maintaining a center of balance, refusing to serve as a role model while he satirizes and excoriates public figures onstage, as expressed in his 1997 memoir Rock This, “Why does the public expect entertainers to behave better than everybody else?  It’s ridiculous...Of course, this is just for black entertainers.  You don’t see anyone telling Jerry Seinfeld he’s a good role model.  Because everyone expects whites to behave themselves...Nowadays, you’ve got to be an entertainer and a leader.  It’s too much.”  In the open and freewheeling observational style of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, comedians are actors and stand-up entertainers that offer scorching social commentary, off color jokes, biting satire, and personal autobiographical revelations while also challenging the limits of free speech.  All the best comedians go through a comedy circuit where they do bits and pieces of their stand-up routines in small clubs, which seems to be the Holy Grail of comedy, as it receives far greater adulation and acclaim for actually being funny than movie roles, where Woody Allen has made over 70 motion pictures, but people still persist in believing that his earliest movies that were the closest to his stand-up routines were his funniest.   

To his credit, Rock loves all comedians, past and present, where he’s probably stolen from the best of them, but he continues to showcase his own unique flair onscreen, where his stream-of-conscious style of outrageous humor is simply hilarious, and this film, which he writes, directs, and stars in front of the camera, bears some autobiographical resemblance to Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980), where Allen’s character Sandy Bates is a highly successful film director known for making hilarious comedies, but confesses, “I don’t want to make funny movies any more, they can’t force me to.  I don’t feel funny.  I look around the world and all I see is human suffering.”  In Rock’s film, his character Andre Allen interestingly reveals he was high or drunk at the height of his professional comedy career, and now that he’s sober, the world doesn’t appear so damn funny anymore.  Trying to make more of a positive difference, he makes a serious film where he plays a Django Unchained style, real-life historical figure Dutty Boukman, the leader of a Haitian slave rebellion called UPRIZE, where he’s hoping to make a serious statement without comedy, but it’s flopping miserably as all anyone wants to talk about is Hammy, a crime-fighting bear, a character that he played in three successive blockbuster films, the last one grossing about $600 million dollars, even though he’s done with the role, insisting upon moving on, but reporters aren’t the least bit interested in his sidestepping their questions, knowing their readers can’t get enough of Hammy.  Shot in New York, where much of the film is openly walking down the streets, fixated cries of “Hammy!” can be heard throughout, much like the “Birdman” calls in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014).  No matter how much these guys try to ignore their past, it follows them everywhere, like an embarrassing nickname or a foul rumor they can’t shed, but the real surprise of the film is the complexity of the role written for Rosario Dawson as New York Times journalist Chelsea Brown, who spends a day following Allen around in order to write an extended profile piece on his life.  While he’s obviously at a crossroads in his life and career, where all the tabloids are writing about his upcoming marriage to be broadcast live on Bravo with Reality TV star Erica Long (Gabrielle Union), seemingly matching the pattern of co-producer Kanye West’s marriage to Kim Kardashian, but what’s most intriguing is that Dawson’s more complicated life is exposed right alongside his own, a beautiful contrast to the vapid imagery seen in tabloid journalism, creating one of her best, most down-to-earth and intelligent roles since Spike Lee’s 25th HOUR (2002).    

Actually, the complexity of the secondary roles is equally outstanding, from his loyal bodyguard and chauffeur, JB Smooth as Silk, who’s been his longtime friend since childhood, to the outlandishly freakish role of Cedric the Entertainer as Jazzy Dee, the underground black market mayor of Houston, the guy who can procure anything, anytime, anywhere, where he’s also like a Get Out of Jail Free card, even though hanging around with him is what gets your ass thrown in jail in the first place, where in any other movie his scene-stealing antics would be the highlight, but this film features an overabundance of stars.  Kevin Hart’s scene as Andre’s manager is equally hilarious, where over the phone the two get into an N-word contest, where they delve into the idea of a black man getting into trouble for calling another black man the N-word, which unleashes a barrage of expletives that could only exist in black culture.  Perhaps the highlight of the film is when Andre brings Chelsea into the housing project where he grew up, where we meet Ben Vereen as his alcoholic father and Sherri Shepherd as his mother, where his old friends from the neighborhood are like a who’s who of black stand-up comedy, including Tracy Morgan (before his recent accident), Jay Pharoah, Hassan Johnson, and Leslie Jones, all playing to the journalist, each stepping all over the other to try to offer the real dirt on Andre, where it’s the only scene where the nonstop laughter feels so authentically natural, as this group takes such pleasure in teasing and ribbing one other, where it feels like they’ve been doing it for years, with the group wondering whether Tupac Shakur would be a U.S. Senator today had he lived, or maybe, as Andre suggests, he just might be “playing the bad, dark-skinned boyfriend in a Tyler Perry movie.”  It’s here that they happen upon the theme of the top five rappers of all time, which is like the listing for a nonexistent black hall of fame, yet each distinct choice offers an eye into each personality, as it’s like defining what it is to be black.  Within the context of this enveloping humor, there’s a surprisingly effective “smallness” brought into the film that simply hones in on Andre and Chelsea walking through the streets of New York while opening up about their lives, offering some of the more astute insight into alcoholism, where part of the recovery program is “rigorous honesty.”  Chelsea’s shrewd insight into her own life, remaining honest and forthright throughout, but also flirtatious and funny, is the unexpected star of the film.  While initially the two protect themselves with lies and carefully guarded secrets, but as the film progresses the guard comes down and what we’re treated to is an unexpectedly smart and comically inventive film that veers into an equally clever relationship movie that feels extremely close to the real Chris Rock, which as we all know is nothing short of amazing.