from Hacker News

The Structure of Stand-Up Comedy

by nniroclax on 8/6/18, 7:16 PM with 93 comments

• by austinl on 8/7/18, 6:38 AM

  I started to appreciate stand-up comedy a lot more after realizing just how much effort goes into delivery. It's almost uncanny to watch a comedian perform the same routine twice, because their timing is so consistent.

  Here's a good breakdown of a Louis CK joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufdvYrTeTuU

  Jerry Seinfeld also gave an interview with the NYT about the process — I think Jerry is a good example because so much of his comedy depends on the delivery.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itWxXyCfW5s

• by jdietrich on 8/7/18, 2:09 PM

  If you have a serious interest in stand-up, I would highly recommend Stuart Goldsmith's podcast The Comedian's Comedian. He interviews a broad range of (mainly British) comedians, taking a deep dive into their writing process and stagecraft. The interviews with Jimmy Carr and Gary Delaney stand out as highlights for me, providing some absolutely revelatory insights into the art of making something funny. It can be a bit inside baseball at times, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

  http://www.comedianscomedian.com/podcasts/

  http://www.comedianscomedian.com/164-jimmy-carr-part-one-of-...

  http://www.comedianscomedian.com/67-gary-delaney-live/

• by dalbasal on 8/7/18, 10:50 AM

  Well done to the authors! This is a really compelling analysis, fun to "read". It's a great use of the medium, pretty much the picture my imagination painted when (one of the whens) "multimedia books" were a thing of the future.

  On stand-up comedy... I've heard more about the "making of" in recent years too, as comedians invaded podcasting. It's very interesting, how a joke or set evolves in the telling. I guess certain jokes and bits don't make the cut, but moreso, they are refined for timing, cadence and the stuff this article points out (kreshendo?).

  A curious paralel is (perhaps) speech-making. There is someone on stage, live audience. They do the same talk/set over and over, to different crowds. Each time, the punches are fuunnier. The misdirections get more subtle. The impacts are better. The crowd cohesion grows.

  Orration is ancient, and I suspect that stand up comedians have a lot in common with orators of the past, before mass media existed.

  If you listen to (for example) a recorded malcolm X speech (I think he was exceptionally talented), you are probably listening to the 100th delivery of the speech. It didn't just pop out of his mouth with that much impact on day 1.

• by habosa on 8/7/18, 5:28 AM

  This was nicely done. And since it's Hacker News let me immedy shift focus to tech ... this was fantastically usable on my mobile phone. It was laid out perfectly and very responsive. I've seen plain text articles jump and stutter so I wasn't expecting this to work. Good job to the dev team.

• by Steve44 on 8/7/18, 8:56 AM

  I've been to see a few comedians playing small theatres whilst they are developing their acts. Sometimes you get big names who are polishing their show for an imminent TV appearance, sometime they've not been on stage for a few years and are just starting to get back into it for a tour the following year. They will often play with stories, making notes how the audience react as perhaps they've gone too far or just missed the point.

  I think I prefer seeing them working in the small venues like this when their act is quite raw and not just seeing the highly polished finished routine. They are incredibly talented and getting an insight into their thoughts is wonderful.

• by andrewtbham on 8/7/18, 10:09 AM

  Referencing previous material like this is commonly called a callback (just like programming :-). It's extremely common to end with at least one call back.. if not multiple.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callback_(comedy)

• by crummy on 8/7/18, 9:05 AM

  That was a great analysis. If anyone is interesting on this topic, I highly recommend Talking Funny. Four comedic greats talk about comedy - of course there's lots of laughing but it's just fascinating.

  Full video on youtube, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrqkP1JpBRY

• by nailer on 8/7/18, 10:20 AM

  I got lost and ended up at the opening page 5 slides in. Also the 'tap to continue' was half off the screen in iPhone X. This feels like a new version of those scroll jacking sites from 2010.

• by jadell on 8/7/18, 5:25 AM

  I'd be interesting in seeing something like this breakdown for someone like Mitch Hedberg, who is generally considered to be one of the greatest stand-ups of all time (especially among other stand-up comedians. You'll often hear other comedians include his name in lists with Carlin, Pryor and other all-time greats.) Hedberg's style is definitely not narrative, not explicitly. It's about as far to the one-liner one-joke-after-another end of the spectrum as you can get.

• by senthil_rajasek on 8/7/18, 7:31 AM

  The site is great, the tools of analysis and presentation are amazing but the title is a bit grandiose.

  Imagine writing an article titled "The Structure of Software" and using code from one application to define the structure of all software.

  I once watched 100 videos of top 100 comedians of the decade. I realized that no two comedians were alike.

  I like to think that comedy is a place of anti-logic or no logic or beyond logic with room for non-sequitur and absurdism and hence no structure.

• by jjgoldman on 8/7/18, 1:56 PM

  The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel explores the the development of a "set" in the first season. It isn't a big part, but in the context of the overall story it is well done.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marvelous_Mrs._Maisel

• by codeulike on 8/7/18, 8:56 AM

  While we're dissecting humour, this reminds me of Dennett's book about it - the core idea seems to be that we find things funny because we're trying to 'debug' them:

  The main thesis of “Inside Jokes” is that humor is an evolved adaptation used by humans to “debug” mental representations, i.e. find tacit incongruities and contradictions within representations and bring them to light.

  https://rosehendricks.com/2013/06/13/review-of-inside-jokes/

• by lawnchair_larry on 8/7/18, 7:24 AM

  I really want to read this but the design of the site is unbearable. Hoping for a plain ascii version.

• by kyberias on 8/7/18, 5:05 PM

  I honestly think the graphical gizmos implemented for this piece do not support the message AT ALL. In fact, I didn't find any message. There is form in an hour long stand-up routine? That's not news.

• by rayalez on 8/7/18, 8:34 AM

  Crazy beautiful website.

  A few thoughts on comedy:

  - In "Step by Step to Stand-up Comedy" (great book about doing standup), the author describes the process of writing a standup routine. Basically, first you write a lot of jokes on random topics, and tag them by categories (like "driving", "postal service", "marriage", etc). Once you have a few dozen jokes, you organize the ones that can belong to a similar topic together, and then figure out how to string them together into a coherent routine, where one joke leads to another. So routines are written "bottom-up" from jokes, first you have jokes, then you find a way to put them together in a way that makes sense, but doesn't need much meaning or structure beyond that.

  - Movies or sictcoms, on the other hand, are written "top-down". First you have a story structure, which can, but doesn't have to be that funny(laws for comedy and drama are the same), and then you brainstorm jokes using your scenes as topics. If you came up with some good jokes or scenes separately, that don't necessarily fit, you can find a way to "shoehorn" them into the script, nothing wrong with that, but generally it goes structure first, jokes second.

  - Jokes are "absurd associations". Our brain thinks in patterns. When you put together two patterns(ideas) that don't belong together, it creates the feeling of absurdity, the less patterns belong together, the less they fit together, the more absurd they will feel. ("A man on a bicycle" is not absurd, "a man on a unicycle" is a little bit absurd, "Hitler riding a unicycle" is very absurd, "Hitler riding a unicycle while wearing a white dress and juggling fish" is absurd as fuck). Comedy is the art of finding connections between patterns. You "connect the dots" between two ideas, find an overlap(an association) between two patterns that are far apart, and you put them together. The more absurd(less compatible) the two ideas are, and the stronger the connection(the more it makes sense), the funnier the joke will be.

• by talltimtom on 8/7/18, 1:30 PM

  Very nice presentation. The analysis is just complete overanalysis with them working backwards from their biased preconcieved conclusion trying to back it up through argument rather than doing actual analysis and dissecting the subject matter. But the presentation is nice. Great visualizations and effective at arguing their hypothesis even though they don’t actual do any critical evaluation of it.

  I’d propose she repeat the show but leave out the physical comedy that goes along with the specific point they are obsessed with and if their hypothesis holds the laughs will be just as big, since they postulate that it’s the structure of the preceding jokes tying in it that causes the laughs and not the joke itself.

• by cjstadler on 8/7/18, 4:14 PM

  Cool presentation.

  This reminded me of Hannah Gadsby's "Nanette" because, like Ali Wong's show, it has a strong narrative arc, and because, like this presentation itself, it analyzes the structure of comedy.

• by pbhjpbhj on 8/7/18, 2:28 PM

  If you are interested in the craft of comedy then you might like British comedian Stewart Lee, he's liberal/socialist and gets pretty political but he clearly revels in the craft and is quite meta about it. He "explains" to the audience when and why they should laugh, and appears to revel in getting laughs out of stuff that just shouldn't be at all funny -- murdered babies for example. When I was younger I find him boring ("this isn't comedy, where are the jokes").

  Latest tour "Content Provider" -- https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bdcnwq/stewart-lee-c...

• by schemathings on 8/7/18, 6:10 AM

  TJ Miller "One Crazy Night - This is not happening" is a great example of this type of structure.

• by gandutraveler on 8/7/18, 6:26 PM

  Louis CK is master of story telling. Ali Wong is to d but I don't think her jokes are smart funny.

• by callesgg on 8/7/18, 11:32 AM

  This would be more interesting if it was about something that was more of a quality comedy.

  I don't understand why jokes about vaginas, being fat, being gross or sex are funny to so many people.

  Something is ultimately funny cause it is unexpected and true in a certain perspective.

  My guess is that people think it is unexpected that people talk about these things and that is why they laugh and think it is funny. To me the concept of using such a simple idiotic picture of what a human is, is cringe. It is sort of embarrassing that people find it funny.

• by glibgil on 8/7/18, 6:09 AM

  This is stupid and only means that the editor knows what they are doing. Like most comedy specials this was filmed twice and sweetened in editing

  https://imgur.com/JtOb4fJ

  https://imgur.com/0QwEnEZ

• by aportnoy on 8/7/18, 7:54 AM

  Ali Wong is at best mediocre, but the website is nice.

• by CraneWorm on 8/7/18, 11:34 AM

  Out of habit I skipped straight into reader mode and got to read the monologue.

  ... the delivery better do some magic 'cause I was depressed after couple of sentences and not in a mood for laughs at all...