Have you ever wondered what a comedy club is like?
Is the crowd filled with drunks who heckle the comedian or, worse yet, would the crowd be silent and sullen and forced to endure cringe worthy silences as the stand-up comic flounders about under the spotlight?
I’ve always been interested in humor, and went so far as to do my dissertation on the dynamics of cartoon appreciation at SUNY Stony Brook. The dissertation had to be based upon experimental data and what I learned was that children will laugh at something that they can relate to and something they consider as painful.
One aspect of my research was to study the differences in audience reaction to the Mel Brooks comedy classic Young Frankenstein. The younger kids laughed longest and hardest at the scene where the monster jumped on a seesaw and sent the child flying though a bedroom window onto a bed. The adult audience on the other hand laughed longest and loudest at the scene where the monster was raping Madeline Kahn, who at first screamed and then sung out in glory and joy.
Don’t blame me for that one, blame Mel Brooks.
At any rate I learned that my old friend David Weiss was emceeing an open mike night at Gateway Comedy Club at the Clarion Hotel in Ronkonkoma on Saturday and I knew this was my chance to see live comics in action and perhaps spot a young star on the rise.
Long Island has produced some of the funniest comics in recent memory, including Billy Crystal, Jerry Seinfeld, Rosie O’Donnell, Eddie Murphy, Rodney Dangerfield and Howard Stern.
I got to the club an hour early and the first guy I met was a young comic named Israel. He told me a funny story about when he was twelve and walking to school one day with his two friends. They found a bird, which looked dead, but by the end of the story the bird awoke and flew off.
As I chatted with Israel, the club began to fill with comedians and a packed house and David Weiss arrived. David is the WINS radio news anchor and we explored the intricacies of the comic mind. Years ago, David interviewed me for a television show while we were at the PGA Golf Expo in Orlando and I experienced one of those moments when you can’t control your laughter. David has a sly, subtle, facile wit, which combines irony, parody and whimsy and he reminds me a lot of my older brother.
After my talk with David I got to meet some of the other performers, including Peter Bales, Al Lobianco, Anthony Fiordiliso, and the manager of the comedy club, Mike Dillon. I asked each of them how they got their start and what their view on humor was?
Peter Bales has put serious thought into the topic of humor because not only is he a professor of history at Queensborough Community College and writer for the History Channel, but he’s also the founder of the Stand-up University where he trains comics on the art of being funny.
David Weiss told me that the art of stand-up comedy varies from person to person, but that the audience must relate to you and see that you are sincere and genuine.
I remember watching Eddie Murphy on television when he was doing his stand-up and what impressed me most was that he was simply telling the audience of the horror stories from his past and was doing so in such a way that he and the audience laughed. Richard Pryor was the same way, and so was Woody Allen.
The highest paid actors on earth include Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey, and that’s largely because the culture values laughter above all else.
All successful comics are first and foremost extremely bright. Professor Leonard Krasner of SUNY Stony Brook is the founder of behavior therapy and he said humor ought to be one of the sub sections of all IQ testing, because it was the sign of high intelligence.
Sigmund Freud said humor is one of the most valuable defenses humans possess.
The smartest person I have ever known was Spalding Gray, who was an actor, a writer and the originator of a whole new form of theater. He was also the funniest person I ever met. And as it turns out he was also the most depressed and committed suicide a few years ago.
When Spalding started to tell a story to me over lunch, I was smart enough to put my spoon down and push the soup and the sandwich aside until he finished. His stories were so full of anguish, surprise, horror and laughter that if you were foolish enough to have food in your mouth, by the time he got to the punchline, you could easily asphyxiate by inhaling the food as you laughed.
I liked the bird story that Israel told me at the beginning of the night because it was such a fine exemplar of the humor process. It reflects how delicate and mysterious humor actually is. His story of a wounded half dead bird that learns to fly again is precisely what every comic is trying to do when they weave their stories of misery turned into mirth. Their stories are often about some kind of psychic pain that they manage to triumph over and we laugh along with them.
When Seinfeld tells a story of how his mother forced him to wear a coat over his Halloween costume, the audience laughs because we all relate to this. When I had my first communion in first grade I had to go through the mortification of being the only boy who wore shorts instead of long pants. My mother must have thought I looked cute, but I assure you I felt nothing but shame. The only difference between me and Seinfeld is that I can’t think up a good punchline.
Comics get paid big bucks because they show us it’s possible to survive the horrors of life, like the little bird in Israel’s story who once again takes flight after being close to death. So thank you David Weiss and Mike Dillon and all the rest of you funny people.
Just like the Oscar winning film ‘Life is Beautiful,’ life can be filled with a fair degree of horror, but it’s also possible to find a way to laugh at it.
