[MUSIC] Hello, and welcome to the popcorn counter here at the two real cinema club. I'm James's speaker. >> And I'm under his Laurenti. >> And you know how I love a quiz? I haven't got a quiz for you this week. I love a quiz, but I haven't got a quiz, but I have got a list. I'm going to see whether you can tell me. So as usual, I've been rummaging around in the IMDB, and I've got a list here. And I'm going to start reading this list and tell me when you figure out what all these people have in common. Okay, I'm going to start the list and see if you can figure it out. Okay, right, so Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin. This is a great cast, isn't it? Robin Williams, Dennis Leary, what do all these people have in common? Jim Carrey, Steve Martin, besides being an exhausting dinner party, Whoopi Goldberg, any guesses yet? >> No, am I looking for, if they're not all Saturday Night Live people, I don't think. >> Not all of them are, but you're barking up the right tree, Woody Allen, Chris Rock. >> All comedy writers? >> Almost, almost Larry David, Amy Schumer. >> All stand up comics. >> Yes, these guys are all, there's all household names, and they were all stand up comedians. That was their kind of their first entry into show business. >> Yeah, that makes sense. >> So I've still got more lists. I've got John Candy, Ben Stiller, Billy Crystal, Jerry Seinfeld. I would have thought that would be the giveaway. Chevy Chase, Russell Brand, so are all of these, are all for a lot of household names who started out as stand ups. >> Ben Stiller, really? I don't think I did that. >> Yeah, Ben Stiller, interestingly, yeah. So I was looking at this list that I gathered together, and I was asking, why is this? Why are so many of our Hollywood household names, people started out in stand up rather than necessarily people who started? I mean, there will be a hundred ways to get into showbiz. Stand up is not the only route. People go to acting classes, or people start under theater, or these days, people make their own YouTube web channels, whatever, don't they? Or there's a hundred ways to get started on this. Why so many of them stand ups? >> I think it's pretty clear to me, these are people... >> This is going to be a really short popcorn couch. >> It will be. >> I think so many of them are good writers, essentially, even if you're never really writing down your comedy routine, or if you're changing it all the time, you've written something that's good, right? And you've rehearsed it, which I think a lot of actors don't necessarily do. You have performed it, right? You've done it live, and therefore you can also do it on screen in all likelihood. And there's something inherently physical about comedy, too, where you're using your body. When you think of Jim Carrey's face, or Rubben Williams' voices, then you're thinking about there's already this acting piece that's built into it. And furthermore, I think there's the quality of the comic to be able to sort of improvise, so you can actually on set potentially make a good script even better, or collaborate with the writers, collaborate with the directors. So there's... >> Make a good script, you know, demonstrably worse, yes. >> You could do that as well, I'm sure that happens all the time. But just the idea that you can improvise a little bit, or you can think on your feet. Most of these comics are pretty fast thinkers. You have to be a fast thinker to be funny, I think. So I think those qualities make comics good actors or make them very versatile when it comes to the entertainment business. >> I agree with everything that you've just said, but I think there is another dimension to this as well. I think there is another reason why comedians are singled out as being great proposals for a long career in entertainment, and that reason is financial, because when you hire a comedian, you get a writer and a performer, but you only pay them one fee. I think a stand-up special is like the single cheapest way to fill an hour of screen time. You have one set, you have one performer, and they've even written their own material, so you only need to pay one salary, you don't need to pay a writer for something separate. You only need to have a bit of setup and some coverage, but it's a pretty inexpensive way to fill airtime, and I think this kind of this double value, it's like a double whammy, isn't it? If you're the writer and the performer, then it's two for the price of one. Who can resist that? No wonder people get a start doing that, because everybody likes to save money. I think it's the trend that we're going to see expand in the future, because it's perfect for the streaming platforms, isn't it? They're trying to create inexpensive content that you can see again and again. There's so many comics out there that can produce an hour of film, a video, that can go pretty quickly without a lot of editing, can go straight to the streaming platform. So I think, for me, I've just seen more comedy in the last few years, just because there's so much more access to it streaming, and you're also right, I think that most of these shows are not an hour and a half, they're not two hours, it's just the single hour, it seems to be, so it's inexpensive to produce something that is going to swallow up some time on the streaming service. I think as a result, we'll probably see some bad stuff too, because we're starting to see some crap movies streaming too, but you probably take less of a loss on comedy than you would on a bad film. Yeah, yeah, it's a smaller outlay, isn't it? I was kind of curious to see why, if there are so many comedians in the film business, why do we not see more films about comedians or about comedy? So last week we watched Punch Line, and we watched Ice to be Funny, but actually there's not a huge number of movies about comedians, I think there's many, many more movies about actors or musicians than there are about comedians, even the comedians I think are disproportionately represented on the screen. That's a great question, do you have an inkling, do you have an idea or a few? I mean part of it, I wonder whether part of the reason is that nobody likes to step out from behind the curtain, I think we might have talked about this last week, that a lot of comedians enjoy perpetuating the myth that they are making up the gags as they go, and if you make a film about comedians, then you're demonstrating that people keep using the same set, or that their gags are pre-prepared, I don't know, I was trying to make a little list that I could recall of films about comedians, there's just not many. Joker, I guess, counts as a film about a comedian, because that film is kind of a riff on King of Comedy, which is a film about a comedian, but both of the comedians and those films are failed comedians, aren't they? They're kind of bad comedians, you either can't get a gig or can't get a laugh, and then the only other ones that I could think of, there's Man on the Moon, I don't know whether you've seen that, which is the Andy Kaufman? It's the Kaufman Biopic, yes. The Biopic, yeah, with Jim Carrey. And then there's an Adam Sandler film called Funny People that I saw a few years ago, which I cannot unsee, which is a pretty dreadful film about stand-up comedians. And that aside, I've drawn a bit of a blank, there aren't very many films about stand-ups, and I think part of it is about preserving the mystique. I did once try to picture a stand-up comedy sitcom, which I wrote with a friend. This was before going to film school, we wrote a pilot for a sitcom called There's No Business. He also was a stand-up, and we'd done a bunch of gigs together in London, and he was quite interested in trying to write a sitcom. We wrote a pilot and pitched it around, and we were kind of told that nobody wants to watch a sitcom about comedians, it's not what anybody wants. I don't know whether that's true or not, or whether that's just something people say to get you out of their office, but I'm not convinced that there is a market for it. For me, I think that the two films we just watched are examples of why it's difficult because I think you're trying to balance that comic life or that comedian's life with a narrative that carries you through 90 minutes or more. I think if you make the character too funny, then you're not going to take the film very seriously, and I think in those two films it's really hard to write funny comics as a character. It just seems like a daunting task, so I think those two films really had a hard time striking the balance between the two worlds I felt, so I think you sacrifice one world in order to try and explore the other world. That's my biggest hesitation about films about comics, but I'm going to make an argument, and this will be a little bit controversial, because I think so many of Woody Allen's films are ultimately about a comic, I think. Oh, yes, that is true. He plays himself in all the films, and he's a joke writer, and I know that we're not supposed to like his films anymore, and I don't watch them anymore, but he did it well, I think, in the sense that he's a funny person, he's living life, and he's commenting on it, and what did we talk about so much last week? We talked about funny people just going through life and finding the humor and existence, and in death, and in living, and in heartache, and making it funny. I think so many of his early films, or mid-period films probably, are essentially films about a comic, because he's vaguely represented as a writer, an author, or even a comic writer, and some of them, so it's not too secret that that's what they're really about. I think those films actually worked pretty well, I wish he weren't so creepy, and it stopped making films and stopped doing a whole lot of other stuff, but I think maybe his later films are very weak, because he's not in them so much, and they're not about, and they weren't funny, and some of them weren't supposed to be funny, but they're not about that character anymore. He essentially played the same character again and again, and it seemed like he was a joke writer, so he knew how to do it, and I think he did it very well, so I think that's maybe the missing piece, is that those films are largely autobiographical, they're films about a funny person going through life, as opposed to films about someone who's just telling jokes or having this other story. So many of those films just felt like him going through the world and commenting on them as a comic would. It's the connection between the story, the character, and the jokes, isn't it? It all needs to kind of mesh together, otherwise you end up just with a story with some jokes sprinkled over the top, and if they're just sprinkled on the top, rather than rooted all the way through the story, they're kind of just a little bit slidey, and they tend to slide off, and I'm already regretting extending this metaphor quite a lot. Flipping the coin over completely, there is one other comedian that I can think of in movies who is also a semi-lead character in a movie, he is a comedian, his performance is revered by many other comedians, and he is played by a genuine comedian. I'm thinking of Mike Wazowski, who is the eye monster in Monsters Inc, played by Billy Crystal, isn't that right? Because I think he was a bit of a failed comedian, and in Monsters Inc there is a little scene where Mike Wazowski shows you his stand-up routine, and it is really pretty dreadful. See in the audience, I've kind of grown out along with these terrible gags that Mike Wazowski is doing, but I remember a few comedians talking to me about this film, both cringing and yet sympathising with Mike Wazowski's terrible stand-up material that they could see themselves in the giant monstrous eye of this monster's Inc character. I wonder whether comedians must necessarily be pathetic figures on screen, because we don't really like to laugh at heroes. So if you're going to be funny, then you can't be the A character, you can't be the lead. Because you're being heroic and being funny, you know, opposite sides of the coin, you can't see them both at the same time, is that right? I think it is. I think we play this game every episode called Who Am I, and the failed comics on screen are the ones that we want to say who I am not. There is this myth of humans taking pleasure and seeing others fail, but that's probably why so many comics are not protagonists and are the, what do we always call them, comic relief, right? Yeah, comic relief. And very often we're laughing at their failure and just saying, "Oh God, someone's got it worse than me," so it sort of makes us feel a bit better, but that could be the one of the reasons. Yeah, we see, there seems to be more material in narrative films about failed comics and about successful comics. I do not understand why the Germans have a word for shard and Freuder, and we do not in English. Oh, shard and Freuder. It seems like such a, it seems like a very, very English emotion to feel pleasure at other people's failure. I can't believe that we haven't invented our own word for it. We have to steal somebody else's. It's funny, yes, it's because it's such an efficient language. I mean, the equivalent would be in English just making a compound now and out of feeling pleasure at other people's failure, so we just have to say that. Yes, it was an example, feeling pleasure from other people's failure. And yet German, which is not the most beautiful language, they really can put words together in a way that we can't, shard and Freuder. Yeah. Have you ever seen a film called The Aristocrats? I have seen a film called The Aristocrats. It's about the joke, The Aristocrats, it's a documentary about, so they go to a number of comedians, famous comedians and ask them to tell this joke and talk about the history of this one joke. I remember being sent to see that film when I was working as a film critic for a few years. Oh, yeah. And so I watched a screening of this film with a bunch of other critics in some screening room in Soho, and I am pretty sure that none of us laughed at any point during the film. And I was in high anticipation of watching this film about this famous, well-known, hilarious joke, which was the very comedians joke, it was the sort of joke that comedians would really enjoy. I was really looking forward to this film, and I must say the very first time that they tell you the joke, The Aristocrats, in the film, I didn't find it particularly funny, and then knowing that I had to sit through 90 minutes of people effectively repeating the same gag with variations again and again and again was a nightmare, a living nightmare. So I did not enjoy that film, and I didn't enjoy the gag, but maybe it plays differently abroad, I don't know. Did you like it? I'm not sure that I liked it, but I don't think the joke is the point of the film, what I liked about the film, I don't like to hear the joke again and again, I loved Sarah Silverman's version of the joke, which I thought was absolutely hilarious, and she stood out as her as well. But I think what happens with that joke, seeing that joke again and again allowed you to see the personalities of all those comedians in a way that you don't otherwise have. And it's because it's level playing ground, it's the same joke, but how does their style treat that joke and how are they as people, because they're on camera, they're not talking to you as an audience of comedy, they're talking to you as an audience about the history of this joke. I liked that film for that reason, because you got to see what these personalities were really like, which you don't always get even in a stand-up, because you don't know what's material or where the real person ends and the comedian begins. And as I said, I loved Sarah Silverman's joke because it stood out so much and her delivery was totally different. So I liked that. The joke itself is inane, it's absolutely not very funny, and just straight up stupid, but telling it the style, and it reminds me of what we've been talking about lately, is just how does that one person use material and tell material. It's really about the funny person saying things. There is a real kind of cult of personality around some comedians. They can sometimes inspire fervent, fanatical, zealous followers. And even among comedians, I remember when I was doing stand-up, and I don't want to start every blooming anecdote this week with me saying, "Oh man, I understand that." But I'm going to say again, when I was doing stand-up, Stephen Wright came to play one gig in London. It's just a single gig on a Sunday night in a theatre in the West End. And the gig was a sellout, but when I went, I would say that a good 30% of the audience were other comedians. It was amazing milling around in the lobby and sitting in the seats and saying, "God, everybody I know is here. Everybody who was a comedian had come to see Stephen Wright do his material." And he had a real reputation as a comedian's comedian, and I still sometimes reel out some of his gags when talking with friends. So this notion of a cult of personality isn't purely an audience and perform my thing. Even comedians have the notion of a comedian's comedian. And it was the same for small-scale gigs as well. There were a couple of comics on the circuit when I was gigging who never used to get laughs from the audience, but you could hear all the comedians chuckling away at the back of a room because they were the comedian's comedian rather than the comedian for the audience. Some comedians were getting big laughs, but all the other comedians would sneer at them as being filthy sellouts, whereas the ones who were doing really difficult clever clever material that no one laughed at. That was the comedian's comedian. It's a strange, culty thing comedy. It's a weird scene, some nice people, but a bit of a weird scene. Everybody looked a bit broken in their own way. I love that. But then aren't we all broken in our own ways? Exactly, but we're not all broken in funny and the comedians are broken and funny, which is great. And Stephen Wright, how lucky do you are to see him? I love that guy. I love that guy. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I can still clearly remember that gig and clearly remember a lot of the gags from that gig. And I'm sure when he goes on tour, he just wheels out the best 90 minutes of his material. And he's got a great back catalog to draw on, but a very funny, very funny guy. Very funny and such a unique voice, I think. He's the radio presenter in Reservoir Dogs, isn't he? Yes. Yeah. And yeah, he's just like that on the stage. I was a little bit confused because there was a famous radio DJ called Steve Wright in the UK. He died fairly recently, and so it was always a little bit of disconnect between this sardonic American comedian. And this chirpy British radio DJ took me a while to get my head straight. Understandably so. They have the same name. Oh, yes. So I would say if there's a message that we want to convey on tonight's popcorn counter, it's that if you're going to be broken, try and be broken in a funny way. Yes. Like break all the bones in your body. Don't just break one, get into that full body cast with the whole strapping up to the ceiling and all that because that's funny. That's funny. Painful to you, but it's funny to everybody else. Well said. Well said. All right. Let's go and see a film about the moon. Yeah. Absolutely. All right. [BLANK_AUDIO]
