The Josh Gondelman Edition

I hope you guys are as excited as I was to read this. Josh Gondelman is a stand-up comic that got his start in Boston, and has since moved to New York. I had the pleasure of hosting a weekend of shows with him at Goonie’s Comedy Club in Rochester. Like every good comic, Gondelman has a unique delivery and way of seeing the world. His history in creative writing shines through in his performance, and crowds seem to fall in love with his honesty and wit.

The fact that he is a writer makes him perfect for this blog, as I hope to look into several forms of comedy, including the written form.

Just to clarify, I asked Josh to write about whatever he wants in the realm of comedy. Here is what Josh has to say about what comedy is.

--Last weekend I had the opportunity to open for Steven Wright at a 1,350-seat theater in western Massachusetts. My set (a twelve minute stint contracted mostly to provide an intermission for the audience to buy more drinks) went well. There was laughter and applause, and then I got paid some money. The true joy of the evening, though, was getting to sit backstage and watch a true master ply his craft.

Steven Wright’s comedy is often described with adjectives like “surreal” and “deadpan,” but to me, the key element of his comedy is its lyricism. Wright speaks with a subdued, rhythmic cadence, and his diction is precise and elegant. His jokes range from silly: “My grandfather gave me five dollars and told me not to tell my mother. I said it was going to cost him more than that,” to bleak: “I got a paper cut writing my suicide note… that’s a start.” Taken together, they form an abstract but emotionally resonant self-portrait.

“Art is a lie that tells the truth,” as Picasso once said. Using that rubric, there are few better examples of art than the comedy of Steven Wright. While his jokes present outlandish scenarios, they carry real pathos. One extended bit describes taking a girl on a date to lie on top of a planetarium to look at the stars above. It doesn’t matter whether that actually happened. Wright sketches the scenario out with a minimal amount of syllables chosen for a maximal impact. They’re crafted to be funny, but in such an artful way that the laughter at times feels incidental.

My girlfriend and I sat fifteen feet from the stage, riveted by Wright’s quiet, murmuring intensity. The waves of his words rolled and crashed against the audience who laughed, cheered, and applauded by turns. At one point, Wright gave a dry chuckle and a tight, wry semi-smile as he remarked to the crowd: “You think this is a show.” They reacted with explosive laughter. And that, to me, is comedy.

Then the next night I performed for eight people at an urban nightclub called Symmetry in downtown Hartford. The last comic closed the show by dry-humping a female audience member. And sometimes, that’s comedy too--

                Josh brings up several interesting points here, but the one that sticks out to me the most is his reference to Steven Wright’s “lyricism.” Paralleling comedy to poetry is an idea that I feel people within the comedy community take as a universal truth, outside that community there is more skepticism.

                To me, there is poetry in every comics act to some extent. Some are more difficult to see than others. When I see George Carlin rumble through a rant about how humans have no rights, I hear someone making a poetic, powerful statement and still getting laughs. But there are comics that many people would see and enjoy, but would be classified as “just funny.” And, as a comic, there are much worse things than people saying you’re funny, but if you’re going to call Bill Hicks an artist, then you better call the guy dry-humping an audience member an artist too.

                A huge thanks to Josh for writing this up, and I hope you guys enjoyed it as much as I did. Next week we’ll be hear from Tim Harmston, perhaps my favorite Minneapolis comic, and why he continues getting on stage and why comics want to be comics. Till then, keep laughing.