San Francisco Comedy Blog

by Ben Feldman

I am not a serious fan of live comedy. Strike that. I am not a serious fan of WATCHING live comedy. I do love to PERFORM it, however.

I’ve been attempting standup comedy for the past few years (2-4 times a week on average). Initially, I got on stage to seek more excitement in life. Lately, I’ve gotten more serious. I work on my writing and performing a lot, mostly via trial and error versus emulation or imitation (although none of us are immune). I see myself as a student of comedy, not of comedians.

Almost all “serious” live comedy bores me to tears. It’s the unintentionally funny things on stage (and in life) that make me laugh most. I suppose I see through most comics. To me, most of them are just another band playing three-chord cover tunes.

There are less than a handful of comics on the planet that I’ve heard or seen that are able to hypnotize me (almost instantly) into forgetting they are doing stand-up comedy, and into believing they are telling this stuff for the first time - directly to me. I don’t mean they sound like they are trying their jokes out for the first time - I mean they have suspended my belief that they have been honing their jokes and their craft for years, and instead have burrowed deep into my psyche and are steering my thoughts around corners, through tunnels, down steep hills and over cliffs on a journey we are both experiencing together for the first time - and I’m riding shotgun. Corny as it sounds.

Often, when you hear a great comic do material that you’ve already heard them do before, it taints it a little - like a friend telling the same story over and over. It’s still funny, but now you’re able to compare the differences (I can’t help but notice the nuances every time I hear the same stuff again), and you realize how the “card trick” is done. You see holes. You see how they might have come up with it. You see how they are fooling the newbies in the crowd into thinking this stuff is being said for the “first time.” You realize that you were not there the first time after all. There were many before you. This is less true with an album, of course, which is more like a souvenir you can use to re-live the memories after the first time you hear it. This does not shatter the illusion. However, hearing the same bit a second time from a different performance can burst the bubble.

I recently discovered Robert Hawkins. I know many comics who think he is the best comic around. But like I said, I’m not a big fan of live comedy, so it took a few years before chance put his video clips on my radar screen. I saw one clip and was sold immediately. I went straight to iTunes and was happy to see he had an album available for download (”Smackin’ Kittens”), which I purchased on the spot. Another album (”Serious”) can be purchased from his website. Then I saw that he was playing at the Punchline in San Francisco this weekend. Hey, would you look at the time - I can probably make it over there by 8 tonight. Sure, why not.

Robert Hawkins is the only comic I’ve ever seen live that made me convulse with laughter at least three times a minute for 45 minutes straight. I’m talking literally convulsing - losing my breath and grasping the table to keep from rising off the floor. The only times that I didn’t convulse were the bits I already heard on his album the night before, when I convulsed alone (I’m sure if my dog understood English, I would have had to resuscitate him). The only other comics that ever came close to making me laugh even one tenth as hard for that long are Todd Barry, Dave Attell, Will Franken and possibly John Hoogasian (a local Bay Area comic, although I’ve never seen him perform more than 20 minutes). I’m not comparing Robert to these comics in terms of style - just in terms of their ability to hit me hard somewhere in the core of my being, over and over for long periods of time.

Obviously I’m not alone - Robert Hawkins is one of the most respected comics in the business, voted one of the top 25 comics by comedy club owners for the American Comedy Awards in 2001.

One could argue that if I was more open to watching live comedy, I would come across more comedians that affected me similarly. Well… I have heard or seen clips of most if not all nationally touring headliners on either Comedy Central, Sirius radio, or online, and am rarely impressed enough to buy their album or go see them live.

By the way, the fact that Hawkins, Barry, Attell and myself are bald has no bearing on my great admiration for them.

Some comics only keep their material in their heads. I write all my material down and massage it daily. One of the dangers of spending too much time around other comics is that their style sometimes seeps into your subconscious, and can impact your writing and performance. For me, this is not usually desirable. After I hear comics like Hawkins or Barry, I welcome this impact, although these are the guys that make you realize just how hard serious stand-up comedy is.

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