The Humor Code (5 page)

C.K. cracks the faintest of smiles but shakes his head. “I am not going to answer that.”

“I wouldn't, either,” Pete responds. “But I've heard that if you don't answer that, it means it's small.”

Now there's no smile.

Sensing we've overstayed, we head for the door. Clearly, we're going to have to look elsewhere to figure out what makes people funny. So, we figure, why not go where many comedians go to try to break into the big time, to hone their acts and get noticed by agents and talent scouts and TV execs? Why not go where up-and-comers go to become the next Louis C.K.?

And with that, we're off to Los Angeles to see how many more people Pete will alienate with penis questions. For science.

“Welcome to the
La Scala of comedy,” says Alf LaMont. ‘This is where it all happened.”

We're standing in front of the Comedy Store, a black bunker of a building surrounded by palm trees. Beside us, Maseratis and BMWs glide through the night along the Sunset Strip, the billboard-lined mile-and-a-half stretch of pavement curving through West Hollywood that's always been steeped in a heady cocktail of fame and vice.

This part of town has long been a place of wise guys and movie stars, beatniks and go-go dancers, groupies and glam rockers—and, here at the Comedy Store, some of the pivotal moments in stand-up history. Los Angeles is bursting at the seams with comedy. There are stand-up shows big and small every night of the week at comedy clubs and improv theaters and cabaret clubs, even in the Masonic lodge of a local cemetery. There are podcast tapings and comedic web-video shoots and several major comedy festivals. There's even a new academic concentration in comedy at the University of Southern California. The seeds of this bustling comedy scene can be traced here, to this spot, in 1972, with the opening of the city's first dedicated comedy club.

“All the other comedy clubs got rid of their history, or never had it to begin with,” says LaMont, head of marketing for the Comedy Store. “Here, it seeps through the very building.” It might not be the only thing seeping through the cracks. LaMont, who resembles a carnival barker with his handlebar mustache, escorts us through a maze of scuffed floors and dingy hallways, describing the club like an out-of-control circus: Here, by the front entrance, are black-and-white photos from when the building housed Ciro's, a celebrity nightclub with Mob ties, years before comics Sammy Shore and Rudy DeLuca rented the space and turned it into a stand-up joint.

And here, scrawled on the walls, are the signatures of up-and-coming comics who flocked to the Comedy Store when Shore's wife, Mitzi, took control of the operation and it became known as
the proving grounds to get on
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
. This who's who of comedy includes David Letterman, Jay Leno, Andy Kaufman, Steve Martin, Elayne Boosler, Richard Lewis, Robin Williams, Arsenio Hall, and Richard Pryor. Here's the bullet hole resulting from the time Sam Kinison got into an argument with Andrew Dice Clay and pulled a gun. (“Sam wasn't trying to kill Andrew,” says LaMont. “I don't think.”)

“And here,” says LaMont, guiding us to a forlorn spot in the Comedy Store's parking lot, “is where things stopped being funny.” In 1979, comics formed a labor union and demanded to be paid for their performances, something the club had never done. The Comedy Store eventually began compensating comedians, but some union members were blacklisted. That included Steve Lubetkin, who, on June 1, 1979, jumped from the roof of the thirteen-story Continental Hyatt House next door, landing on the pavement where we're standing. He left behind a note: “I used to work at the Comedy Store. Maybe this will help to bring about fairness.”

We stop in the Original Room, a space up front that's known as the toughest room in the country. To show us why, LaMont has us walk on stage and he lowers the lights. Looking out, all we see is pure darkness, with a single, blinding spotlight shining straight at us like an oncoming train. “It's important to hear the audience, not see it,” LaMont tells us.

LaMont's tour ends in the Comedy Store's Belly Room, a murky shoe box of a performance space up a rickety flight of stairs at the back of the club. We're here to meet Josh Friedman, a clean-cut 22-year-old financial consultant who's a friend of a friend. The year before, Friedman had tried out on a whim for a stand-up competition and ended up winning the contest at a big downtown club. Now he wants to see if he has the potential to go further—which is why he's here in the Belly Room about to perform for the first time.

We take our seats, and the show begins. Soon the young comic is up. Friedman begins with a tale of a drunken night in Shanghai that ends with him taking a spin on what he thinks is a stripper pole, ripping out a support beam, and knocking out an old Chinese lady. Then he goes on to point out that people who complain that Doritos are
like crack don't know what they're talking about: “You eat too many Doritos and it's like, ‘My stomach hurts.' You smoke too much crack and it's like, ‘My teeth are gone.' ” He ends with a bit about his doctor asking to look at his penis: “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this guy is trying to molest me!' And then I realized how ridiculous I was being. He's not some random guy off the street. He's my optometrist!”

The six-minute set isn't bad, but we're biased. We like Friedman. For the real verdict, we'll leave it up to a couple of pros we've invited to the show. One is Sarah Klegman, a young dynamo of a manager for Levity, one of the biggest comedy agencies in LA. The other is Jeff Singer, a hip-looking guy with black plastic glasses who's the executive talent scout for the Just For Laughs comedy festival. These two spend their days watching stand-up reels and grilling club owners, their nights haunting open mikes and talent showcases, looking for the next big thing. And we want to know if Friedman has a shot at the title.

Klegman and Singer, who both watched the performance impassively, divide their comments into good and bad news: the good news is that Friedman has impressive confidence for someone so green. Now for the bad news. He's too long-winded with little payoff, says Singer. “In a six-minute set, you have to get funny quick.” And that line about Doritos and crack? “He telegraphed that like a bad boxer.”

Klegman has her own critiques. He has no personality on stage, no particular voice, she says. Plus, his beats were off. If he's going to tell stories, “he's gotta dance into it.” Finally, he missed an opportunity with his appearance: “He looks like a gay fourteen-year-old,” says Klegman. “He should talk about that.”

If Friedman is serious about comedy, say Klegman and Singer, he has to get to work. He needs to get on stage four times a week, minimum. If he keeps at it, who knows, maybe he'll be worth their time—five to eight years down the road.

That seems like a lot of time and effort to see if someone has what it takes to be funny. Could there be an easier method, a way to measure somebody's sense of humor, like modern-day baseball scouts use on-base percentages or unintentional walk and strikeout rates to predict a player's future performance?

One stumbling block is that no one seems to agree on what having a sense of humor means. Does it suggest you're good at telling jokes—or good at getting them? Does it mean you find everything funny? Or that you laugh a lot? Most of the time, if you say somebody has a good sense of humor, you're giving them an all-around compliment. (Or, if you're selling your friend on a blind date, it means the date is not very good-looking.)

It doesn't help that the term “humor” has had all sorts of different connotations. It wasn't until the early nineteenth century that humor became widely used in its modern sense, as a virtue. Before that, “humour,” from the Latin word for “fluid,” referred to bile, phlegm, and other bodily fluids believed to wreak havoc on people's moods. A “humourist” was someone whose body fluids were so imbalanced they acted mentally ill. A “man of humour” was someone skilled at impersonating an insane person.
¹

Despite the confusion, researchers have made valiant efforts to measure people's sense of humor. In the 1980s, Yale researcher Alan Feingold tried to rate humor as an ability to remember funny things: “What comedian said, ‘I get no respect!'?” “Complete this joke: ‘Take a long walk on a short ____.' ” But mostly what he found was that those who scored high watched a lot of funny movies and TV shows.
²

Tests that require people to produce humor, such as coming up with cartoon captions or crafting jokes, might make more sense, but so far, no one's figured out a standardized way to do so. More effort has been put toward questionnaires that ask people to gauge their own sense of humor. But one of the problems with this method is that according to self-report measures, everyone in the world is hilarious. Researchers found that when asked to rate their own sense of humor, 94 percent of people claim it's average or above average.
³
Apparently, if everybody applied themselves, we'd be a nation full of Carrot Tops.

Klegman and Singer say they don't need to use quantitative measures. Friedman doesn't have what it takes. They can feel it in their guts. Later, at a greasy late-night diner, Singer elaborates on the subjective part of his job, the stuff he can't quantify. “There are a lot of intangibles,” he says over bacon and eggs. “In comedy, you are looking
for something that pops, something that will play to the masses, something that will make someone a star.” Sometimes, he says, “you can look at someone and there is something unique in their soul. It's in their DNA.”

He doesn't see that looking at Friedman.

“Okay, class, what's
the most important thing in stand-up comedy?” Greg Dean asks his students.

“Your relationship with the audience,” they respond in unison.

“What's your reason for being on stage?” Dean continues.

“To tell the audience what's wrong,” they answer.

Dean, sitting in a director's chair on stage at the Santa Monica Playhouse, looks satisfied. The dozen or so people sitting around us in the small theater's stadium-style seats are halfway through his five-week intro stand-up class, and they seem to be getting it. The students here are retired lawyers, dock workers, and the unemployed. But they all want to get into comedy. That's why they've come here, to take what's reportedly the longest-running stand-up class in the country. And today, Dean, named best comedy teacher at the Los Angeles Comedy Awards, is going to teach them about riffing, the art of interacting with your audience.

“Stand-up comedy is the most terrifying thing on the planet, and riffing is the most terrifying element of stand-up,” announces Dean. He's a big, imposing guy, but he comes off as gentle and a little geeky. That doesn't make what comes next any less intimidating: Each student has to get up on stage and start riffing like they're working the room. “And remember,” says Dean, as he pulls out a stopwatch, “Be playfully mean.”

Earlier today, we'd visited Dean at his house, a small bungalow in Hollywood filled with small yipping dogs, whiffs of incense, and the flotsam of a life lived oddly. There are circus hats and juggling pins and Buddha statues and two suits of armor standing guard by the fireplace, remnants of a career that includes a stint as a Ringling Bros. circus clown, a one-man comedy act called the “Obscene Juggler,” a warm-up act for Chippendale dancers, and personal assistant for
self-help guru Tony Robbins. For Dean, it all culminated in what he calls his life's work, “a taxonomy of comedy that other people can build on.”

To explain what he meant, Dean started diagramming jokes on a whiteboard he'd set up in his living room. He explained that his joke-writing method arose from number-one benign violation critic Victor Raskin and his linguistic theory of humor—the idea that a joke involves two different and opposite scripts, or frames of reference, with one script usually suggested by the set-up and the opposite script often revealed by the punch line. Take an example Raskin uses in his hefty book on the subject,
Semantic Mechanisms of Humor
:

“Is the doctor at home?” the patient asked in his bronchial whisper.

“No,” the doctor's young and pretty wife whispered in reply. “Come right in.”

The script suggested by the set-up is that the patient wants the doctor at home so he can be treated by him. The second script revealed by the punch line is that the patient doesn't want the doctor home, so he can be treated in a different manner by the doctor's wife.
⁴
All Dean did was turn Raskin's theory into a step-by-step joke-writing process. The first step, Dean told us, is coming up with the first scripts, or set-up. “Any statement will do,” he said, writing one on the board:

My wife is an excellent housekeeper.

The obvious meaning of this phrase, what Dean calls the “Target Assumption,” is that the wife is great at housework. But what else could “housekeeper” mean, he asked us; how could this key word, what he calls the “Connector,” be construed? What about if “housekeeper” means someone who literally keeps the house? He calls this step, coming up with a second script, the “Reinterpretation,” and it's key to finishing the joke, which he wrote on the board.

My wife is an excellent housekeeper.

When we got a divorce, the bitch got the house.

The system is an elegant way to take obtuse scholarly theory and put it to good use. Even Raskin has nice things to say about it. “Greg is a very nice man, and I have always been flattered by his attention,” he responded when I e-mailed him on his thoughts about Dean's
work. Still, Raskin being Raskin, he added, “He is no scholar, and the way he understands the theory is very simplistic.”