Goodbye, Kurt Vonnegut

My friend Jay Black gave me a copy of We Are What We Pretend to Be: First and Last Words by the late Kurt Vonnegut.  The book was released just last month, but Jay is such a Vonnegut fan that he read it immediately.

The volume contains an unpublished early (if not necessarily the first) short novella by Vonnegut, and the uncompleted book he was working on at the time of his death in 2007.

No one has much to say about the novella.  It's workmanlike.  There are some clunky turns of phrase.  It stretches credulity at several places.  The Vonnegut magic wasn't there yet.  The consensus seems to be that it went unpublished because the work's antagonist is a foolish General, a veteran of the First World War, who thinks he can command his family and run his farm the same way he ordered his troops about.  He even thinks he can bully his horses into submission!  Since this was written in the late 1940s or early 1950s, magazines weren't in the market for anything that poked fun at the military.  And it's an inconvenient length: too long for most magazines which published short stories.

The controversial work is the unfinished novel (which is listed in the book as a novella).  It is called If God Were Alive Today, and its protagonist is a stand-up comic named Gil Berman.

And here is the problem: Vonnegut writes comedy material for Gil Berman.  The material is supposed to be both thought-provoking and funny.  It sometimes succeeds at the former, but rarely at the latter.

Which is to say: it's not funny.  Not for stand-up comedy, which is designed to elicit an out-loud laugh from an audience approximately every fifteen seconds.

Oh, an extraordinarily charismatic performer might be able to deliver this material.  And it might get a few laughs.  But the character of Berman is already independently wealthy AND a genius.  For him to be charismatic as well would beggar belief.

Now, my friend Jay Black happens to be a stand-up comic.  One of the best comics in the business, in fact.  He and I met in through the comedy business.  And when someone, even someone as august as Kurt Vonnegut, writes stand-up comedy, Jay and I have a very high standard.

And Kurt Vonnegut didn't meet our standard this time.  Too bad.


By the way, if you happen to be in South New Jersey on Saturday 15 December, Jay Black will be performing at the Marlton Comedy Cabaret.  He's worth seeing.  He can even make you forget about Kurt Vonnegut, at least for awhile.

St. Crispin's Day

Today used to be the Feast of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, who have not fared well in modern times. No one remembers Crispin's brother, Crispinian: folks just call it "St. Crispin's Day." Then, at Vatican II, their feast day was removed
for insufficient evidence that they ever existed. (The French and the English tell completely different stories about the brothers.)

Today, we probably wouldn't remember St. Crispin's Day at all were it not for William Shakespeare, who wrote one of his most stirring speeches for "Henry V." Even folks who have never seen the play have heard lines from Henry's speech on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt.

Back when I was doing stand-up comedy, during our invasion of Panama, I noted how unlikely a military leader George H.W. Bush seemed to be. I dramatized the point by doing an impression of Bush doing Henry V's "St. Crispin's Day speech." (Is it any wonder that I never became a headlining comic?)

If you'd like a hear the "St. Crispin's Day speech" done the way it should be done, here's a link.

Goodbye, Ron

After an extended - and very public - battle with cancer, stand-up comic Ron Shock died yesterday.
   

I hadn't seen Ron in twenty years.  But from 1984 to 1986 I was the house booking agent at the Comedy Workshop in Houston, Texas.  This made me the de facto agent for Ron Shock, Bill Hicks, Brett Butler, and a host of lesser-known comics.  So, for two years, I dealt with Ron Shock on an almost-daily basis.

The relationship between an agent and the talent he/she represents is often fractious.  Rightly or wrongly, if the talent isn't as successful as he/she wants to be, the agent is often blamed.
  

At the time, Ron Shock was stuck in the middle spot.  (For those of you who have never been to a comedy show, it traditionally has at least three acts: the MC, the middle act, and the headliner.)  Ron, of course, wanted to be the headliner.

Of course, I wasn't the owner of the Comedy Workshop.  I had a boss to answer to, and he felt that Ron Shock's long-winded storytelling act wasn't ready for the headline spot.  I agreed.

You see, Ron wasn't a conventional stand-up comic.  He didn't do the usual setup-punchline-tag sequence that most comics use.  He told funny stories.  Consequently, the laughs were further apart.

Later in his career, Ron learned to get the audience liking him in the first half of his act.  THEN he told his long stories, when they were on his side.  But in 1984 he hadn't mastered that.  Instead, he argued with me.  Sometimes he just came at me like a child, repeating the same demand, over and over.  It wasn't pleasant.  At one point, after he publicly excoriated my own stand-up act (yes, I was a performer, too), the Artistic Manager of the Comedy Workshop made Ron call me the next day and apologize.  Which Ron did, sincerely.

He must have had some respect for my talents, though, because he and Bill Hicks got together and asked me to become their personal, exclusive agent.  Hicks said that "the reason you're not promoting us enough is that you have all these other duties at the Comedy Workshop."  (Getting work for our stable of comics was secondary to other duties, such as booking acts into the Comedy Workshop's rooms in Houston and Austin.)

I politely declined.  In truth, I couldn't think of a less-secure income than trying to get booking commissions out of these guys.  This was the 1980s, when drugs were rampant.  Most of these comics were full-time performers, with their entire days free...yet they could barely get organized enough to meet for breakfast at a diner at 3 pm!  They didn't really need me; they had more than enough free time to book and promote themselves.  (Some of the more business-like comics, like Fred Greenlee, did just that.)

Eventually, I quit the Comedy Workshop and left Houston.  Despite some bad encounters with Ron Shock, I was pleased to find that, years later, he had made it to the headline spot.  I was delighted when Ron appeared on "The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson"—the last new comic to be introduced on the show during Carson's reign.

And now Ron Shock is gone, along with Bill Hicks and Johnny Carson himself.

But, in the photo above, you'll notice that Ron Shock is wearing a tee-shirt with a skeleton on it.  He had them printed up and sold them at some shows.  The logo - which you can't see - is "You're gonna die anyway."

Ron Shock was right about that, too.   

The Man Who Gets Right to the Point

Stand-up comic Nolan Gilbride left town today. He's returning to Nebraska.

I've been in the comedy business in one way or another since 1984. I've been a comic, a booking agent, a comedy writer, a comedy instructor, and a club manager. I've seen and advised a lot of comics over the years.

For 99% of comics, my main advice is "cut out at least 20% of the words." A successful stand-up comic gets to the punchline as quickly as possible. If you edit out some of the words, you get there quicker.

(Of course, the advice I try NOT to give is "be funnier." That's not particularly helpful, even though it's true for most new comics.)

Nolan Gilbride was among the 1% of comics who did NOT have to cut out words. He'd already learned that lesson. In fact, I advised him to ADD a few words, to provide a segue or two. I hoped he might be more successful if the audience had more time to digest his succinct, pithy jokes.

So Nolan was unique among local comics. He was trying for a particular type of absurdist comedy, unlike anyone else currently working in the Philadelphia area. It's the sort of comedy that Steven Wright does. And it's one of the hardest types of comedy to pull off.

In the two or three years Nolan was around, I'm not sure I ever gave him a paid gig. When I sent him to other comedy clubs, the managers usually gave him a mediocre report.

Still, at least he was trying something different. I wish I could have helped him be more successful.

He didn't have much in the way of credits. So, to have something to write about him on the Comedy Cabaret website, I named him "The Man Who Gets Right to the Point." (Grammatically, that should be "The Man Whom," but advertising should be colloquial.)

But now he's gone. And the Philadelphia comedy scene just got a little less interesting.

The Man Who Gets Right to the Point left town today. If he continues in comedy, I hope he finds success back in Nebraska.