Stand-up is about as simple as a comedy performance can get. And yet some surprises lie in wait for the unsuspecting blogger who tries explaining it.

Definition

The first surprise comes when trying to nail down a straightforward definition. Of course, definitions on this blog are just starting points and there’ll be examples of rule-breaking and exceptions for all types of comedy, but the very simplicity of stand-up makes it an extremely malleable art form and therefore tricky to define.

A decent stab at a definition might be something like: A performance given by a single performer on a stage who says funny things directly to an audience with little in the way of costumes, props or dramatic devices like plots and situations. That covers a good number of stand-ups, but I’ll bet it doesn’t take you long to think of one who strays outside that definition.

A single performer – does that mean Morecombe & Wise weren’t doing stand-up? No costumes – what about Steve Coogan or Paul O’Grady when they were doing their drag acts? No props – what about Carrot Top and Tommy Cooper?

See what I mean?

Rather than continuously expand it into uselessness, I suggest for now that we indulge in a bit of denialism, pretend the definition works fine, and we’ll round up those exceptional cases in future articles.

All the same, I’m confident we can extend that definition a little bit without causing any trouble. For one thing, I’d say stand-up is further defined by the absence of a fourth wall. No matter the performer, they’re acknowledging and addressing the audience directly. Second, a stand-up performance is unscripted. I’m not claiming stand-ups never write carefully worded jokes and arrange them into a set (plenty do), I’m saying that stand-ups are in a unique position to improvise and adapt their act as they’re performing it and very often do so in response to audience reaction.

As we’ll see later, audience interaction is a critical part of stand-up, but for the moment let’s look at its origins because more surprises are waiting for us there.

Origins

Stand-up is a twentieth century creation, which is surprisingly late given its simplicity. To be sure, stand-up has its forerunners.

In Medieval and Renaissance times you’d find clowns, court jesters and minstrels, performers who raised laughter by dancing, telling jokes or singing humorous songs. Jesters in particular have a whiff of stand-up about them, especially given how they were granted licence to poke fun at the powerful.

In the late nineteenth century emerged variety theatres like Music Hall in the UK and Vaudeville in the US. These places catered for everyday folk, hosting performers like singers, magicians, dance troupes or novelty acts. A few funny acts would feature on the bill too. However, like the clowns and jesters before them, the comics were expected to do more than just tell jokes. Comedians of this era were often singers who sang funny songs or paused partway through a rendition to inject funny ‘bits’ into proceedings. Milton Berle (an American performer who emerged in the 1920s and came to disdain the term ‘stand-up’ when applied to him in later life) claimed that a Vaudeville comic might also do impersonations, magic tricks and dance routines. It’s hard these days to imagine someone like Stewart Lee stretching himself in quite the same way.

The classic ‘I say, I say, I say!’ style of joke-telling in such raucous environments was parodied memorably in The Fast Show by Paul Whitehouse as Music Hall megastar Arthur Atkinson.

It was only by the mid-twentieth century that stand-up comedy emerged as a distinct form of entertainment in its own right. Around this time, Vaudeville and Music Hall were dying out, while smaller venues like night clubs, cabaret theatre and working men’s clubs were on the rise. These emerging places still hosted a number of acts per night, but did so in a more casual and intimate environment. The comedian served as the ideal MC, warming the audience up at the start of the evening and coming on stage in-between acts, filling time with jokes while the next performer prepared. Soon enough, these comedians moved from filling space between acts to becoming acts in their own right. Many toured the clubs and theatres, or even appeared on TV shows like the 1970s classic The Comedians. Venues started opening like The Improv, Yuk Yuk’s and The Comedy Store, clubs devoted to hosting comedy acts, mostly performers with nothing but a microphone and clutch of gags.

The stand-up comedian had finally arrived.

The question is: why so late? If all you need is a stage and an audience, then why weren’t stand-ups treading the boards at Ancient Roman amphitheatres? (“So anyway, how about that Hadrian’s Wall they’re building? I was going to tell a construction joke at this point, but it’s still not finished.”)

I’m going to answer that, but first I want to talk about why comedians need an audience at all.

Audience

A stand-up has a relationship with the audience unlike any other form of comedy. Sitcoms can work fine without an audience. Comedy films never have one. Even a comic play could be staged sans audience without it feeling too awkward. But imagine watching a recording of a stand-up telling jokes to an empty room. It just wouldn’t work.

It goes beyond the simple need to hear a reaction. The audience feedback shapes the performance. A sitcom or a funny play follows a script – if the material falls flat then tough shit – whereas a stand-up can judge how their stuff is being received and adapt the material in real-time. Many comics indulge in crowd work, dealing with hecklers or reaching out directly to audience members to ask questions and poke fun. Dara Ó Briain is notorious for the extent to which he incorporates audience banter into his act, so much so that he can comfortably claim that he’s never delivered the same set twice.

This is all good fun but it also helps the comic establish what sort of audience they’re faced with. They forge this bond with their audience because they’re ultimately creating an environment in which communal laughter can take place. For that to happen, there needs to be some level of sympathy and agreement, so that all members of the audience are prepared to laugh at the same things.

Which brings us back to the question of why stand-up comedy took off so late in human history.

Intimacy

Arguably the stand-up breakthrough had to wait until the arrival of the microphone. Prior to that, performers were armed with only their own voices and had to project them across the theatre accordingly. This rendered their delivery exaggerated and unnatural, and left little room for the performer’s personality to shine through. Even when the earliest microphones arrived, they were bulky, expensive luxuries. Touring performers couldn’t bring their own and couldn’t rely on the theatres having them either. But technical improvements eventually brought down prices and, midway through the twentieth century, led to the hand-held microphone, an invention that practically symbolises stand-up comedy.

A microphone allows the performer to speak in a completely natural tone. The stand-up can address an audience of hundreds or even thousands with as much effort as a gossipy chat over the garden wall, complete with discreet whispers. That conversational style reduces the distance between the performer and the audience. The design of a typical stand-up venue – with its stage closer to and level with the audience – further reduces that distance. All this serves to increase the level of intimacy between performer and audience.

That intimacy is needed because of ethos – and no, that’s not one of The Three Musketeers. Ethos is a fancy Greek term meaning ‘character,’ and it’s an important part of the act. A stand-up endeavours to reveal things about themselves to establish aspects of their character. Those aspects might be 100% true to the performer or exaggerated/invented for comic effect, it doesn’t really matter; what matters is that the audience buys into it. For example, the real Victoria Wood may not have been quite the rapid-fire gossip she was on-stage, but we can easily believe she was, and that helped to cultivate a genuine, intimate bond with the audience.

However, the point of establishing that bond is about more than just making the audience laugh. Comedians take advantage of that bond to do something you might have overlooked.

Rhetoric

When trying to find an art form with strong similarities to stand-up, you have to venture outside comedy. Who else stands up on stage and speaks solo, thrives before an audience, seeks their approval and builds a bond with them, whips up a reaction and tries to come off as genuine?

Politicians.

Comics invest in building bonds because stand-up comedy is an exercise in rhetoric. They challenge taboos, expose absurdities or simply invite people look at things differently. It’s easier to persuade an audience of something once you’ve bonded with them and got them on your side. Unlike politicians, stand-ups aren’t using rhetoric in the pursuit of power – quite the opposite.

Stand-up performers are deviants, and I don’t mean that in the #MeToo sense. (Well, some of them are that kind of deviant, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.) Like their jester forebears, comedians are granted a special licence to be subversive. Their outlook is meant to deviate from the norm and that deviant aspect is built into their stage persona. A stand-up often presents themselves as ‘broken’ in some way, giving themselves personality flaws such as being dim-witted, tight-fisted, egotistical, clumsy, neurotic, weak-willed etc. This generates pity from the audience, making them feel superior and more disposed to laugh at the performer, but it also allows the stand-up to sneak in their deviant views and get the audience to respond positively towards them.

Stand-up comedians are therefore not just inviting you to laugh at them, they’re endeavouring to make you identify with the deviant thoughts. By inducing you to laugh at the elephant in the room, they’re getting you admit that the elephant is really there and it’s shitting all over the floor. It’s no accident that stand-up is often associated with taboo subjects and many performers in history have struggled against censorship or become spokespeople for controversial issues. George Carlin – whose routine Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television landed him trouble with the law – is just one example, but there are numerous others like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Billy Connolly, or Frankie Boyle just to name a few.

Conclusion

In summary, stand-up comedy conventionally involves a solo performer taking to the stage to get laughs armed with little more than a microphone and some gags. They address the audience directly and adapt their act in response to the reaction, working to build up a bond that they can exploit to challenge or surprise.

Over the next few articles, we’ll go deeper, explore the work of some specific performers and look at some aspects of stand-up in more detail.