The American Comedy Institute Blog

Take My Wife, Por Favor: My Comedy Adventures In Portugal...Part VI

The Portuguese have a highly visible contradiction knit into their national character. On the one hand they think of their country as a kind of paradise on earth. Can't argue with them on that point. The country is beautiful, their cuisine is heavenly, and the people are beautiful in every way, physically gorgeous, generous, kind. On the other hand a great sadness permeates their culture. Fado, their traditional music, is an unrelenting cry of pain for love lost. It makes our country and western music sound like the score of Hello Dolly! Coupled with their sadness is a kind of national inferiority complex. Last year (2004) when Portugal hosted the European soccer championship there was a national campaign to get people to display the Portuguese flag. We show our flag all over the place with no prompting.

I didn't know about their national inferiority complex when I first arrived in Portugal, and so I had no way of comprehending why so many people, including the people who sponsored my visit, were telling me that the Portuguese could never learn how to write comedy or perform real stand-up. Could this be true, I wondered? Could a population of 10 million people not have enough talent to sustain a comedy industry?

stephen 10:18 AM

Take My Wife, Por Favor: My Comedy Adventures In Portugal...Part V

Until the mid 1970's Portugal was ruled by a right wing dictatorship. The dictator was Salazar. The wealthy elite did fine under Salazar and everyone else was screwed. Public education ended in the 4th Grade. Kids' education ended at age 10. As a result, Portugal was an illiterate country. Like all dictatorships, Salazar's ruthlessly controlled the media. Anyone who attempted to air anything critical of the regime was imprisoned. It was difficult to see a movie because Portugal has no film industry of their own and they couldn’t show subtitled foreign films because hardly anyone could read. As a measure of the despair of its people during these decades of the dictatorship, Portugal had the highest rate of alcoholism in the world.

Under these conditions it is impossible to create a national comedy scene because the fundamental conditions are missing. To have a national comedy scene you need people who know what is going on in their country and in the world. An illiterate people deprived of a free media can not produce comedy on a national scale. Just think about how much of our comedy is focused on politics. Where would we be without Bush, Chaney, Clinton, and Kerry jokes? We'd have no Daily Show, no Leno monologue, and no SNL. An illiterate people deprived of a free media don't know what is going on. That makes national comedy impossible.

The second missing condition is the right to complain, to bitch and moan about anything and everything going on in your life. Comedy at its heart is criticism. You can't make jokes about the great things going on in your life. This doesn't work: "Take my beautiful, funny, intelligent successful and loving wife, please." If you live in a society where criticism is forbidden, there can't be comedy.

The third essential condition of comedy is hope. A big reason we love comedy is that it gives us the chance to look our greatest annoyances, fears, and disappointments in the eye and laugh. In order to laugh we need to feel deep down that everything is okay. We laugh at cartoons and slapstick violence because we know no one got hurt. The refrigerator drops on the rabbits' head. We see him look momentarily dazed. His eyes roll around in his head for a second, then off he goes. If the refrigerator paralyzed or killed him we couldn't laugh. You can't laugh unless you know deep down that everything is all right. Despair and laughter can not occupy the same space at the same time...

stephen 10:14 AM

Take My Wife, Por Favor: My Comedy Adventures In Portugal...Part IV

When I arrived in Portugal in May of 2002, there was one sketch comedy show on television. It wasn't really sketch comedy as we know it. The "sketches" were staged jokes. They would take an old joke like: A man walks into the doctor's and says, 'Doctor, it hurts when I do this (he bends his arms).' The doctor says, 'So don't do that.' In the sketch, they would simply stage the joke. An actor playing a man walks into a doctor's office set, bends his arms, and speaks the line, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this," an actor playing the doctor says, "So don't do that." End of sketch.

There was one stand-up comedy show on television, it consisted mostly of actors performing old jokes written, or more likely pulled from the internet by the show's staff.

There was one major Humor Festival, and the year I arrived there wasn't a single Portuguese comedian featured on the Festival's main stage.

There were no comedy clubs.

This primitive state of comedy in Portugal was in stark contrast to its European neighbors: Spain, France, and Italy, which all have major comedy industries. Portugal's former colony, Brazil, has a more sophisticated comedy scene than its Western European motherland.

In discovery how it happened that this one Western European country's comedy industry was 50 years behind its neighbors, I came face to face with the fundamental requirements that must exist in order for comedy to flourish.

stephen 12:12 PM

Take My Wife, Por Favor: My Comedy Adventures In Portugal...Part III

In my last blog I told you that there is a shortage of actors and comedians in Portugal. The phrase "unemployed actor" has apparently never been uttered in Portuguese and virtually any performer can do stand-up on national television, even if they've never done it before.

Here's the catch. There are no performers' unions in Portugal, no SAG, no AFTRA, No ACTOR'S EQUITY. The main reason that actors there hold down several jobs at once is that no single job-even if its on television, pays a living wage unless, of course, the performer is a star.

The catch with the TV stand-up show that provides the performers with jokes is that it sucks. And there is no laugh track. So there you are on national television doing jokes that are probably off the Internet and the studio audience isn't laughing. A lot of the time they are not even smiling. "Look mom, I'm bombing on national TV!"

The state of comedy in Portugal when I first arrived three years ago was startlingly grim. How did this come to be in this stunningly beautiful country chock full of gifted writers and performers.

To be continued...

stephen 12:02 PM

Take My Wife, Por Favor: My Comedy Adventures In Portugal...Part II

In some ways, Portugal is a performer's paradise-This became evident to me through the one instance in all the time I've worked with Portuguese writers and performers when a cultural difference made it impossible for me to understand a piece of comedy. In a television comedy-writing workshop I was conducting, a sketch was presented that was set in an office of unemployment. This office is where people go who want to be unemployed. Funny idea. The first client is a plastic surgeon whose made so much money that he can't figure out what to do with it anymore and everyone in his family is fighting over how to invest it. This got big laughs from everyone including me. The second client is an actor who is exhausted from all the work he's doing -- plays, soaps, commercials, TV series. Huge laughs from everyone but me. The truth is important in comedy, not for any moral reason, I tell them, but because truthful observations are recognizable to an audience. If the comedy doesn't appear to be truthful, they don't know what you're talking about. Who's going to get the joke of an overextended actor?

The answer to that question is - everyone in Portugal. There is a shortage of actors in Portugal. Yes, you read that right. There is a shortage and it is so severe that actors are playing leading roles in several soap operas at the same time. No one in our workshop did one job at a time. They were exhausted from going from one rehearsal, to another, one taping of a TV show in Lisbon to performing a play in a city several hours away.

Virtually all of my Portuguese students are doing stand-up on television. Even the ones who aren't stand-ups. Actors get television stand-up gigs who have never done stand-up in their lives and who have no material. The show provides them with material and they make their stand-up comedy debuts on national network television.

Have you started packing yet? Before you call Continental, read the next installment. To be continued...

stephen 11:01 AM

Take My Wife, Por Favor: My Comedy Adventures In Portugal

For the last three years I have traveled to Portugal twice a year to work with their performers and writers on developing their skills in comedy. For me it has been like living through a real life version of Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. In that story a late 19th century New England man, who is an inventor and a factory superintendent, finds himself transported in time and space to the medieval court of King Arthur. He is in possession of knowledge and technology hundreds of year in advance of the people he finds himself living amongst.

In my story an early 21st century comedy writer-director-teacher, finds himself transported by Continental Airlines to a land where the rudimentary techniques of comedy writing for stand-up and sketch comedy are virtually unknown.

I want to relate this story to you because of the insights I have gained into the nature of our work as a result of my adventures in Portugal. I want to begin with what I found the state of comedy to be in when I first arrived three years ago and my realization of what is required of culture in order for it to produce comedy.

To be continued...

stephen 1:17 PM

New York or Los Angeles?

Is it better to develop your craft in New York or Los Angeles? I'm glad you asked. It's an important question and an easy one to answer.

New York.

Here's why:

You can get more stage time in New York. In addition to its major comedy clubs, New York is filled with small stand-up stages all over town; any night of the week you can get stage time somewhere.

This kind of off-off Broadway network of small stand-up venues is unique to the City and is one of the key reasons why New York continues to be the launching ground for so many professional comedians.

The second reason has to do with mindset. The L.A. mindset is focused on dealmaking. In L.A. stand-ups are on their cell phones trying to get someone from HBO to come to their first performance.

The New York mindset is focused on craft. Stand-ups are getting up every night, even if it's in a hole in the wall, to strengthen their work.

There are two steps that lead to a successful career: The first is getting good, and the second is getting seen. When you get really good, industry people seek you out - When you've achieved step one, step two pretty much takes care of itself.

The tendency in LA is work on step two way before step one is achieved. That is a big mistake.

You can't be an overnight success in stand-up comedy. You need to perform for years to master comedy writing and performing and to learn from hundreds of different audiences, what works and what doesn't work for you.

The stand-ups in New York and, just as importantly, the agents, managers, casting directors and producers here grasp the necessity for talent to take the time to develop their raw abilities into marketable skills.

Get good in New York and you'll be signed by an agent and/or manager. Then, with their help, go to L.A. and make your deals.

And when you go, don't forget to write.

stephen 10:51 AM

Bashing Jokes

Over the years I have witnessed in the clubs the disappearance of jokes bashing handicapped people, Black people, Jewish people and Korean people; so when a couple of years ago I noticed that gay bashing jokes were disappearing, I thought the frontier of "bashing" humor was finally and happily closing. Bashing jokes make fun of groups of people for simply being who they are -- for being Black or Jewish or handicapped. They contain no real insights into these people the way well written jokes do. They rest solely on the prejudices some people feel about certain groups of other people.

I was wrong. A new frontier has opened -- old people bashing. It is common now to hear jokes that ridicule old people for being elderly and frail. Even the New Yorker Magazine, supposedly a bastion of smart, sophisticated wit is producing this schlock comedy. The cover of their humor edition showed an elderly person with a walker about to slip on a banana peel.

It is no longer acceptable to ridicule people for being handicapped -- it would be unthinkable to depict a blind person about to trip on a banana peel. But, the New Yorker doesn't balk at inviting their audience to laugh at and elderly person in that identical situation.

Probably, I was naive to think that bashing jokes will ever end. Another group of people will become targets in a few years when old people bashing become unacceptable, as it surely will. That is the fate of all humor that rests on prejudice as opposed to insight. So, if you want to create comedy material that lasts, get specific and use your powers of observation to create truthful comedy about real, living people, not ephemeral stereotypes.

stephen 4:24 PM

Funny Is Money

I recently had a meeting with Rick Dorfman. Rick is one of the best young talent managers in the business. He is also a member of our faculty. The purpose of the meeting was to introduce Rick to an exceptionally talented student of mine, Laura Spaeth. In the course of the meeting Rick made an extraordinary comment. He said that virtually all of the hugely successful talent management companies are build around clients who are comedians. Rick's remark reminded me of a sign I saw in the office of the legendary talent manager and producer, Jack Rollins. Jack is Woody Allen's longtime manager and producer. At one time Jack represented Robin Williams, David Letterman, Billy Crystal, Nichols and May. It was every comedians dream to be represented by Jack. The sign in his office reads, "FUNNY IS MONEY."

As you are working on developing your craft as a comedian and comedy writer, as you experience all the bumps along the way, the nights when no one laughs, the dry spells, the blocks, remember that what you are engaged in is, potentially, of great value not only to you, but to the entertainment industry.

stephen 4:21 PM