Why does film get stand-up so wrong?

The difficulties of depicting the comedy life

Dustin Hoffman in ‘Lenny’ (1974) and Maxine Peake in ‘Funny Cow’ (2017)

The film ‘Joker’ (2019) made a billion dollars worldwide, in contrast to the film it was most indebted to, ‘King of Comedy’ (1982), a notorious flop. The two films have in common presenting comedians to the world in a somewhat lurid manner – tortured, manic and, if their careers aren’t working out as they wished, prepared to resort to violence to advance them. Those of us who have spent much of our lives with and around comics know that they are much more likely to take career disappointments out on themselves.

Why is there so little film and television which presents the lives of comedians in a realistic light? Perhaps, at a pinch, we might mention TV series such as ‘Master of None’ (2015-) or the underrated film ‘Obvious Child’ (2014), which show comedians just talking and hanging out, waiting around to perform.

These works are, as it happens, written and produced by stand-ups, people who know the trade inside out. The issues begin to arrive when non-comics use the comedian as a symbol of something; take the dark 1995 film ‘Funny Bones’, with comedians caught up in smuggling and Daddy issues, the 1993 Lynda LaPlante series ‘Comics’ in which the titular comic witnesses a gangland murder, or go right back to John Osborne’s play ‘The Entertainer’ (1957) where the vaudevillian comic is used as a sign of the decline of the British empire. Perhaps the apex of this idea of the ‘troubled comedian’ trend in recent years is the film ‘Funny Cow’ (2018), a biopic of a fictitious Northern female comic whose misery peaks with a novelty act hanging themselves in a comedy club’s toilets.

It’s a bit unfair for the media to ask the question ‘Why are comedians so tortured?’ while at the same time using the figure of the comedian as shorthand for miserable suffering. Part of this need to sensationalize comedians’ existences is that the lives of actual comics aren’t in fact particularly dramatic – there’s a lot of waiting around, an obsession with fine-tuning things through repetition, and also frequently a lack of camaraderie or indeed any social interaction at all between performers. This is why we get films about comedians who have magical powers, or are desperately ill, or attack audience members, but many fewer about comedians actually getting on with their work.

A recent peak of how dramatic contrivance distorts our picture of the comedian’s life came in the first episode of the recent The Twilight Zone reboot, named ‘The Comedian’ (2019). In a key scene, Kumail Nanjiani as the titular comedian goes from playing to deathly silence to suddenly improvising a brilliant set – this reinforcing probably the most common misconception about stand-ups, that they ‘make it all up’ on night after night. We never see scenes of comedians having a rocky five while also finding one joke in there that works, and none that communicate how for many rising comics that represents a good night’s work.

The most insightful work written by a non-comedian about the profession may well be Trevor Griffiths’ ‘Comedians’ (1975), which depicts a group of working-class men rehearsing, and then performing, their set for an agent. The play achieves the difficult feat of characterizing its protagonists through both their material and in the distance of their true personalities from it.

It also dramatizes a historical conflict within comedy, the switch from the working-class era of ‘The Comedians’, where gags were both offensive and open source, to the more individualistic era of alternative comedy, encapsulated in the play in the figure of Gethin Price, who performs a surrealist monologue to the consternation of the crowd and the respect of his teacher Eddie, a veteran act. Here we see one of the central artistic questions within comedy dramatized, whether comedians are artists or rather a ‘service provider’ for entertainment. Should a comedian satisfy the audience’s prejudices or challenge them? A contemporary version of this play might dramatize the controversies around free speech and ‘wokeness’ that these days frequently flare up in comedy spaces, allowing characters with divergent views to have such debates out.

Yet a lot of aspects of a comedian’s existence remain fundamentally undramatic – the long travel between gigs, the atomized social relationships and, above all, the constant repetition. Jacques Rivette, the French New Wave director who made a thirteen-hour film about theatre companies rehearsing, might seem a highfalutin name to drop in a discussion of stand-up comedy, but he would have been the ideal artist to depict how a comedian gets their set together – perform, scrap, retain, refine, repeat¹.

I must confess, though, to having a vested interest here, having recently self-published a novel which attempts to address some of the shortcomings I mention above and present the lives of comedians in a more realistic light.

In my novel ‘Midlands’ (2022), I try to depict the in-between phases and minor joys of two Anglophone comedians on the road in 2010s Germany. In sending the book out to publishers, I encountered an inability to understand a presentation of comedians not as tortured, dark or even particularly funny but as professional, serious and, crucially, in love with doing comedy. You need to be a certain kind of person to devote yourself to making people laugh; my book is an attempt to communicate a little better to non-comics who those people are and how they live their lives.  

Buy ‘Midlands’ (2022)

1. Although, of course, any true comic would have told Rivette to cut his film down to a twenty.