For my stand-up routine that I did for English, I used linear storylines recounting stories of odd instances in my life in a way to point out the absurdity of the situation. I have many strange stories from my family that I wanted to tell. For instance, I feel like I have a unique perspective on my childhood since I grew up as an immigrant, and since my mom is more fluent in our native language than I am, I figured I’d use the language barrier for some absurd humor.

I used self-deprecating humor, which I am very fond of, because I have struggled with self-esteem in the past. I struggle to focus due to my ADHD, which drags down my self-esteem, so I used my past struggles of negative self-image from ADHD to build up strange storylines to point fun at my flaws.

It’s much more difficult to come up with jokes than you think, setting up a punchline often involves balancing what you find to be funny and what you assume other people would find funny. It took studying different concepts of comedy to use techniques designed to elicit a laugh. That being said, I’m grateful Mr. Greco provided a “Comedy Toolbox” for us to study, as well as excerpts from a novel detailing how to set up stand-up comedy, it gave me a clearer path to set up my routine.

Humorist Analysis

A primary comedian that greatly inspires me in my work is John Mulaney, which I’m sure will be a frequent name you will be encountering in some other proposals. His style is loud, frank, and sarcastic, but not exactly offensive. He points out the absurdity of situations, like in “Horse Loose in a Hospital” and “Delta Airlines.” In these, he compares the current President to an unlikely, insane situation like a horse running around in a hospital, and he exaggerates the way Airline employees will speak to him when he’s trying to catch a flight. His exaggerism goes hand in hand with his satire, in he will overstate the severity of a situation to point out how ridiculous it is.

Mulaney often provides anecdotes in his skits, as do many comedians, and in those anecdotes he will employ situational humor with plenty of slapstick in it. He may litter epigrams in his bits of situational humor. He will often give repartees, clever responses to ridiculous situations he encounters to blunders in a situation, another companion to his typical satire bits that he will use if he’s using a real life example for situational humor instead of satire. Mulaney’s jokes are rather drenched in wit with a twinge of slapstick, he uses clever, ironic ways to employ exaggerated physical activities or violence as well as sarcastic, exaggerated extreme voices that needlessly escalate the situation he’s describing. This is especially seen in “The One Thing You Can’t Replace,” where he goes to a house party in highschool of the son of an unlikeable teacher. He describes outlandish activities that the teenagers in the house do, like break a pool table or defecate on the teacher’s computer desk. He uses caricatured voices when quoting the characters in the skit, like the police officer’s stereotypical accent when he arrests the kids. At times, he will use hyperbole in the bit, in which he will describe the teenagers as “a bunch of drunk, white toddlers,” another example of his wit.

Sometimes, Mulaney will use self-deprecating humor as well, pointing attention to his thin physique and sometimes effeminate mannerisms. He’s married to a woman, but he often notes how his features will often make people mistaken him for a gay man. In these instances, he puts the punchline on himself, rather than putting the punchline on gay men, . Mulaney often portrays himself as the Non-Hero in the situation, a normal person in a strange instance in which he will reveal an Unspoken Truth over the course of a ridiculous storyline. For example, in his comedy special “New in Town,” he makes a comment about how eighth graders are unusually mean, using an example in which he, the Non-Hero, encounters a group of eighth graders who make fun of his “high-waisted, feminine hips,” in which he reacts strongly to in an exaggerated manner.

Another comedian that I take some inspiration to is Eric Andre. Though he also uses some absurdism and slapstick in his skits like Mulaney, what differs in his approach to comedy is that he doesn’t often use linear storylines in his skits at all. Instead, he employs nonsensical, practical jokes with the sole purpose of shocking the audience. While he is quite self-deprecating like Mulaney, Andre doesn’t directly point out his flaws in stories but instead uses a crass, unpredictable persona. His persona is in the limelight of his show, “The Eric Andre Show,” where he’ll use it in practical jokes he creates to either make the celebrities he interviews uncomfortable or to go out in public and shock and disturb bystanders. This is seen in an episode where he rides on the shoulders of his co-host, Hannibal Buress, while they wear an oversized trench coat to conceal Buress and head out to a public car dealership and pretend to be trying to buy a car, while the dealer is confused and suspicious of them and demands them to unbutton the trench coat. Andre plays dumb and replies that he will not undress in front of him to buy a car, an ironic response.

I find the most inspiration from the absurd humor both comedians employ, the way in which unlikely situations surprise the audience gives me ideas to use absurd responses to common situations to take the audience by surprise. I especially enjoy the slapstick humor, exaggerated actions and voices are a simple way to get the audience to laugh, but of course, they need formula to be able to work. A random action or voice with no build-up will not work in the comedian’s favor, as seen in how Mulaney uses situational humor to build up to an opportunity to use exaggerism.

Andre’s shock humor is something I’d like to draw inspiration, not necessarily in an overtly offensive way, but rather I will apply subtle black humor to stories that typically have a family-friendly feeling to them. For example, I draw to mind an episode in with Andre pretends to be a blind man with sunglasses on with a seeing-eye dog, he’d ask passerbys if they can see his dog and take off his sunglasses to reveal that he has no eyes (with the help of special effects makeup) while he screams for them to describe the dog to him. The responses are usually of surprise and shock, not from a joke that is intentionally offensive but is disturbing in nature. While I don’t necessarily feel that I will try to be intentionally disturbing, the way in which Andre used a typical, family-friendly situation like a blind man with a dog to take the audience by surprise is what I intend to draw inspiration from.

I do want to use linear storylines as Mulaney does as well, recounting stories of odd instances in my life in a way to point out the absurdity of the situation. I have many strange stories from my family that I would like to tell, just like how Mulaney has many strange stories to tell from his childhood. I am considering making myself the Non-Hero of my stories, an ordinary person with strange encounters, like Mulaney does. After all, I have plenty of strange stories that happen in times that were supposed to be normal. In being the Non-Hero, I could also use self-deprecating humor, which I am very fond of. I have struggled with self-esteem in the past, so I can use my past instances of negative self-image to build up strange storylines to point fun at my flaws.

I would like to use caricatured voices as well in my comedy since I will mainly be using storylines in my stand-up. Mulaney’s implementation of caricatured voices is a huge inspiration to me, especially since I consider myself an actor. From my history of performing in theatre, I relate to Mulaney’s personas he uses in his stand-up, so I would like to use some acting in my storylines to aid the punchline.

I might use some slapstick as well since I enjoy the shocking ways Andre uses slapstick to take the audience by surprise. The way in which Andre will sometimes open up his show with him destroying the set on his stage is a form of slapstick that comes to mind, the physical violence he uses to surprise the audience would be something difficult to pull off, but still something I would like to use with good time and effort to research good ways to implement it.

Sources:
Mulaney, John. Kid Gorgeous, Netflix, 1 May 2018.
Mulaney, John. New in Town, Comedy Central, 28 Jan. 2012.
Andre, Eric, et al. “The Eric Andre Show.” The Eric Andre Show, Adult Swim, 20 Mar. 2012.

The Gremlin Scale

Alright, so it’s pretty much a given that at least some of you in here are immigrants. And with that, I’ll assume that you’re either bilingual or your parents speak a language other than English. So, I’m not gonna assume all of you can relate but maybe at least one of you will. I’m an immigrant, first-generation, in fact, and my mom’s first language is Portuguese. Lovely language, I gotta say, but that’s probably ‘cause I’m inclined to bias. I hear it from a complete stranger, and my little toddler mind’s first thought is “MOTHER!?”
Okay, so my mom! 5’3”, loves cooking, sings a lot, very tired, and has a funny way of saying “fuck!” I love her, even though I struggle to understand her sometimes. But sometimes, when I do understand her, she still makes no sense. Like this one time when I was a kid and my mom took my brother and I with her to the concerts she sang at churches. She was in a gospel group, and sometimes her group would get invited to churches that were pretty far away. So we ended up going on plenty of roadtrips. These were long, boring, and often late at night, so it wasn’t uncommon for her to fall asleep during these roadtrips. So, on one of these roadtrips, my brother has a question for my mom and he decides to wake her up. But when she does wake up, she looks around and says in Portuguese, “…..mayonnaise injection.”
And that’s how I learned of crack cocaine.
No, I didn’t, but I might as well have from the similarities I’m seeing right now.
But to be honest, I feel so bad for my mom. She was already an immigrant single mom with two kids, that’s already a pain in the ass. But I have ADHD, okay? And that’s gonna screw up what I like to call “The Gremlin Scale” horrifically for her. Now, everyone knows kids can be utterly nuts sometimes, but I find that it follows a specific graph throughout the years.
Also, thank you Vonnegut for the idea, I hope you don’t mind subtle plagiarism.
So, the x-axis is time, how old the kid is, you know? But the y-axis is the gremlin level, or how much the kid is gonna scream. You start off when the kid is born, the chart is gonna start off half-way up because the kid is already gonna be kicking and screaming. Then it plummets during the first few months, not completely ‘cause the kid’s gonna keep crying when it’s hungry or tired, but it’s gonna be mostly quiet, I guess. But when the kid turns two, it’s gonna spike. The kid’s gonna scream a lot more, in something I like to call “the Banshee Peak,” or alternatively, “oh Jesus Fuck.”
It’s gonna lower quite a bit at the age of five, ‘cause by then the kid is speaking complete sentences, so there’s a lesser need to scream. But then it’s gonna spike a little bit at age seven, because that’s when you start first grade. And everyone knows, we’re all screaming when we’re in school. But it’s gonna stagnate by then, a sort of average in-between of screaming and whining. Not much is happening until around the average age of twelve. It will peak here as well, and I’m sure many of you know why. For starters, puberty! Puberty begins, your voice is dropping or you’re suddenly bleeding, and you’re very afraid because all of a sudden your left nipple is higher up than your right nipple and for some reason that makes you want to cry and commit arson. And for some reason during this time adults look at us and think, “you know what’s a great idea? Cramming all of these emotionally volatile infants into one small space. What could go wrong?”
This is a generally accurate graph, give or take. Not really, I came up with this spontaneously because I’m a visual learner but I failed math like twice. But it’s different for a kid with ADHD like me. Because instead of this well-balanced graph, actually not really well-balanced but not completely god-awful, it’s more like “OH JESUS CHRIST, OH NO, OH GOD.” -scribble really high on the graph-
So, it’s obligatory for me to start on the banshee peak, because when I was like two years old, I don’t think I was able to speak yet? And so because I couldn’t communicate my needs, I would scream every time I wanted something. Oh, and I could walk. So I was less of a small human child and more of a wild animal that hasn’t been housebroken yet. Just picture if your dog was a human person but had none of the human intelligence. That was me.
So for some reason, little 2 year old me had an intense love for McDonald’s. My mom took me there sometimes for ice cream and I was hooked. Because a small human child doesn’t know the proper balance between wants and needs, whenever we passed by a McDonald’s in a car, my mom would have to cover my eyes or distract me or else I would scream for it like an 18th century woman who lost her children to cholera.
And it would get even worse if we were walking on foot instead of being in a car. Because then if I saw a McDonald’s, I would instead sprint for it! And then that would lead to my mother having to chase after a starving fetus with no concept of boundaries and language, and inevitably when she finally caught me and dragged me away, I would screech! It’s like if Chucky had no concept of the English language and the voice of a velociraptor! Visually, it would look like this! (SCREEEEEEEEE)
So, yeah, my mother had to take care of a sequel 20th Chucky for maybe about a decade.