Five lessons you can learn about comedy from the Out Of Bounds Comedy Festival
Slow improv, torturous sketch, and three other ways to whip your funny bone into shape
Slow improv, torturous sketch, and three other ways to whip your funny bone into shape
On The Spot: It's oh so quiet
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As the eternally misattributed saying goes, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." But it can become less hard if you know the right places to look—like the upcoming 2009 Out Of Bounds Comedy Festival. The weeklong festival offers several lessons on how to whip your funny bone into shape; to wit:
If you give it time, an unfunny bit can become a funny bit.
As two-thirds of Dasariski, improv veterans Craig Cackowski and Rich Talarico (appearing here as Cackowski And Talarico) are practitioners of "slow-play," a Zen-like style of performance where, rather than invent a whole bunch of crazy crap off the bat, the players let the world of the show slowly build and blossom around them. If it doesn't sound funny, that's because sometimes it isn't—it requires as much patience from the audience as it does the players. But once they have a well-defined world in which to goof around, that's when the players rev the funny engines. It's a strategy that pays off for local heroes The Frank Mills as well, and both troupes will close out the festival by getting slow together.
Sometimes, punch lines should be, you know, punchy.
On the flip side, some things—like mobile electronics and ABBA songs—are best served in sleek, compact packages. For every Matt Bearden, who's able to spend several minutes wringing laughs out of a harrowing LSD trip that ended with his buddy diving into an empty pool and breaking both his arms, there are dozens of stand-ups who waste too much time setting up mediocre punch lines. That's why the breezy non sequiturs of Steven Wright and Mitch Hedberg are such breaths of fresh comedy air. (Another reason: They're really funny.) Though far more squirrelly than Wright and Hedberg (but who isn't?), Austinite Ramin Nazer works at a similarly quick clip, cutting childhood anecdotes—wanted B.B. gun, traded baseball cards for B.B. gun, stole baseball cards back with B.B. gun—down to 20-second gems.
Great collaborators don't have to be great friends.
Friendship is the foundation of any successful romantic relationship, but it can tend to get in the way of a creative one. Sensitivity to the other party's feelings isn't effective when the other party's idea is shitty; sometimes you just have to come out and tell him his idea is shitty. It's unlikely that the animosity Audience Of Two's Sam Dingman and Ben Masten express toward each other in their comedy is sincere—if so, they'd have stopped doing this a long time ago. But all the punches and insults make for an engaging online presence, and the tension between Dingman and Masten echoes to humorous effect in videos like "David Mamet Performed By Robots" and their sketch show Why Are We Friends?
Silence is golden.
Words can only get you so far in comedy, and sometimes, it's best not to speak at all. (Think the wordless, direct-to-camera reactions on The Office.) The silent-film era enshrined an entire generation of stars who squeezed laughter out of characters and situations that could only be expressed physically, and it's in the spirit of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd that Honolulu's On The Spot presents Hush. It's an entire silent comedy (plus musical accompaniment) realized before your very eyes—although they'd be hard-pressed to recreate something like Modern Times' massive gears setpiece.
Weird everybody out and they'll demand an encore.
One of the most talked-about sets of Out Of Bounds 2008 belonged to Fuct, a New York City-based sketch troupe that paints in shades of taboo, absurdism, and self-torture. That talk wasn't necessarily about how funny the set was—a lot of it revolved around questions like, "Holy shit, did you see that sketch where the two pantsless guys played Britney Spears and Paris Hilton while barely keeping their cocks and balls tucked between their legs?" Nonetheless, somebody at OOB headquarters was impressed, because Fuct whips out its instruments of pain (and magic!) for two shows this year. A word to first-timers hoping to return: Working up a quick bit where a cast member gets snapped in the chest by a massive rubber band may be a better idea than it sounds.
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