
The Structure of Stand-Up Comedy - nniroclax
https://pudding.cool/2018/02/stand-up/
======
austinl
I started to appreciate stand-up comedy a lot more after realizing just how
much effort goes into delivery. It's almost uncanny to watch a comedian
perform the same routine twice, because their timing is so consistent.

Here's a good breakdown of a Louis CK joke:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufdvYrTeTuU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufdvYrTeTuU)

Jerry Seinfeld also gave an interview with the NYT about the process — I think
Jerry is a good example because so much of his comedy depends on the delivery.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itWxXyCfW5s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itWxXyCfW5s)

~~~
mattmanser
It's interesting watching comedians in cars getting coffee as obviously
they're always telling each other jokes and he'll often pick out bits of the
other comedian's joke that he thinks really makes the joke, and it's not
always what you'd first think.

~~~
ZorroToaster
It was one of those episodes that made it click for me. I can't remember which
episode it was but Jerry and the other guy were discussing what it was like on
stage and Jerry mentioned during the periods the audience is laughing he isn't
thinking about the laughter or the crowd. Instead he's thinking about how he's
going to continue the joke or transition to another one. I have found the
whole series to be really insightful into the lives of comedians. I think it
was one of the earlier episodes in the latest season.

~~~
mobilehnuser
Check out Pete Holmes' You Made It Weird podcast for more comedians talking
about comedy academically

------
jdietrich
If you have a serious interest in stand-up, I would _highly_ recommend Stuart
Goldsmith's podcast _The Comedian 's Comedian_. He interviews a broad range of
(mainly British) comedians, taking a deep dive into their writing process and
stagecraft. The interviews with Jimmy Carr and Gary Delaney stand out as
highlights for me, providing some absolutely revelatory insights into the art
of making something funny. It can be a bit inside baseball at times, but
that's not necessarily a bad thing.

[http://www.comedianscomedian.com/podcasts/](http://www.comedianscomedian.com/podcasts/)

[http://www.comedianscomedian.com/164-jimmy-carr-part-one-
of-...](http://www.comedianscomedian.com/164-jimmy-carr-part-one-of-two/)

[http://www.comedianscomedian.com/67-gary-delaney-
live/](http://www.comedianscomedian.com/67-gary-delaney-live/)

~~~
kiddico
I was hoping there'd a be a Dylan Moran one... No luck there. Thanks for the
link though, this is getting added to my regular podcast rotation.

~~~
meanmrmustard92
Moran is famously press-shy. He's been on Marc Maron and Scroobius Pip's
distraction pieces and is excellent in both, so I'd recommend listening to
those.

~~~
kiddico
I've read/watched quite a few breakdowns of his acts, but haven't been able to
find anything by/with him discussing his act, so I'll definitely look into
those.

Now that you mention it all of the preroll interviews in his recorded acts do
seem really forced... I could never tell if that was me reading him wrong, or
if he was keeping up the "I don't care" character.

------
dalbasal
Well done to the authors! This is a really compelling analysis, fun to "read".
It's a great use of the medium, pretty much the picture my imagination painted
when (one of the whens) "multimedia books" were a thing of the future.

On stand-up comedy... I've heard more about the "making of" in recent years
too, as comedians invaded podcasting. It's very interesting, how a joke or set
evolves in the telling. I guess certain jokes and bits don't make the cut, but
moreso, they are refined for timing, cadence and the stuff this article points
out (kreshendo?).

A curious paralel is (perhaps) speech-making. There is someone on stage, live
audience. They do the same talk/set over and over, to different crowds. Each
time, the punches are fuunnier. The misdirections get more subtle. The impacts
are better. The crowd cohesion grows.

Orration is ancient, and I suspect that stand up comedians have a lot in
common with orators of the past, before mass media existed.

If you listen to (for example) a recorded malcolm X speech (I think he was
exceptionally talented), you are probably listening to the 100th delivery of
the speech. It didn't just pop out of his mouth with that much impact on day
1.

~~~
bla2
(it's "crescendo", an Italian word I believe)

~~~
ggambetta
Yep, it literally means "growing". Very similar to the Spanish "creciendo".

------
habosa
This was nicely done. And since it's Hacker News let me immedy shift focus to
tech ... this was fantastically usable on my mobile phone. It was laid out
perfectly and very responsive. I've seen plain text articles jump and stutter
so I wasn't expecting this to work. Good job to the dev team.

~~~
drdrey
How does one even render a page like this? I have minimal HTML and CSS
knowledge and this as far as I can tell is magic

~~~
alexpetralia
I'm very curious about this as well. What JavaScript framework(s) enable this?
How does it integrate with certain CSS frameworks or HTML templating
languages?

~~~
jamessb
This uses D3.js [1], and waud [2] for audio. The Pudding have their own
library for scrollytelling (Scrollama.js [3]), but I don't think it's used in
this project.

[1]: [https://d3js.org/](https://d3js.org/)

[2]: [http://www.waudjs.com/](http://www.waudjs.com/)

[3]: [https://pudding.cool/process/introducing-
scrollama/](https://pudding.cool/process/introducing-scrollama/)

------
Steve44
I've been to see a few comedians playing small theatres whilst they are
developing their acts. Sometimes you get big names who are polishing their
show for an imminent TV appearance, sometime they've not been on stage for a
few years and are just starting to get back into it for a tour the following
year. They will often play with stories, making notes how the audience react
as perhaps they've gone too far or just missed the point.

I think I prefer seeing them working in the small venues like this when their
act is quite raw and not just seeing the highly polished finished routine.
They are incredibly talented and getting an insight into their thoughts is
wonderful.

~~~
fenomas
Dave Chappelle tells a story somewhere about his all-time favorite comedy
being an old tape of Richard Pryor bombing terribly, early in his career.
Apparently Pryor goes on for 30-40 minutes, doing a bunch of different bizarre
routines, none of them working at all. Then Chappelle's punch line is that
when you watch this tape knowing Pryor's later material, you can see how every
bit is the raw initial form of what would eventually become his best, most
famous routines.

------
andrewtbham
Referencing previous material like this is commonly called a callback (just
like programming :-). It's extremely common to end with at least one call
back.. if not multiple.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callback_(comedy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callback_\(comedy\))

------
crummy
That was a great analysis. If anyone is interesting on this topic, I highly
recommend Talking Funny. Four comedic greats talk about comedy - of course
there's lots of laughing but it's just fascinating.

Full video on youtube, too:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrqkP1JpBRY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrqkP1JpBRY)

------
nailer
I got lost and ended up at the opening page 5 slides in. Also the 'tap to
continue' was half off the screen in iPhone X. This feels like a new version
of those scroll jacking sites from 2010.

~~~
echelon
It works on so many other devices, though!

It's crazy how complicated design is since there are so many form factors to
get right. Miss one, and you lose part of your audience.

I have so much respect for front end engineers and designers, because this
stuff is not easy.

~~~
ElmntOfSurprise
A shame that having plain paragraphs and pictures does not work (Android
dropped support since N).

Commenting on the design, as a slow reader and non-native English speaker I
felt annoyed at having to read against the clock ticking away for each slide
(or alternatively, having to click 'pause' again for each slide individually).
I hope whatever package this page is based on changes their default settings
in future releases.

------
jadell
I'd be interesting in seeing something like this breakdown for someone like
Mitch Hedberg, who is generally considered to be one of the greatest stand-ups
of all time (especially among other stand-up comedians. You'll often hear
other comedians include his name in lists with Carlin, Pryor and other all-
time greats.) Hedberg's style is definitely not narrative, not explicitly.
It's about as far to the one-liner one-joke-after-another end of the spectrum
as you can get.

~~~
jfoutz
Stephen Wright is kinda like that also.

~~~
ckocagil
Jimmy Carr too.

~~~
PuffinBlue
Jimmy Carr himself would probably disagree with you and instead cite Harry
Hill, as would most UK comedians.

------
senthil_rajasek
The site is great, the tools of analysis and presentation are amazing but the
title is a bit grandiose.

Imagine writing an article titled "The Structure of Software" and using code
from one application to define the structure of all software.

I once watched 100 videos of top 100 comedians of the decade. I realized that
no two comedians were alike.

I like to think that comedy is a place of anti-logic or no logic or beyond
logic with room for non-sequitur and absurdism and hence no structure.

~~~
cristianpascu
Actually, not quite so. There's structure, otherwise it would be
incomprehensible and people would not resonate so much with it.

William James said that philosophy “sees the familiar as if it were strange,
and the strange as if it were familiar.” The same is true of standup comedy.
Simon Critchley has written that both ask us to “look at things as if you had
just landed from another planet”. [1]

[1]
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/humor/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/humor/)

~~~
senthil_rajasek
"strange as if it were familiar"

Don't you see the paradox you have introduced. What came first the strangeness
or the familiarity?

We are all very good at meaning/structure making post hoc.

------
jjgoldman
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel explores the the development of a "set" in the first
season. It isn't a big part, but in the context of the overall story it is
well done.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marvelous_Mrs._Maisel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marvelous_Mrs._Maisel)

------
codeulike
While we're dissecting humour, this reminds me of Dennett's book about it -
the core idea seems to be that we find things funny because we're trying to
'debug' them:

 _The main thesis of “Inside Jokes” is that humor is an evolved adaptation
used by humans to “debug” mental representations, i.e. find tacit
incongruities and contradictions within representations and bring them to
light._

[https://rosehendricks.com/2013/06/13/review-of-inside-
jokes/](https://rosehendricks.com/2013/06/13/review-of-inside-jokes/)

------
lawnchair_larry
I really want to read this but the design of the site is unbearable. Hoping
for a plain ascii version.

~~~
amanzi
Sorry but a plain ascii version wouldn't have conveyed the same story.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
You could reduce the content to a couple of short paragraphs and not lose
anything essential.

The animations are decorative, not informative. Run through the piece again
and you'll see they convey no independent actionable or memorable content that
isn't already conveyed in the text, and/or couldn't be illustrated just as
effectively with static diagrams.

This is an absolute monster load of development work for what's really just a
one page magazine article.

And if you know a little about dramatic form, you'll note that it doesn't
explain the design of the structure in any detail - certainly not any kind of
detail you could repurpose if you were interested in writing or stand-up.

It's just "Stand-up has structure" \- which you could get across in a single
sentence, and which is probably a thought a lot of readers will already have
had.

~~~
sethherr
The graphics are clearly critical - a plain ascii version wouldn’t convey the
information as successfully.

Personally, the animations drew me in. Basically all things can be reduced to
a single sentence explanation, but that doesn’t mean a single sentence has all
the impact of the original.

------
kyberias
I honestly think the graphical gizmos implemented for this piece do not
support the message AT ALL. In fact, I didn't find any message. There is form
in an hour long stand-up routine? That's not news.

------
rayalez
Crazy beautiful website.

A few thoughts on comedy:

\- In "Step by Step to Stand-up Comedy" (great book about doing standup), the
author describes the process of writing a standup routine. Basically, first
you write _a lot_ of jokes on random topics, and tag them by categories (like
"driving", "postal service", "marriage", etc). Once you have a few dozen
jokes, you organize the ones that can belong to a similar topic together, and
then figure out how to string them together into a coherent routine, where one
joke leads to another. So routines are written "bottom-up" from jokes, first
you have jokes, then you find a way to put them together in a way that makes
sense, but doesn't need much meaning or structure beyond that.

\- Movies or sictcoms, on the other hand, are written "top-down". First you
have a story structure, which can, but doesn't have to be that funny(laws for
comedy and drama are the same), and then you brainstorm jokes using your
scenes as topics. If you came up with some good jokes or scenes separately,
that don't necessarily fit, you can find a way to "shoehorn" them into the
script, nothing wrong with that, but generally it goes structure first, jokes
second.

\- Jokes are "absurd associations". Our brain thinks in patterns. When you put
together two patterns(ideas) that don't belong together, it creates the
feeling of absurdity, the less patterns belong together, the less they fit
together, the more absurd they will feel. ("A man on a bicycle" is not absurd,
"a man on a unicycle" is a little bit absurd, "Hitler riding a unicycle" is
very absurd, "Hitler riding a unicycle while wearing a white dress and
juggling fish" is absurd as fuck). Comedy is the art of finding connections
between patterns. You "connect the dots" between two ideas, find an overlap(an
association) between two patterns that are far apart, and you put them
together. The more absurd(less compatible) the two ideas are, and the stronger
the connection(the more it makes sense), the funnier the joke will be.

~~~
gadders
Somebody who was fantastic at picking _exactly_ the right word for a joke was
the British comedienne Victoria Wood.

"During a stand-up routine from 1996, Victoria says the word "bollocks" then
comments on the scandal inherent in this. "It will be in the paper on Monday.
‘Woman says bollocks near Cheadle'.’’ As Rebecca Front states in the
documentary: “Cheadle being the absolute perfect near-Manchester town. It just
falls in the right way.” Victoria could have said "Sale" or "Hyde" or
"Droylsden", but they wouldn’t have been as funny as "Cheadle". She had an
unerring instinct for the mot juste."

[1]
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/bbbRrf2hng7ddQ7HVH6...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/bbbRrf2hng7ddQ7HVH6lDQ/victoria-
woods-rules-of-comedy)

------
talltimtom
Very nice presentation. The analysis is just complete overanalysis with them
working backwards from their biased preconcieved conclusion trying to back it
up through argument rather than doing actual analysis and dissecting the
subject matter. But the presentation is nice. Great visualizations and
effective at arguing their hypothesis even though they don’t actual do any
critical evaluation of it.

I’d propose she repeat the show but leave out the physical comedy that goes
along with the specific point they are obsessed with and if their hypothesis
holds the laughs will be just as big, since they postulate that it’s the
structure of the preceding jokes tying in it that causes the laughs and not
the joke itself.

------
cjstadler
Cool presentation.

This reminded me of Hannah Gadsby's "Nanette" because, like Ali Wong's show,
it has a strong narrative arc, and because, like this presentation itself, it
analyzes the structure of comedy.

~~~
danbolt
It reminded me of that too, especially since Nanette goes in-depth about how
tension and release are tapped into to shape humour.

------
pbhjpbhj
If you are interested in the craft of comedy then you might like British
comedian Stewart Lee, he's liberal/socialist and gets pretty political but he
clearly revels in the craft and is quite meta about it. He "explains" to the
audience when and why they should laugh, and appears to revel in getting
laughs out of stuff that just shouldn't be at all funny -- murdered babies for
example. When I was younger I find him boring ("this isn't comedy, where are
the jokes").

Latest tour "Content Provider" \--
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bdcnwq/stewart-
lee-c...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bdcnwq/stewart-lee-content-
provider)

~~~
fenomas
Stewart Lee is phenomenal - he very much straddles the line between comedy and
avant-garde theater, but he does things no other comic can.

Relevant to the article, he also wrote a book that deconstructs some of his
routines. There are a few brilliant youtube clips somewhere, where someone has
taken video of those routines and added annotations of what he said about each
joke, as the joke comes up. I'd link them but I can't find the damn things.

~~~
jackweirdy
A great example (but unannotated) of his off-beat delivery is this segment of
one of his shows
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngGdtqd71d0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngGdtqd71d0)

------
schemathings
TJ Miller "One Crazy Night - This is not happening" is a great example of this
type of structure.

------
gandutraveler
Louis CK is master of story telling. Ali Wong is to d but I don't think her
jokes are smart funny.

------
callesgg
This would be more interesting if it was about something that was more of a
quality comedy.

I don't understand why jokes about vaginas, being fat, being gross or sex are
funny to so many people.

Something is ultimately funny cause it is unexpected and true in a certain
perspective.

My guess is that people think it is unexpected that people talk about these
things and that is why they laugh and think it is funny. To me the concept of
using such a simple idiotic picture of what a human is, is cringe. It is sort
of embarrassing that people find it funny.

~~~
matwood
Define quality?

IMO, comedy is a great vehicle to help people realize taboo topics should not
be taboo. Are Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy not quality comics? Do you also have
an issue with cussing? George Carlins famous bit showed how absurd it is to
ban _words_ from TV.

~~~
callesgg
Quality can't be defined.

But in this specific case it is about the amount of quality work that went in
to the material.

------
glibgil
This is stupid and only means that the editor knows what they are doing. Like
most comedy specials this was filmed twice and sweetened in editing

[https://imgur.com/JtOb4fJ](https://imgur.com/JtOb4fJ)

[https://imgur.com/0QwEnEZ](https://imgur.com/0QwEnEZ)

~~~
ruytlm
I understand the point to be that a standup routine is generally a crafted
product, designed to create a 'laugh climax'; that editing would be used to
support this structure for the video seems to only reinforce the argument in
the article.

~~~
glibgil
> that editing would be used to support this structure for the video seems to
> only reinforce the argument in the article

The article measures the time between big laughs. That timing is not what
happened in the auditorium. It's not worth measuring. The data was edited and
cannot tell you anything about precise timing. Why doesn't the author of the
article acknowledge this?

------
aportnoy
Ali Wong is at best mediocre, but the website is nice.

~~~
1337biz
Feels odd why they would not pick one of the really great comedians but some
niche personality with not even 500k Google results.

~~~
chemochemo
I think we all know exactly why this comedian was chosen, and it has nothing
to do with popularity or talent.

~~~
danbolt
Perhaps for some people, but I don't think that sort of sentiment about Ali
Wong is universally true.

I genuinely enjoyed the material and found it very fresh, especially as
someone that didn't really think standup comedy was for me before that.

------
CraneWorm
Out of habit I skipped straight into reader mode and got to read the
monologue.

... the delivery better do some magic 'cause I was depressed after couple of
sentences and not in a mood for laughs at all...

