(upbeat instrumental music)
- [Shannon] Self-improvement-style advice
is often a bunch of useless platitudes and nonsense
peddled by people who just want money.
And it's even worse online with clickbait listicles
and the YouTube video version of clickbait listicles.
Or at least that was certainly my experience when Googling,
how to be funny or how to get funnier.
Either you get weird sociopathic woo-woo pickup artist.
- What's up?
This is Will Powers from Evolution of Man.
And what I want to talk to you about today
is high-status humor
or what I like to call, prize frame humor.
- [Shannon] Trick people into liking you
or trick women into thinking you're funny
so they'll sleep with you stuff.
- Hiya fellow Pinnacle Person.
So in this video you're gonna learn exactly
a couple ways how to make a girl roll over with laughter
and basically make her laugh all the way to your bed.
- [Shannon] Or really, really basic structural advice
on comedy, yes and, rule of threes, or, y'know,
put down your phone, be yourself, which isn't helpful.
There's a lot I want to talk about in this video
but in the interest of differentiating myself
from clickbait or stringing viewers along
before I get to my central thesis,
the central theory I've concocted on the fastest way
to be funny, the fastest and most direct way to get funnier,
I'm just going to say it outright right now.
The fastest way to get funnier
is to put yourself in a position where being funny
is rewarded and not being funny is punished.
A lot of resources for being funnier,
especially specific resources for improv or telling jokes
in conversation or for stand-up comedy,
look at comedy like a math problem
where you take an established rule or format
and slot your own experiences
or observations into that formula.
Of course, if you're trying to be funny
it helps to learn the established mechanics of comedy.
Especially with specific comedic art forms or formats,
you should bare minimum have an understanding
of what people before you figured out
the same way any narrative filmmaker should at least know
what shot reverse shot and a 180 degree rule are
even if they choose not to adhere to them.
This approach is certainly helpful as a foundation.
But in my experience you should look at comedy
the same way you would look at learning
a complicated language or a series of different
though interconnected complicated languages
whose communicability and success are very subjective
and dependent on audience rather than as a checklist
or a chart or a math problem or as some objective puzzle
you solve and then become the crowned king of subversion.
I don't speak French and, yeah,
I'd learn some French through Duolingo or French classes
at a college or online, but if I wanted to be fluent,
the quickest shortcut is to go to a country
where people speak French and force myself
to speak to people and to learn the language to get around
and function and try to interact with a society
that is fluent in this language.
And deal with my own failures in learning it
as they exist as a barrier in interaction,
which is perhaps a more intense motivator
than a bad grade or a green cartoon owl.
To me that's the difference
between having an encyclopedic knowledge of joke formats
and memorizing every Carlin or whoever bit,
and writing all your jokes in a vacuum
with just you yourself or you
and all the people who already like you
and will only ever laugh and support you,
versus actually going out and performing stand-up
night after night to a bar full of apathetic drunks
and feeling intensely which jokes work and which jokes bomb
and then obsessively tweaking them night after night
and hanging around other stand-up comics
who are sometimes vicious and bitter people
who are very withholding of laughter and validation
and trying to get along with them and fit in.
Try being unfunny in that environment
and see how it makes you feel.
I think my answer to the question of how to be funny
is a very ugly and unpleasant answer.
It might not be good for you as a human being.
It might not develop healthy interpersonal traits
and in fact it can do the opposite.
Like with a lot of other art and performance,
you might sacrifice other aspects of yourself for it.
It's not healthy to invest your self-worth
in the approval of an audience or of your peers,
especially approval based on laughter response,
but that's the shortcut.
And as far as I can tell, every funny person I've ever known
has experienced some form of it.
I made fun of the self-help and creepy pickup artist aspects
of being funny, but there's a lot of truth to the concept
of learning to be funny out of desperation
and lack of an alternative, as a way to be liked,
whether by people you're attracted to
or by people generally, and as a way to get attention
and validation you don't get elsewhere,
and as a way to avoid violence.
Making fun of yourself before someone else can
as a defense mechanism or using humor defensively
in an aggressive way or to disarm a threat, break tension,
or de-escalate an intense situation.
You also don't have to be funny to be liked.
There are so many other things that are more valuable
in a person than being funny.
Kindness and empathy and openness and flexibility
and vulnerability, that can sometimes be lacking
in super funny people.
Humor can be a shortcut to being liked and accepted,
and I've known people who are really funny
and fun to be around and riff with
but who aren't the best people.
Improv is collaborative, filmmaking is collaborative,
any kind of collaborative art is maybe going to be harder
to be successful at if you're a total antisocial jerk
to people, but stand-up is a very solitary art,
and there's so little incentive for someone who is funny
and who is good at it to also be a nice, empathetic person.
I'm not saying someone is a good or better person
because they do improv versus stand-up, that's absurd.
And I have so many friends I love and respect who I met
when they were doing stand-up and some of them still do it,
and while I have a tremendous amount of respect
for accomplished improv comedians,
I actually prefer to watch stand-up
and prefer it as an art form, in part because bad stand-up
as a singular five minutes at a time at an open mic art form
is tolerable, but bad failed improv
because of the more vulnerable and sincere
and supportive collaborative nature of it, is so bad,
it's like the worst thing in the world to watch.
I'd cringe so hard and feel so bad for people
and don't enjoy it whereas with like open mic stand-up
it's like, okay, in three minutes
this will turn over to the next person.
A lot of current edgier comedians
and older "you can't joke about anything anymore"
dinosaur comedians put too much value on being funny
as the pinnacle of human cultural achievement or something
in a really egomaniacal way to shield themselves
from criticism or introspection or evolution,
as if being funny is both static
and important above all else.
Such a noble and subversive cause
to tell hack rape jokes at an open mic.
You know, the content of the joke, the impact of the joke,
what telling the joke is doing to the comic,
whatever you are sacrificing in yourself or in others
to get there, not just in offensive jokes,
but the strain of really personal or self-deprecating jokes.
Not that they're all straining, but the potential strain.
That doesn't matter, all that matters
to these people is being funny.
And they have their way to be funny, this, masculine, mean,
unempathetic, aggressive style focused on domination
and resistant to shifting cultural mores,
and that's what's funny.
For one, if you're really the funniest person in the world,
pretending humor is some kind
of measurable objective quotient.
It's not an audience's fault
if they don't think you're funny,
especially if your material panders to people
of your own belief set and alienates everyone else.
If you think a cliched, hacky, shallow pro-feminism joke
or Cheeto in chief anti-Trump joke is virtue signaling
and bad comedy and the death of comedy
but you get on stage and tell a,
"there's too many genders now" joke and think that's brave
and funny for no other reason
than because it reaffirms your beliefs
and upsets people you disagree with,
and when it bombs you lean into it and say people
who criticize you are too sensitive then you're deluded
on top of being unfunny and having bad opinions.
And two, there being a time and a place for everything
and always trying to have room for context and for empathy
is such a foundational, basic social etiquette.
One time several years ago, I was hanging out with
some people who had just lost a relative in a car accident.
We were at a party playing Apples to Apples.
And one of the cards I got dealt was, a car crash.
I'm 100% a morbid sicko who finds jokes about grief
and death funny and in another game
I'm sure I could have found a good use for that card.
But in that moment I felt dread about the possibility
of even accidentally playing it.
Not only were the people I was playing with
not sickos like me, they took the game very literally
and probably wouldn't have found that card funny anyway,
but even if the card combination would have made me laugh
or made other people around laugh,
whatever I woulda gotten out of that
would not have been worth upsetting people
who just lost someone
But by the rule of like, putting being funny first,
I should have shown those cucks
and made my car accident joke and called them babies
who don't appreciate the nuanced fine art of comedy
if they looked put off or upset
by me being massively disrespectful.
I was never, like, an online bigot or harasser.
I never told anyone to kill themselves
or anything horrible like that,
and I talked about this a lot already
in my political correctness video if you want to see
how I feel more specifically about edgy comedy.
This video isn't really, I talk about edgy comedy
in this video, but that's not really what it's about.
But that video is definitely about that
so link in the description.
This is kind of a companion video to that one.
But I spent my late teens and early twenties
glued to a computer posting on 4chan and edgy forums
and then spent my mid-twenties hanging out
with stand-up comics around Atlanta.
And I definitely did get funnier and a lot better
at a specific brand of very cutting, very mean humor.
And that helped my acceptance in those communities,
especially the online ones.
More so the online ones.
If you're unfunny in an environment
where all people really care about is who is funny
and dominating each other or dominating outsiders
in that very, especially mid-to late-2000s
masculine online humor way, I mean, then you're worthless
to that environment's value system,
and nobody wants to feel worthless.
Then I got older and I realized that being funny
at the expense of other people who don't deserve it
or, even separate from edgy or politically correct humor,
seeing being funny as a competition,
as if laughs and approval are a limited resource
and you have to immediately humiliate
and just gut someone if they vie for that resource
or having friendships where you get that high
from riffing with someone where you make each other laugh
and you can kind of indulge in being a little meaner
until you realize what you were indulging in
sometimes went too far and was not healthy.
I had learned a lot about how to be funny
that I kind of had to forget,
and I let go of unhealthy relationships where humor
was the only real foundation.
Like, I had to learn that lesson multiple times
over years of my life.
And at this point while I find that style
of dominance-oriented humor too mean
for me to use all the time,
while I'm occasionally tempted to indulge in it
or do laugh at it when other people use it,
I certainly still appreciate irreverent humor
when it's not targeted at marginalized people.
It's inflexible and it is not appropriate
for every situation that calls for humor in the first place.
It's certainly not useful for general interactions
with other human beings who aren't stand-up comics
or irony poisoned internet freaks.
I didn't write this
because I think I'm the funniest person ever
or an expert on being personally funny
I wrote it because I want to be funnier and I have struggled
with being self-conscious about whether I'm as funny
as other people I work with on podcasts or live shows
at conventions, and I spent a period of time
neurotically obsessing over it.
I've been doing way more comedy-focused work
or work where I need to be funny
to keep up with everyone else.
And at some point suddenly, in those situations,
after five years of being Shannon Strucci, video essayist,
it didn't matter at all if I could write
and edit a compelling video essay
because now I'm trying to establish myself
in a very different field.
Like, who cares?
And I'm working regularly with people who have done stand-up
for a decade or who have written professionally for TV
or whatever and who I know they're funny.
It's not a question to me if we're talking about them,
and I was forced to get outside of my comfort zone
and work through some insecurities
that I would never have to have dealt with
if I had stayed just a video essayist.
Comedy helps in making video essays and making them engaging
and I've tried to incorporate it into my work,
and I am proud of some of the visual gags
and editing gags I've come up with,
but being okay at editing gags
doesn't suddenly make me a comedian.
We've had a lot of really cool and really funny guests
on "Critical Bits," the podcast I'm on,
but by far the time I was the most intimidated
and felt the most pushed to be better
was when we had Mark Meer on.
Meer is probably best known for his voice work,
but he's an incredible stage performer and improviser
and tabletop role player and he was just so funny in a way
that was so quick and weird and creative.
- [Mark] You did more?
Don't hog it all, you swine!
- [Shannon] And he just threw himself into voices
and bits that I either would have been too self-conscious
and hesitant to do or not able to do in the first place.
- [Mark] I am adult human like you.
(group laughing)
- [Man] That explains--
- [Man] When he says that his skin ripples.
- [Man] Why yes, normal Earth human, of course.
- [Mark] Yes, the best kind, normal Earth human.
- [Shannon] Either limited in my voice acting ability
or in, not at this point,
being capable of thinking that quickly.
- [Mark] Okay, well, so long kids, best of luck.
- [Shannon] Oh, can we like get
your cell phone number or something?
- [Mark] Oh, it's threep, okay, see you.
(group laughing)
- [Shannon] And we recorded that episode in person, too
so here's this super funny man
with years of improv experience
who's been doing voice acting for like 20 years
just killing it sitting right in front of me.
And I'm trying to play off of that and trying to keep up.
And I didn't bomb, I think I did well.
- [Mark] As we we're walking, I'm also talking.
So, you look like you've been having some fun.
Tell me, what have you been up to, hm?
- [Shannon] Oh, I'm sorry, I have no idea who you are.
And I just start running away.
- [Mark] Oh yes, well, I've seen better days
as you can probably tell.
Sheriff Raoul Duke, you don't remember?
- [Shannon] Nope, and I, how far am I?
(group laughing)
But it still energized me to want to be better.
On top of always wanting to be better
when my co-hosts are so funny.
When you work with people who are good at what they do
you want to honor that and at least keep up with them.
So I'm a lot better about it now and more comfortable
but especially in 2019, I got very in my own head
about trying to be funnier and be funny
without indulging in being mean, and at the same time
I got a couple of very flattering CuriousCats
asking about being funnier, like this one
referencing "Critical Bits"
I'll link the full answer in the description.
There's more comedy advice there from me and my friends
that I don't go into in this video,
which maybe I'll talk about in a future video.
I don't know, more sort of structural advice
and advice for stuff to check out.
But the question was, how does one improve
at the improvised banter you and the crew have on the bits?
Would improv classes be worth it, if you've ever taken them?
And here's part of my answer
that I basically based this essay on.
The most direct answer that I could come up with,
and it sounds kind of harsh or like sociopathic
or something, is that if you spend time in an environment
that rewards you for being funny
and punishes you for not being funny,
you get way funnier way faster.
That isn't necessarily a good thing and those environments
aren't always creatively or emotionally supportive
or nurturing, but that's kind of the shortcut,
like going to another country when studying a language
to force yourself to learn to speak it.
When we were all talking about this Joel said,
"Tell them to just get funny friends.
Then you'll all want to out-riff each other
and will never have a real conversation again."
And that is honestly what it's like
when you hang out with comics, or in my case,
comics or edgy internet forums circa 2008.
And that is kind of the language everyone speaks in.
And if you can't keep up
you get left behind in the conversation.
Again, this kind of environment can be very unhealthy.
I have quit being friends
with a lot of the funniest people I know
because they were also mean/selfish people
who used laughter as validation.
And "be around funny people" isn't really viable advice.
But you could try going to stand-up or improv shows
and try doing stand-up even if you don't take classes.
I think my answer for myself is,
especially since the idea of just doing straight improv
or taking improv classes or doing stand-up,
are all not anything I am remotely interested in
just because of my own disposition,
I'm just going to have to endure that vulnerability
of learning how to be funnier without relying on bad habits
as I go and as I get better on mic on the internet,
recorded forever, working to keep up with people
with years more experience than me,
and always reading and watching and listening to
and playing funny media as inspiration.
- [Man] Hello, baby!
- [Shannon] But I'm glad I'm at least pushing myself
and learning more.
And it's not that I'm unfunny, or that I think I'm unfunny.
Fans do think I'm funny on the show
and I know in conversation or on panels
I can make people laugh.
It's not that I suck at comedy.
It's more that it's been a while since I challenged myself
with anything creative in this way.
I learned how to draw as a child,
I learned how to edit as a teenager,
I've enjoyed writing all my life.
I've gotten paid to do all three a bunch of times.
I'm not saying I'm the best at them, I just mean
I'm not self-conscious about them at all.
Like, I know that I can edit.
I've been editing for fifteen years,
I've been drawing for like 25 years,
since I was a small child.
I haven't been podcasting for 25 years!
And I've never done stand-up or improv
or any serious comedy writing,
so what hubris to just like assume I'd be as good at comedy,
at being funny, as people with years of experience
in those when I've been spending years making video essays
about auteur theory and reviewing Korean webcomics?
Doc Hammer, one of the showrunners of "The Venture Brothers"
and an accomplished oil painter,
said this once about his paintings.
"Painting is showing up and dealing with sucking.
People will get on me and tell me that I need to relax
and take it easy, that I'm not really that bad.
What they are missing is the arrogance of what I am saying,
the fact that I know I suck proves that I know
I am better than this, which is a very arrogant thing to do,
so people should not be concerned with my self-esteem.
When I say I suck, it actually means
that this is not a representation of my ability.
I know that inside me is better.
Dealing with my sucking and proudly saying this sucks
is how I get up and do it again.
I can't let that thing get out there.
I have to apologize for it with my next piece."
And that's me with, like, failed jokes that I make.
Anyone trying to get funnier in other mediums
has to keep risking sucking and being vulnerable in that way
to hopefully get better and get funnier
the same way stand-up comics and improvisers do onstage.
But I also want to do it without being cruel
and without relying too much on laughs for validation
or my own self-image which are both traps
that are easy to fall into and excused
and encouraged in a lot of comedy environments.
I also should say, again, since I make fun of it so much
in this essay that I don't hate stand-up.
I love stand-up, it's not for me personally to perform it,
but I have so much respect for people who work so hard at it
and are good at it and who transform the medium
in such cool ways in ways
that I never would have considered.
And I didn't want this essay to be like,
Shannon Strucci's Manifesto Against Stand-Up Comedy
or to be perceived as some kind of reaction
against bad personal experiences that I had.
On my top films of the decade video
a couple of people suggested "Nanette" to me.
I've seen "Nanette" and I did not like it.
I actually had a line about not liking "Nanette"
in that video that I cut.
The more I linger on it, the more I think
I kind of hated "Nanette".
I have sympathy for Gadsby and respect for her,
but I did not agree with her underlying message at all,
and as openly critical of the defensive
and often unhealthy culture around stand-up as I am,
I could not follow her to the conclusions that she reached,
especially knowing so many Atlanta queer comics
and black comics and comics with mental illness
and female comics and other comics of color
or comics from other marginalized groups
or people who are a part of multiple
or many marginalized communities who use comedy
to talk about really difficult subjects,
rape, racism, disability and ableism, self-harm, poverty,
suicide attempts, in a way that is very meaningful
and very funny.
I should note, too, there's so much variance in comedy,
even specifically in stand-up.
I'm not saying all cutting comedy is toxic automatically
or any more kind of intense, competitive comedic environment
is inherently problematic or anything like that.
I'm not like, sitting here saying,
"Showtime at the Apollo" is inherently problematic
and an example of toxic masculinity, or anything like that.
And I'm not admonishing the concept of roasting people
or of roasts generally.
It's more what interpersonal issues that I experienced
in the Atlanta comedy scene were kind of excused
or exacerbated by the comedy culture.
Not saying all comedy has to be nice,
although that was sort of my point with the video, too,
that sometimes nice and being funny are very at odds.
And it's been quite an adjustment, I think,
for stand-up comics to be doing shows over Zoom calls,
and that's been very interesting.
I didn't really want to talk about the pandemic earlier on
in this essay, I didn't want to date it that much
because I want this video to be up in the future.
And I do think if you want to get good at stand-up
then you just have to go to open mics.
You just have to do it and fail and do it and fail
and do it and fail and slowly get better.
It's my perception anyway.
Anyway, thank you for watching.
If you haven't seen my political correctness video that's,
like I said, a good companion piece to this video,
and you should definitely check that out.
I'll link the Mark Meer "Critical Bits" episode
in the description, but I think the funniest episode
that we've done is probably Hoagie Allin
which is the episode Branson Reese guested on.
- [Branson] Today is the day that Hoagie Allin
is gonna take a man's life from him!
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,
which is only fair!
- [Shannon] Branson is a fantastic comic artist
and improv comedian.
- I'm Jimmy Buffett!
- [Shannon] And actor and he has his own podcast,
"Rude Tales of Magic" that's really, really good.
It's really funny, and he played the very mean,
petty character who wanted to kill one of the main cast
named Hoagie Allin.
And I think that's a good intro episode of the show as well
if you've never listened.
I mean, there's spoilers, it's a little bit later on,
but I think it's the best
out-of-context episode for our show.
- [Woman] Maybe you should be bad at like,
the witch instead--
- [Branson] I'm not mad at the witch.
She gave me a superpower!
- [Woman] Oh.
- [Branson] She said, "You're gonna have bad luck
for the rest of your life unless you learn your lesson
about how to treat other people
and how to forgive them for stuff.
That's it, that's a superpower!
All I have to do is never learn my lesson
and I have a power for the rest of my life, watch this!
I'm gonna step out into the street
right in front of a car. - Oh no, no!
- [Man] So the semi truck starts to, like, honk
at Hoagie Allin and he does not move and then--
- [Branson] I do the, like Triple X like, suck it!
- [Shannon] That's my favorite episode to link people.
If you'd like to support me doing more of this,
I have a Patreon and a Ko-fi, and we have merchandise
both for "Critical Bits" and I had StrucciMovies merchandise
but nobody bought it, but message me if you want to buy,
like, a StrucciMovies sticker or postcard, I have 'em.
But on the free Big Cartel
you can only have five products at a time
so now it's all "Critical Bits" stuff, thanks.