\n <\/p>\n
Stop me if you\u2019ve heard this one before. A stand-up comic, tired of hiding behind jokes, jolts the audience by finally getting real with a personal confession, which, invariably, changes everything.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s corny, if effective, and is such a common scene that I have come to expect it in any movie or TV show about a comedian, like explosions in an action movie or a marriage at the end of a romantic comedy.<\/p>\n
An early example is from the movie \u201cPunchline<\/strong>,\u201d when Tom Hanks chokes up telling a club audience that he disappointed his father, failing out of medical school:<\/p>\n In \u201cObvious Child<\/strong>,\u201d Jenny Slate stops joking in one set to say she was cheated on. Things get dark:<\/p>\n After his jokes are met with awkward silence, Kumail Nanjiani pivots abruptly in \u201cThe Big Sick<\/strong>,\u201d offering an apology and an explanation:<\/p>\n In the hit \u201cBaby Reindeer<\/strong>,\u201d the comic Donny Dunn (Richard Gadd) breaks out in dramatic sobs and florid metaphors, revealing he\u2019s the victim of abuse that has made him loathe himself. It\u2019s a speech that would fit right into a clip at an awards show:<\/p>\n The latest example can be seen in the recent season of \u201cHacks<\/strong>,\u201d where the usually jaded host Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) refuses the network\u2019s order to fire her head writer, using her opening monologue to become tearfully sentimental and quit in protest:<\/p>\n These movies make stand-up look like therapy, albeit a kind that follows a pretty rigid script.<\/p>\n The confession is usually triggered by a joke bombing:<\/p>\n Expect shots of stunned audience members \u2026<\/p>\n \u2026 along with a nervous chuckle, a cough, a dry lip smack, a mic squeak and some throat-clearing:<\/p>\n Someone always walks out, usually an audience member \u2026<\/p>\n \u2026 sometimes a network executive:<\/p>\n Then the comic gets mad at the world.<\/p>\n Some scenes are more realistic than others, especially those that illustrate artistic evolution. In \u201cSleepwalk With Me<\/strong>,\u201d Mike Birbiglia plays a struggling comic telling jokes that don\u2019t connect. That changes after he takes the microphone off the stand and gets honest:<\/p>\n The epiphany is less personal than aesthetic. In the first episode of \u201cCrashing<\/strong>,\u201d Pete Holmes plays another green comic who goes more confessional, with the opposite result:<\/p>\n In real life, comics abruptly stopping their act to get soberly personal almost never happens, but there are exceptions. Someone like Jerrod Carmichael often aims for stand-up that has the feel of one of these intimate scenes, including his special \u201cRothaniel,<\/strong>\u201d in which he divulges secrets between punchlines:<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible that Deborah Vance from \u201cHacks\u201d would depart wildly from character and quit on air. Or that the comic in \u201cBaby Reindeer\u201d would dump all his subtext into an eloquently improvised 10-minute monologue in a comedy contest. But the reason we keep seeing such scenes over and over has a more practical explanation.<\/p>\n An onstage speech is the easiest way to dramatize the emotional landscape of a character. In real life, that can be messy and often underarticulated. But for a dramatic shortcut, put the feelings onstage inside a climactic monologue and you will have the audience\u2019s attention. The alternative \u2014 to get real with you for a moment \u2014 is the hard work of writing a nuanced, believable scene.<\/p>\n Videos: Columbia Pictures (\u201cPunchline\u201d); A24 (\u201cObvious Child\u201d); Amazon Studios and Lionsgate (\u201cThe Big Sick\u201d); Netflix (\u201cBaby Reindeer\u201d); HBO (\u201cCrashing\u201d and \u201cRothaniel\u201d); HBO Max (\u201cHacks\u201d); IFC Films (\u201cSleepwalk With Me\u201d)<\/p>\n Produced by Tala Safie. Design by Alice Fang.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Stop me if you\u2019ve heard this one before. A stand-up comic, tired of hiding behind jokes, jolts the audience by finally getting real with a personal confession, which, invariably, changes everything. It\u2019s corny, if effective, and is such a common scene that I have come to expect it in any movie or TV show about<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[2511,2513,2512],"class_list":{"0":"post-9878","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-anatomy","9":"tag-cliche","10":"tag-comedy"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}