Half and Half Comedy

One of the things I learned this week is that comedy is constantly evolving. There’s the original stand-up comedy, writing comedically, comical movies and shows, and now podcasts. There’s also a form of comedy that isn’t always comedy. I’ve decided to call it half-and-half comedy. You know, like  half-and-half for your coffee, but instead of being milk and cream, it’s comedy and seriousness.

Jenny Slate and Hannah Gadsby are the reigning queens of half-and-half. They couldn’t be more different seeing as how one is a straight, Jewish female from the United States, and the other is a lesbian woman from Australia. However, they both did something similar; they changed the way we view stand-up comedy. In Jenny Slate’s Stage Fright, we see a side of her we haven’t seen before. It’s a side I definitely didn’t expect to see in her stand-up comedy show. She does something that no one I’ve seen has done before. Slate adds these home videos, intertwined with her comedy bits, that build off of, or lead up to the videos. She mixes her comedy sketches with the comedy of her family, and introduces us to them. In it there’s a cut scene where it shows her being interviewed, and she’s talking about her stage fright. Slate says, “Will they like me? And I know that they will once I start to talk, but I don’t earn the love unless I give something beautiful that goes out. So, my stage fright comes from a deeper thing of like, of exchange” (46:51 - 47:14). As she’s saying this she starts crying, and suddenly you don’t feel like laughing anymore. I think this is really important because she’s giving you an insight to how comedians can be vulnerable too, and she is.

Hannah Gadsby does the same thing in her show Nanette. She starts off with jokes that make you laugh so hard you’re crying, and ends so seriously that you’re crying again. Only they aren’t happy tears this time, they’re sad and angry tears. The whole show she eludes to how comedy is no longer for her, but you don’t know where she’s going with that until she actually gets there. About half-way through the show Gadsby tells us a story about an ignorant man who almost beat her up. She makes a joke out of it and everyone laughs, but we don’t realize until almost the end of the show that we were laughing at her expense. Gadsby says, “Remember that story I told about the young man who almost beat me up. It was a very funny story; it was very funny… I actually am pretty good at controlling the tension, and I know how to balance that to get the laugh at the right place. But in order to balance the tension in the room with that story, I couldn’t tell that story as it actually happened” (59:08 - 59:32). She tells us afterwards that the man did in fact beat her up. At this point everyone has gone dead silent because they’ve realized what they’ve done. We laughed about a joke that we should have never laughed at. Gadsby continues this tone of seriousness for the last nine minutes of her show, making you constantly wonder when the next joke will be. I was honestly shocked when she ended it the way she did. I sat there thinking, but wait where’s the joke, and when she came back out to bow I was certain she’d tell one. However, she knew if she did then the lesson she’d just taught us would be forgotten, and that was much more important than any comic relief she could have given us.

Technically I guess I’ve learned three things this week. The first is that comedy is always evolving. The second Slate taught me which is, you can be a funny person and still be vulnerable. The third thing I learned came from Gadsby which is, you can be funny and still teach people an important lesson. Her story needed to be heard and she told it beautifully. Thanks to these two women, I feel like I can go out into the world and be less afraid to be vulnerable, and help spread awareness of how easy it is to treat others with kindness.

                                                                                                          

Photo Credit: http://www.clipartbest.com/search?q=serious+face