comedy

Impressions on the standup comics and crowds in Midtown for the East Village.

• Midtown: Long-Island like, sports and sex jokes, louder, more stereotypically New York, Mitch Hedburg, played into racial stereotypes, comfortable, comedy as a hobby, beer culture.

• East Village: nuanced, less obvious punchlines, more believable personal stories,

When I first started listening to comedy in college, there was definitely an interest trying it out. Could I do that? Even though I was open to writing, songwriting, architecture, and basically anything, comedy felt like the one craft that was untouchable. It’s hyper-vulnerable. The artifacts are fused with the person and the whole thing is judged

Did not expect Jerry Seinfeld to be promoting transcendental meditation.

How to Write Funny and The Hidden Tools of Comedy. I forgot where I found these recommendations, but now that I look them up and see their mass-market covers and promises, I’m skeptical. Can you learn comedy from a book? I’d think a better method is to actually laugh at something, rewind, and then figure out why it works.

The idea to approach standup comedy with no intent to become a comedian, but just as one of the sub-exercises of becoming an essayist. It’s the “live” element of writing.

An essayist, a novelist, a memoirist, a historian, a poet, a comedian, a narrative philosopher, a songwriter, a screenwriter — in the search to find the edges of language, the writer finds temptations to learn all the sub-mediums.

Comedy is making and breaking frames over and over until it’s over.

I wonder if all jokes boil down to the same pattern that eventually gets layered and complexified by veteran comedians. A joke is made by creating a frame with an embedded assumption, and then using a punchline to break the frame and reveal an implied truth. There are two layers of subtext, the assumption (the undertone), and the post-punchline

The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge.

Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough to get close to