Modified On June 15, 2007
Steve Heisler, writing for TimeOut Chicago, interrogates Patton Oswalt, giving him a chance to say some interesting things about the alternative vs. mainstream debate.
But also keep in mind a lot of, um, 90 percent of mainstream comedians are just boring people and 90 percent of alternative comedians are bad comedians. You know? Alternative comedy came out of comedians who’d been doing it so fucking long that they just got bored with it and started fucking around and getting more personal and more experimental. So a lot of these comedians that just started off just as alternative comedians never went through the “just becoming good comedians” first. Does that make sense? It’s like a chef starting out going, “I’m gonna be, like, the guy at Alinea or the guy at Moto.” It’s like, Well, no, you need to learn how to just cook an omelette first. [Changes voice]”Fuck that! I’m gonna do like a weird fusion thing where you’ve gotta wear a silver hat and….” No, dude, just… I bet the guys at Moto and Alinea, if you just gave them a pan and three eggs, they could make the best omelette you’ve ever eaten; but they could do it without thinking, so that’s boring for them. Does that make sense?
The omelette metaphor (or is that a simile?) is perfect.
We recently came to a tentative conclusion that a lot of agents and managers abused the “alternative” label, passing off their clients as alt acts to provide a sort of cover for their client’s inexperience. (An alternative stage was one venue where a comic’s seemingly offhanded delivery and/or lack of slick was perceived as an asset rather than a liability.) Of course, in the case of many of the early alt acts, that delivery was achieved through years of working at standup in the traditional way, then deconstructing things. To put it another way, it was a studied and intentional lack of polish. Less than 48 hours later, we read Oswalt saying basically the same thing.