Let's be independent together!

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on April 22nd, 2008

John Wenzel writes for the Denver Post. He pays a lot of attention to standup comedy, particularly alternative comedy. In fact, Wenzel says he’s got a book coming out about that branch of comedy typified by/led by David Cross, Demetri Martin, Sarah Silverman, Patton Oswalt, et al.

He calls the movement “indie comedy.” (In fact, there’s every possibility that Wenzel actually coined that term.) Indie (short for independent) more aptly describes that genre of comedy that has developed fairly recently. It’s the kind of standup that was depicted in Oswalt’s Comedians of Comedy Tour (and subsequent movie about the tour).

It’s actually a better way to characterize the scene– at least from a PR standpoint. Rather than just conveying the Us Against Them implications of the “alternative” label, “Indie” implies a certain level of take-charge entrepreneurialism, an autonomy, an admirable DIY attitude that the former term lacked.

And, whereas alternative acts came about in an era when studios, agents, suits, managers and networks were calling the shots, Indie acts are all about vertical integration– locating the venue, marketing the shows, micromanaging the audience demo, creating the vibe, booking the acts and, of course, putting yourself and your Indie buddies on the bill. Indie comics seem also to have abandoned much of the bitterness and the self-pity that inevitably made its way into the articles written about the scene and into the quotes that those articles were framed by.

It’s a natural progression, a maturation of the business. Much of this maturation has been brought about by modern technology– the WWW, MySpace, cheap printing, etc. (And it is this very same technology that has so severely eroded the power of those aforementioned studio executives and captains of the entertainment industry.)

Alts took their cues from the Entertainment Industry at large. Indies seem unbound by such restrictions. Just as some independent musical artists have thrown off the chains of major record labels and have bucked the traditional channels of distribution, so too have Indie comics sought to avoid chain clubs and people who, in Wenzel’s words, “settle at candlelit tables to hear jokes from a random stand-up.”

Our ruminations here on Indie/Alt comedy were spurred initially by a Wenzel article in yesterday’s Denver Post on the Denver comedy collective known as Wrist Deep Productions, in which Wenzel once again makes the case for Indie comedy.

In other words, smart, aggressive stand-up that shatters expectations without spinning off into abstractions. The result is an injection of the punk-rock ethos into an art form that suffered an image crisis at the hands of the ’80s comedy boom and bust — one from which Wrist Deep is helping it recover.

We can forgive the bombast. Wenzel has a book to sell. But at least he’s enthusiastic and, for the most part, positive when he describes his favorite brand of standup. (And he is suprisingly restrained when he disses the non-Indie brand.)

It’s very instructive and informative to go back and read Wenzel’s other pieces on the subject. This article, in November of 2006, is, Wenzel admits, pretty much the book proposal, for his upcoming tome. And the opening 81 words is the elevator pitch:

Overpriced two-drink minimums. A tacky comb-over in a blazer. Sickly potato skins and drunken bachelorette parties.

These used to be the hallmarks of live comedy, an art relegated to the controlled environs of smoky, mainstream comedy clubs.

Lucky for us, a new breed of comedians has rejected the stale format. The alternative comedy movement of the 1990s has morphed into something unpredictable and cerebral. Something more akin to the visceral, anti-establishment ethos of punk and indie rock.

Call it indie comedy.

We’ll overlook the “tacky comb-over in a blazer” reference (that’s rather jarring in its inauthenticity!), but, once again, Wenzel manages to be upbeat when advocating for Indie. And the entire article is worth reading for its information and for his success in eliciting thoughtful, insightful quotes from Indie gods such as Cross, Martin and Brian Posehn.

We found yet another Wenzel piece, this time from his DP blog, on the occasion of his fourth visit to the South By Southwest festival in Austin last month. SXSW has, like so many other formerly strictly music festivals, incorporated standup into the program. A natural progression for indie music and, Wenzel notes, a natural progression for Indie comedy. But the evolution of Indie is not without its problems.

To be sure, indie comedy is not the largest or most diverse scene out there. Comedy nerds like myself that weekly devour Adult Swim and SuperDeluxe offerings tend to notice the same several dozen people (mostly white dudes) popping up at these fests. And if you live in L.A., New York, Chicago or Seattle you’re also likely to see the same handful of comedians at shows like Comedy Death Ray, or touring indie music venues in general, or releasing albums on indie music labels like Sub Pop, Drag City and Matador. In other words, overlapping with the indie rock sphere in a way that implies an inexorable, blessed blend of the two.

Which brings us to the piece in yesterday’s Post. If you read the three pieces in order, you can follow along as the genre (the movement?) grows and evolves. And, if we were to handicap it, if we were to try and guess at which point the movement is in its history (its epoch, if you will allow us to take the evolution analogy further), we would say that it is just about to succumb to its own success. Name us a genre that hasn’t. (In fact, if we’re to take Wenzel’s constant comparison of Indie comedy to punk rock to its logical extreme, we might be, not quite, but just about, at that point where Blondie released “Rapture.”)

Out there, on the road, over the past year or two, we’ve seen two tracks forming among open mikers and upandcomers: Your typical open mike comic will either emulate Dane Cook or he’ll present himself as an amalgam of a handful of Alt/Indie stars. There are exceptions to be sure. But the exceptions are rare.

Neither trend bodes well for the future. (In the former example, it takes an awful lot of personality and energy and cunning to pull off the Cook thing. But that’s an entire post for another day.) In the latter example, it is evidenced by an army of comedians (“mostly white dudes,” as Wenzel says) who dress alike and who affect similar grooming, delivery and quirks. And they reference an alarmingly similar array of words, phrases and subjects– AIDS, rape, abortion, genocide are specifically mentioned in yesterday’s DP article, with abortion being cited twice. It’s what Wenzel calls “hipster catnip.”

And they slather their presentations generously with Alt/Indy buzzwords and terms– “nutsack,” (and its variant, “ballsack”), “Satan’s spawn,” “soul-crushing,” “anal rape,” “fist fucking” and “Stephen Hawking.” Extra points are awarded if you manage to work in the name of any mid-20th century philosopher (Sartre is okay, Nietzsche is much better. Work in Jacques Derrida and they throw you a party). And if you manage to work in one or more reference into a single joke– i.e., Stephen Hawking getting fistfucked– you take home the blue ribbon.

For all its talk about innovation and breathing new life into the artform, for all of its huffery and puffery about moving the boundaries and challenging old expectations, there seems to be an awful lot of regimentation and replication– some of it self-imposed, some of it accidental. And this tendency toward imitation rather than innovation might destroy any of the good that emerges from the movement. See indie films– they’ve become self-parodying, bloated, high-budget, cliche-packed havens for the same old artists, directors, producers and distributors, virtually indistinguishable from the studio product. The same might happen to Indie comedy if folks aren’t careful.

(Check out MileHiComedy.com, a website curated by Denver comic Donna Ayers. She’s quoted in the April 21 DP article and her site pays strict attention to the comics and comedy venues of Denver and surrounding area. Every market, big or small, needs a site like this one.)

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