And, from Nancy Groves, writing in the UK Independent comes a story on “the craze that’s taking over comedy clubs.”

Storytelling.

That’s right. It’s taking over comedy clubs. Because, for God’s sake, something needs to take over comedy clubs. They can’t just have comedy there. How… vulgar! It’s about time something took over the comedy clubs. It’s about bloody time!

So what differentiates a storytelling night from your average Jongleurs set? Haven’t comedians always mined their own lives for material? “Yes, but what we’re doing is taking it back to the original story the comedian starts with, before that story is turned into stand-up,” Lederer says. “It’s a dopey analogy, but it’s like the bare fir tree before it becomes a Christmas tree. Stand-ups put all sorts of decoration on the branches to make it shinier. And that can be beautiful. But what about the goodness of the tree as it stands in your own backyard?”

Let’s see if we have this straight: Storytelling is “taking it back to the original story the comedian starts with, before that story is turned into standup.” Hmmm… so it would be… the story… without all that annoying jokey stuff, the stuff that makes people guffaw and exhale and gasp and tear up and, you know, laugh! Laughing is so… gauche. And actually going for the laugh is, well, it’s unseemly.

Conversely, holding back and being all coy and reserved and artsy is proof that one has “mastered complex languages of metaphor, symbol and meaning.” And, well, I guess we can all conclude that all this makes storytellers much better than comedians.

Of course, that’s all nonsense.

Some of our best friends are storytellers. We’ve enjoyed watching some shows in this format ourselves. Not all storytellers are as pretentious and as blowhardy as the ones in the Independent article. Because they know that what they’re doing (or attempting to do) is hard, it’s entertaining, it’s catching a lot of buzz. But they don’t think that automatically makes them (or what they do) more virtuous than standup comics or what they do.

Why, we ask, can’t the two exist simultaneously? Why must one suffer if/when the other “takes over?” Why do these people exist in a zero-sum artistic/aesthetic contest where one form will obliterate another… if there’s any justice in this world.

Why, we ask, is the subject of standup even introduced into articles like this one? (Aside from the obvious fact that some of these storytelling events are held in comedy clubs.) Unless of course, the intent is to set up some grand artisic endeavor championship, some unification of the title, like in boxing. It is a curious thing to witness folks clawing and scratching and climbing over each other to prove that this art form or that discipline is somehow “better” than standup comedy.

Read the rest of the article (if you must). It’s recycled clichés from all the other articles from the past twenty years about how storytelling and poetry slams and spoken word nights are going to crowd out standup once and for all. (Does the name Henry Rollins ring any bells?) Another in long line of pieces that simultaneously touts storytelling as the most ancient of arts and heralds it as The Next Big Thing.