When you’re teaching comedy and you’re invoking Nelson Mandela, something has gone horribly wrong.
From what we can piece together, Louie Anderson and Kyle Cease started this thing called Comedy Boot Camp (We mentioned it, in passing, in one of our recent Montreal updates), and here’s a screencap is an interview with Cease to find out what all the fuss is about. (Click it to be taken to the interview itself… if you dare.)
Cease wants to change standup comedy. We’re not sure exactly what it is about standup that needs changing at the moment. But Cease is determined to “re-boom the scene” fifty or sixty comics at a time. He’s determined to do so by means of his Boot Camp. (So… at $299 per comic, Cease and Co. will be paid $14,950 every time he “re-booms a scene.” Nice hustle!)
If the interview (posted online by MSU Telecasters, whatever that is… God bless you if you can ascertain what MSU stands for) is designed to generate enthusiasm for the Boot Camp, it is, as the kids say, a major FAIL. Clad in the Generation Y Zippered Hoodie/Backward Baseball Cap uniform (that even Generation Y has stopped wearing!) Cease is seated at Zanies comedy club (we see the familiar logo in the background… along with caricatures of… Yakov Smirnoff?) as he holds forth on such topics as Tony Robbins, addiction, fear, creativity and “your core self.” It’s a warmed over hodgepodge of motivational buzzwords, spiritual uplift, Freudian psychology and New Age doublespeak that causes the eyes to not just roll back into the head but maybe even dropped down into the lower intestines.
We’re reminded of that insufferable bore who has just found Jesus, or has recently discovered macrobiotics, and who badgers strangers into accepting the Lord or who never misses a chance to tell unsuspecting diners in the next booth that bacon will kill them slowly.
We will save you the trouble of watching Cease’s ramblefest: Go to Home Depot and buy a hammer and a four-inch, spiral-shank nail. Then drive it slowly into your skull, with tiny, measured taps. If you hit brain matter before the 26:05 mark, you’ll be better off than us. And you will probably have experienced far less pain.
While watching, we were horrified at the prospect of all the open-mikers who might have the misfortune of listening to this claptrap. Being told, “If you’re passionate about what you’re talking about, you won’t have stage fright,” might be one of the dumbest things anyone has ever told an aspiring comic. And that leads us to imagine another horror: The audience who has to sit through an open mike that features a parade of open mikers who have been told, “If you’re passionate about what you’re talking about, you won’t have stage fright.” (Compare this to what we tell comedians who’ve attended our seminars: “You’re probably going to bomb the first time. If you don’t bomb the first time, you’ll probably bomb the second time. Everybody bombs.” Simple. To the point. Useful. Heavy on the practical experience. Light on references to Nelson Mandela.)
It’s all over the map.
Perhaps the most infuriating thing about the Cease Method is that he cautions aspiring comics to re-prioritize and not go for the laugh. The most important thing, Cease says, is “You need to be authentic, you need to be real, you need to break down barriers. Stop doing things based on crowd approval.” We’ve seen this seeping into the language of so many comics and critics and hucksters– It’s gauche to go for the laugh. Actually caring about a response is the mark of a hack, is a sign that you’re shameless, a loser. It’s a strange sort of math that is popping up from time to time that says that someone who consciously, intentionally goes for a laugh is automatically pandering. And its corollary: The performer who doesn’t go for the laugh, and who doesn’t particularly care if the audience likes him– who is “in the moment,” or “authentic” or is finding his “real voice”– is the comedian who serves as the gold standard, the role model for all to follow.
But it’s all very muddled. The interview sounds like someone who was emerging from a Tony Robbins lecture and was asked to recap what he’d just heard– it’s Whisper Down The Motivational Lane. It’s a disjointed speech that seeks to outline the Brave New World of Standup as envisioned by Anderson and Cease.
Anderson is held up as a prime example of someone who uses the pain onstage– abuse by an alcoholic dad– to achieve comedy enlightenment free of suffering, desire and ignorance (our apologies to The Buddha). There’s only one problem: Anderson didn’t mine the heartache until well after he had made a small fortune telling fat jokes. (Well-written fat jokes, mind you, and told well. But his formula for success was a very traditional one– setup/punchline, relying on honed material, on subjects with a wide appeal, no pun attended.)
If this is the formula, the method, the means that they’re teaching aspiring comics (or stalled comics, or comics wishing to “push it to the next level), then they’re giving them way too much information. We tell comics how to survive their first five minutes onstage. Get used to the sound, the lights. Don’t worry about “being your authentic self.” That will come eventually, in some form or another (if we understand the phrase correctly). And don’t listen to anyone who tells you how to go about crafting an identity or an approach.
He talks about “success,” in the same breath as “money” and selling out Madison Square Garden… but we’re not clear on how he defines success… but we’re pretty sure he equates success with money. (He mentions selling out MSG, so we’re pretty sure he means money… Who sells out MSG without coming out with a bucket of cash?)
Let’s examine the top-earning comedians for the last year, as compiled by Forbes:
1. Jeff Dunham
2. Dane Cook
3. Terry Fator
4. Chelsea Handler
5. George Lopez
6. Larry the Cable Guy
7. Russel Peters
8. Jeff Foxworthy (tie)
8. Howie Mandel
10. Bill Engvall
Most motivational speakers will tell their audience to identify successful people, analyze their methods and emulate those methods as closely as possible. In this case, Cease identifies the successful people (not by name but by the fact that they’re playing MSG) and prescribes a method that seems at odds with theirs.
And out of the top ten on this list, we’d say that there might be nine different approaches. (And one could argue that even the ventriloquists take starkly different approaches to their particular craft.)
Is anyone on this list trying to change the hearts and minds of their audience? Is anyone delivering their material with this passion that Cease jabbers on about? How many of them are drawing on pain to arrive at their material, their presentation?
They’ve become wildly successful (as have, no doubt, the next ten or twenty people on a Forbes list that would go further) by writing great material and presenting it to the audience with the intention of making them bust a gut.
If you’re going to push a method for success, you would do well to cite an example or two. It’s not Cease. When he achieved his mainstream success– an hourlong Comedy Central special two years ago– he claims to have been suicidal. It’s certainly not Anderson (see above). So, we’re not quite sure who has achieved wild success through his recommended methods. And we’re somewhat skeptical as to who might achieve it in the future using these methods.
And if it’s standup comedy in general that he wants to fix, we’re convinced that it doesn’t need fixing.
“For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” –Nelson Mandela