I'm dying up here
So it's Thursday. Sue me.
Comedy's, Like, Groovy, Man
I’ve become obsessed with HBO Max’s new show Minx, a comedy about the creation of the first erotic magazine for women — and not just because it stars Jake Johnson. What intrigues me about it is that the show is set in the 1970s, a period I enjoy watching recreated onscreen. I’ve always been fascinated by the time period, but I’ve recently become infatuated with its style and history. And I’m not the only one, thanks to the sort of mysticism that surrounds the era. The culture was an exciting time, full of booms in every industry. New clothing styles were being created. Feminism was making a real splash, and there was an underlying sense of freedom in the air. The ‘70s are glitz! The ‘70s are glamour! The ‘70s are cool, so anything from there is cool, too. From a bell bottoms revival to rollerskating, the 1970s aesthetic has reached peak trend status. “This time around, the ‘70s have achieved full-on saturation,” says GQ. “The feeling is everywhere all at once.”
The other reason I was so excited that Minx would be set in the 1970s is that I think comedies are just better when they’re set in that era. Something about watching men in bell bottoms hold a microphone and tell jokes makes sense to me. I mean, I was definitely disappointed when Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here was canceled. The Nice Guys, set in 1970s’ LA, is one of my favorite movies ever. I can recite lines from That ‘70s Show. And hey, I’m looking forward to Minions: The Rise of Gru (it’s set in the ‘70s — look it up).
I began to wonder what it is about the 1970s that makes it such a good setting for modern comedies. The obvious reason is, of course, the nostalgia factor. You don’t have to look at comedies set in the ‘70s specifically to know that shows/movies about times past kill with audiences. People want to relive — or newly experience, in a way — bygone eras. There’s a sense of escapism that comes from consuming nostalgic content; you get to run off into a different time and place. Whether that escape comes from wanting to relive fond memories of a period you lived through or the impossible desire to visit one that’s often outfitted with lavish sets and cool-as-hell clothing, nostalgia done right can make people feel more connected to the content — as well as more interested in it.
"Nostalgia is the warm, fuzzy emotion that we feel when we think about fond memories from our past," Erica Hepper, Ph.D., a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Surrey in England, tells Huffington Post. But, she adds, "It often feels bittersweet -- mostly happy and comforting, but with a tinge of sadness that whatever we’re remembering is lost in some way."
This is where the whole comedy thing comes into play. Because there’s that positive, happy emotion that you get from experiencing nostalgia, using it as the foundation for a comedy just makes sense. You’re starting with a baseline uplifting tone, so any humor you build on top of that is going to be heightened by the underlying sense of joy. Even if it does drum up that bittersweet feeling, there’s a pleasure that comes with getting to see it recreated beautifully onscreen with attention-grabbing characters.
And while nostalgia is a big part of why period comedies exist, the biggest reason is that comedy and the 1970s are inextricably linked. Comedy was in such a period of evolution during the 1970s; it defined the ‘70s while being defined itself by the ‘70s, for lack of better phrasing.
Before the ‘70s, though, the 1960s saw a huge surge in counterculture, of which comedy played a big part. More people began to find the art form and realized they could mold just being funny into an actual career. Then, in the 1970s, comedy boomed. People flocked to metropolitan areas for the chance to make it big. Comics of this time literally changed the game. “It’s almost like listening to music. “The rhythms are so different. The cadence is so different.”
At that time, counterculture was cool. I mean, it still is! So as comedians began performing at different bars and clubs, they became something more than performers — they became part of a fast, exciting, unexplored scene. They became voices for people who didn’t even know they could use their voice like that. In the ‘70s, “Comedy had become ‘cool,’” writes LiveAbout, “and the art form was reborn.”
At the same time that the comedian population really began to grow, so did the comedy industry as a whole. Comedy clubs began opening left and right. The famous Comedy Store in LA opened in 1972 — and went on to open two more locations by 1976. A West Coast branch of The Improv also opened in 1975. At that point, the original location in New York had been open since 1963. In 1972, Catch a Rising Star opened its first location, and in 1976, Comic Strip Live joined the party. Second City opened its Toronto campus, which went on to nurture a lot of stars, in 1973. Comedy was rapidly growing in the culture-making metropolitans and was, in turn, quickly becoming a significant part of the entertainment zeitgeist.
On its tail, though, the boom also brought about a comedy revolution. In 1979, nearly 150 comics who regularly worked at The Comedy Store went on strike for six weeks, demanding pay for their sets (they previously performed for exposure). They ended up winning the right to a specified amount per set, effectively unionizing. It changed the way people thought about comedians just as much as it changed how comedians thought about the comedy industry. Comedy wasn’t just a hobby you did down at the club anymore. Now, it was a recognized art form that you got paid for.
On top of the growth of clubs, comedy was also exploding on TV. In 1976, Second City launched SCTV, a sketch show based out of Toronto that starred names like Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Rick Moranis, and Martin Short. And a year before that, our good old friend Saturday Night Live premiered, launching what was then considered alternative comedy — and comedy in general — into our homes and the greater cultural zeitgeist.
Nostalgia will always be the main driver behind TV and film companies greenlighting comedies set in the 1970s; business is business, and nostalgia sells. But at its core, comedies fit naturally in the ‘70s setting because the two are so thoroughly entangled that one can’t exist without the other (and yeah, I know that’s how time works, but I mean culturally and metaphorically). The era itself has so much to build on, and combined with comedy’s part in the pop culture revolution of the time, you’ve got a solid foundation for a winning comedy. It’s fun, it’s interesting, and just the absurdity of cultural norms of the time is certain to make you laugh — even if the show’s writing doesn’t.
Interview with a Comedian: Zach Zucker
Zach Zucker is a clown — in that, sure, he's a comedian, but he also graduated from École Philppe Gaulier, the elite clown school in France. Taking what he learned from the unique craft, he created Stamptown, an award-winning production company "that creates and tours original comedy and music worldwide." Zucker is a true nomad, always zooming to a new place (over the two weeks we tried to plan this interview, he was moving back and forth from Portugal to France to Spain), and he now spends most of his time split between LA, NYC, and London. As well as performing as half of Norwegian-American comedy duo Zach & Viggo, Zucker created and runs Stamptown the show, which brings together comedy and variety acts for a truly unique comedic experience. I spoke to Zucker over the phone from France (I think? Could have been Spain.) about his constant travels, his capital-C Chaotic character Jack Tucker, and how he defines comedy.
How would you describe your comedy?
Oof, um, good question. I don't know. I feel like it's definitely stupid — probably start there. I started with clown school and the focus is just on fun — pleasure. Like, rather than like trying to be funny, what do you have fun doing? Because if you're having fun doing whatever you're doing, the audience will most likely like it. And even if it's not funny, at least it's entertaining.
You’ve done it all: stand-up, sketch, improv, and beyond. In fact, foundationally, you’re a clown! Clown obviously plays a big part in your comedy, but what is it that draws you to it?
[With] clowning, what I love is like—With sketch, you're stuck doing a scene that just bombed. Right away, you know you bombed. Part of the superpower of clowning, I think, is it teaches you how to be not only good at bombing but not afraid to bomb, which ultimately yields bigger risks, which yields bigger rewards and more exciting artistic choices. And if you do bomb, you can stop what you're doing at any moment and drop it. I feel like improv or sketch people feel like they're locked in, and you can't just change something because of the quote-unquote rules. Who cares? No one cares about doing proper improv; they want to see a good show.
Talk to me a bit about your comedic process. Where do you pull ideas for bits and characters from?
I'll start by saying almost never does it come fully formed. That's definitely a myth; it gets easier in the sense that you learn to trust your voice, so you know what to build from. For us, it starts from, “Do I enjoy doing this? I can do anything I want with my stage time; is this what I want to be doing? And am I loving this?” If the answer is no, obviously, we'll throw it away. But we start from there. … Sometimes there are bigger ideas that we're thinking of that we're trying to chip away at, or they materialize in a different way, but it mainly comes from us just hanging out and making each other laugh. If we're cracking each other up, and we go and try it on stage, we'll book a few nights. Usually, we say we have to do something about six times with good preparation before we really know if it works or not.
You have this character, Jack Tucker, who is… hard to describe if you haven’t seen him in action. He’s loud, air-headed, flirty, and very over-the-top. Where exactly did the idea of this character come from?
That one developed over time. In one of my solo show runs in Edinburgh, I started getting bored, and I was like, man, I want to start doing something new. … I was seeing all these terrible comedians. I was like, alright, well, that’s bad comedy. Really cringe comedy is something I personally find very funny. I had never done comedy with a microphone in my hand; I had only ever done like physical clowning, variety sketch stuff.
What was the audience reaction to Jack Tucker?
At first, it just started off with one bad joke. … As we started to do these runs of the shows, I just got my ass kicked night after night and had 75 walkouts in our Australian festival run and like 104 in the UK. It was crazy, people throwing bottles at me, people throwing punches. People are really getting upset thinking Tucker's real. We have never said anything offensive; people imagine that he's just a really bad, nasty, crazy guy. … He's not even saying anything, but people imagine this type of thing for Jack.
Is that big personality inspired by any one person, or is Jack Tucker just an amalgamation of a bunch of dudes?
It's a wide range. Sasha is a big influence for me. Besides working for him, I'm super influenced by him. My buddy, Greg Turkington — he's wonderful. He does this incredible character, Neil Hamburger, that's a massive influence. He's also just been a really cool influence in my life and just a good friend and collaborator, which has been wonderful. Tim Heidecker. Then, honestly, my dad and his two best friends, who are my uncles. They are Jack Tucker — no joke.
There's also Andrew Dice Clay like it started because my dad, his buddies love Andrew Dice Clay. … He's always smoking into the leather jackets and all this crazy stuff. Tucker's idea of comedy is that Andrew Dice Clay is maybe the only comedian he's ever seen, but he's never even actually seen a show. He just heard about him and then made his own version.
That's another big part of clown. It’s one idiot constantly miss understanding something another idiot tells him and then delivering that information, full confidence, to another group of idiots who fully misinterpret that, but also believe that they fully understand it. It's this constant game of broken telephone. That's what you then get with this character. I think it’s a clown trying his best to make a stand-up character who's never done stand up, and then this is what he thinks it looks like.
Tell me a bit about Stamptown the show. How did the idea for this program come about?
So, Stamptown started as just a response to the scene that we were in. … Me and Viggo [Venn, one half of Zach & Viggo, a clown duo] couldn't get booked because people were saying what we did wasn't comedy, which I think is so unbelievably unimaginative and lame. We had been doing that show for a while, and then I had made an hour show, a Jack Tucker solo show, called Jack Tucker Comedy Stand-up Hour. A lot of the material that I host with for Stamptown is pieces from the show that I like. … [We] also just try and create some fun storylines, … so the character keeps developing.
Stamptown combines so many things to create a hard-to-describe comedy experience — you’ve got stand-up, variety, improv, sketch, clown, and more. Where did that decision to make it more than a stand-up show come from?
I like stand up — of course I like stand up. I am not a guy who's dying to go to The Comedy Cellar and see six comics back to back to back with no rhythm or flow. I think it's so much more fun and you can put together sighting piece where you have a street performer who's like juggling a soccer ball and doing handstands, and then also a David Cross-type comedian, and also some of our crazy friends.
Stamptown does shows in NYC, LA, and London as well as around the globe. Was the intent always to make Stamptown an international show?
You become stagnant if you stay in the same place, and your art doesn't grow. There, of course, are great artists in every city, and there are great artists who never leave a city who are phenomenal and don't need that. … It’s just truly who we are; we're nomadic, we stay on the road, and we love people. … We ultimately say we put on these shows because we just like to hang out with our friends, and this is the least complicated way to do — get them all together, do a show together, and travel to be able to see them. … To me, it's just it's more exciting. I think Stampown’s the best show in the world — and I say I can say that because we've been doing it all over the world. …
Ultimately, the show is just a traveling circus, like here's a bunch of idiots coming and doing their thing, and they all love each other.
The show is truly something unique. But, you do it quite often, and you always play the same character. Do you ever feel like it gets repetitive for you as a performer at all?
It never stays stale for us. We have a ton of moments [where] we know, “okay, this moment’s about to happen,” but we never know when they're about to come. For me and my comedy partner, Johnny, who does sound, it's cool, this jazzy clowning thing. But it's funny, because we're both idiots. Both of us think we're in control of the show, and we both are. So that's why you get that fun mix where sometimes I'm leading, or he's leading, or both — just ultimately just playing together. It stays fresh and new for us. … You could come see the show 10 nights in a row, it will never be the same show, you know?
Oh, 100%. Whenever I see a Stamptown show announced, I rush to buy tickets. I’ve seen it a handful of times already, but I have a need to see it even more. It’s different every time; it seems to take on a different life with each audience.
Part of what makes our stuff good is we'll have a plan, and then everything goes wrong — and we're best when things are going wrong. That's our superpower. I welcome any light going out, microphone getting cut, a wing falling down — anything like that is perfect, because now we have something organic that the audience has seen, and we can play with that for the rest of the night. If we come out with like a game plan, we're always open to the fact that we might actually ditch all of it, but it's easier to ditch it all when you have a plan than if you just go out with nothing and don’t have a plan.
Other than continuing to produce comedy shows, what does the future hold for Stamptown?
Well, we've been talking to a few people about making a special, and I would really love to make a special. My dream is to do a show in New York, LA London, Melbourne, and India in Mumbai. To me, that would be unreal. Otherwise, just keep turning it.
We want to eventually build up into doing pop-ups around the world, like a month-long pop-up in London, New York, and LA. … Basically, … find a space, convert it, build a stage, [and] program comedy and music and dance and poetry and cool shit every night. Engag[ing] with whatever community we’re in — that's a big part of it. … We've created our own family. We … [are able] to work in these communities, where we know all the local bar managers and venue managers and [operations] folks and technicians. We want to go to all these places [and] put on something like this. We’re getting into fashion design and also having some more art exhibits and some other artists attached to it — just making these cool, fun immersive month-long pop-up experiences. …
With my personal desires to run a venue and a festival and keep making shows and collaborate and work with other people, eventually moving towards a more independent version of what is our own festival in the guise of a pop-up is exactly what I want to do.
You can catch Zucker hosting Stamptown on April 2 at Asylum NYC at 9:30pm and on April 3 at Union Hall at 8pm. To see more from Zucker, check out his Instagram or Twitter.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Saturday Night Dead?
The Bad: Who Would Cancel a Legacy?
Imagine you’re sitting at a table in a big corporate boardroom. The NBC logo looms large on the wall as the pre-meeting silence fills the air. You can feel a huge knot forming in the pit of your stomach, and you’re anxiously flipping through your notes. As the meeting begins, you’re only half paying attention, too focused on your presentation to listen to anything else. Finally, it’s your turn to pitch. You stand up. “I think the future of NBC is something new and innovative. To do that, we have to cancel Saturday Night Live.”
If I was an executive in that meeting, I would laugh out loud. I would be absolutely busting a gut in your face. Can you imagine suggesting canceling SNL in a meeting — or even just in a face-to-face with one other person? Can you imagine looking someone in the eye and telling them you think we should cancel the show that’s been on the air almost consistently for over 40 years — that was a triumph for NBC and changed the face of comedy forever?
This is going to be a short one. The question we’re aiming to answer here is, as always, why exactly is SNL still on the air? And for this column, I wanted to very briefly explore the idea that the show has an internalized legacy that keeps it afloat. People-wise, every season churns out at least one impressive comedian (often more!), and to cancel it would be to potentially miss out on the next big thing. There’s also a strong following for the show. There are tons of podcasts, blogs, newsletters (me included), etc., etc. that analyze every bit of SNL and look for it every week — even if it’s not good.
There’s a sort of mythos about Saturday Night Live that shrouds it in a level of untouchability. It’s part of the history of comedy, a living thing that continues to move with and mold the shape of the art form. It changed what comedy was when it first came out, and it continues to create breakout roles and stars. Canceling it would cause an uproar and potentially leave a hole in the world of comedy. Doesn’t the sentence “Saturday Night Live premiered live on Saturday nights on NBC from 1975 to 2022” just sound wrong? Why would such an important show get canceled? I mean, imagine canceling Monty Python! It would be blasphemy.
Well, that’s exactly the problem. The amount of pushback that NBC would receive from fans, haters, and comedians alike would be astronomical. It would be unending, and I promise you that you’d hear about it in the news for months. It would cause a ripple in the world of comedy and greater culture as a whole. As SNL has developed, it has sort of dissociated from being a show that needs to be judged as good or bad to stay afloat. Instead, it has morphed into something that simply is. It continues to air, and people continue to watch it. Whether it’s good or bad, people will talk about it. SNL has essentially almost* become too big to be canceled. (Hm, that sounds kind of familiar…)
Does that mean I think it should never be canceled? No, of course not. I’m still considering if it should even be around at this current moment! But what it does mean is that SNL has managed to keep its run going for so long in part because of its legacy of both creating greatness and reflecting the current (at the time) state of comedy. It has surpassed being a living thing and become a sort of immortal god that looms large to fans and comedians alike. To cancel it would be to shut down a part of history, to say that SNL has run its course and is no longer relevant. And unfortunately, when it keeps bringing in viewers and send out stars, Saturday Night Live is nowhere near being irrelevant.
So, it continues.
* I don’t think it’s fair to say anything is definitively too big to be canceled. The TV industry is super finicky and considers a lot of factors when deciding to cancel something. SNL can be canceled and will be canceled one day — that’s life!
The Comedy Showcase
2. Actual genius Maria Bamford's Late Late Show set
3. Ismael Loutfi's half-hour Sound It Out (worth it to see his mustache alone)