You're a prop comic? Like Carrot Top?
Walk Into The Set Purse First
In May, I attended the first-ever BBC Comedy Festival in Newcastle upon Tyne. I wasn’t sure what the local comedy scene would be like, so the first night, I headed down to the (only) comedy theater in town to check out a showcase of comics. As one comic — named, simply, Zoe — took the stage, the bag she was carrying caught my eye. Her set incorporated the prop beautifully, but I was transfixed by its mere presence the entire time. I was so mesmerized mainly because I had just seen comedian Robin Tran bring her bag on stage at the Netflix is a Joke festival a week or so before, so, naturally, I could sense a pattern beginning to form.
I knew my first order of business was to talk to Nicola Mantalios, the UK-based comedian behind the character Zoe, about why she decided to bring a bag on stage for her set. “I think it's just a bit of a visual thing,” she told me. “It's a new dimension; it's to add a bit more substance to your set. It's not just about words.” That made sense to me, and it soothed my curiosity for the rest of my UK trip. But on the plane ride back, I couldn’t help but think about the bag a bit more. Was that really all there was to it? It’s just a cool visual thing? What I found, after weeks of research and hours of reading random articles about purses, is that, when a comedian brings a bag on stage, it’s not just a fun object to point to and say, “Here’s my purse!” Instead, it’s a decision that heightens the standup set through the use of prop comedy, the object’s ability to make a good set opener, and subtle subversion of standup stereotypes.
Let’s start with the most obvious reason comedians are bringing their purses on stage: It’s prop comedy, baby. That’s the form of comedy where a visual is introduced that is somehow then played off of for comedy. Carrot Top is probably the most famous example of this, and his wacky, fast-moving prop comedy asks you to look at something and see the humor in it — whether it’s some kind of kooky invention or a normal object that’s about to be the butt of a joke. It’s the visual equivalent of observational comedy in a way; you see something, and you say something (funny).
For that reason, bags are the perfect addition to a standup set, because it’s kind of hard to miss — someone is literally carrying it onto the stage. It introduces a visual aspect, but it also creates a sort of tension for the audience, since they don’t know exactly how the prop will be used. And, as we’ve talked about before, that release of tension is one of the ways to further comedy. Whether addressing the bag at the top of the set, like Tran, or using it as the final bit, like Zoe, the comic is deliberately letting the audience breathe — and laugh. “It adds an element of, ‘Something's about to be revealed,’” said Mantalios. “There's an anticipatory feeling there.” Additionally, there’s a sort of security that the comic receives from having a prop. Mantalios explains that it’s not that the props are there to lean on, but that they’re there as a little something extra for those that come to see the show. “It gives you a talk and find; it gives you a tangible thing,” Mantalios explained. “You can redirect attention to it. You can describe it and feel like you can find new bits of material in interacting with the audience.”
Bringing a bag on stage is also a good choice not just for the comedy of it, but for the performance as well, since it makes for a solid opener. Just like writing an article, a comedian has to catch the audience’s attention right off the bat; otherwise, it’s going to be an uphill battle the whole set to win them over. It’s a common thought in comedy that standup sets should start by addressing yourself as a performer to get the audience on your side. This can be something self-deprecating, a mention of something interesting about yourself, or a riff on something noticeable about you. “Start with something that really introduces you personally, especially if there is something visual about you that stands out,” wrote Gold Comedy. “Acknowledge it right off the bat and the audience will forget about it and pay attention to YOU.” And believe me, it’s hard to pay attention to a whole stand-up set when there’s a purse strangely sitting on the stage in front of you. If the comic doesn’t address the prop, they’ve created an environment where the audience is more focused on the puzzling item in front of them than the comedy being performed.
In many of these instances, the purpose given for bringing the bag on stage is to keep it safe. Tran incorporated this into her set in May. Another comic, Naomi Ekperigin, uses this reasoning for bringing her bag on stage during her special on Netflix’s The Standups. “Y’all are very supportive, but yes, I did bring my bag on stage,” she began. “I did. ‘Cause I said, ‘I don’t know y’all.’ I don’t know y’all in this life. I am from Harlem, and I got to keep an eye on my items, okay?” It reminded me of a bit I had seen Dulcé Sloan do in 2021. “I brought my purse on stage ‘cause white people steal,” she joked at the top of her set. While both jokes seem like they’re attacking the audience a bit, they’re actually doing the opposite. These jokes are saying, “My stuff is more secure up here than backstage.” It lulls the audience into a sense of security — the bag is safe because the people watching it are safe, too — which allows the comic to get them on their side. By making the audience feel special, the comic is saying, “I’m not worried about anything, and you shouldn’t be either.” It allows the audience to sit back, relax, and let themselves be swept away by comedy. “Gonna just watch it,” Ekperigin continued. “So, now I can relax; I can focus.” And now, if you’re watching, so can you.
The less obvious reason that bringing a purse on stage just works is because it subverts a major idea of what a standup comedian should be, whether a conscious decision by the comic or not. It functions similarly to the water bottle, which Jason Zinoman wrote about recently in the New York Times. “The water bottle is the prop that clues us in that a comic — not a character — is at work,” writes Zinoman. Bringing a purse on stage is uncommon for a standup; in fact, it’s uncommon to bring up personal items of any kind (bar a cell phone to record a set). Seeing a bag suddenly appear shatters the illusion that the person you’re seeing is this perfectly crafted image or character — they’re literally just a person. That conflicting idea doesn’t take viewers out of the comedy, though; it actually makes it funnier. “Our amusement is generated by the fact that the scene is staged to show not only what is actually going on but how that set of events could also visually support an alternative,” Andrew Horton wrote in Comedy/cinema/theory. “It is this play of alternative, often conflicting interpretations … that primarily causes the amusement that attends sight gags.”
There’s also a female-specific inversion at play, which is relevant to discuss here, as all the comedians I’ve seen utilize a bag as a prop are women — though, I am not saying this is true in all instances. Bringing your purse on stage is more than just keeping your stuff safe — it’s announcing your femininity. Comedy is so overwhelmingly seeped in masculine energy, so a woman stepping on stage is immediately upsetting to some. (When “women aren’t funny” is as common to hear as it is, I don’t think you can fight me on this one.) Essentially, the bag they bring on stage is seen as a physical manifestation of womanhood. Think about a man carrying a purse on stage. Immediately, the joke seems to be about a drop in his masculinity (though not true). That perceived performance of gender further upsets men in comedy who think women don’t belong. How dare you be a woman in comedy, and how dare you be so proud of it?
While inverting such specific troupes may not be a conscious choice for these comics, they’re doing it anyway. That confidence and pushback against stereotypes manifests to the audience as less of an intelligent choice and more of a nonchalant, laid-back vibe, putting the audience at ease and allowing them to understand that the person in front of them is here to capture your attention and to perform. They don’t care what people think about them — ultimately leading to better comedy.
“The drink seems blandly functional, but it gets more interesting once you realize that it’s also a choice,” Zinoman mused about water bottles. It’s the same idea with bringing a purse on stage. From any perspective, it’s a functional tool, something to carry your things in. Sometimes what it looks like matters, sometimes it doesn’t. But bringing the bag on stage is a conscious choice by the comedian because they feel that it will in some way benefit their comedy. People are definitely not bringing purses on stage without humorous intentions; to do so would kind of undermine the entire set. It’s prop comedy, it’s a good way to grab attention, and it’s a fun way to play into (and against) troupes often projected on comedians. Plus, it’s just a fun visual gag by itself — and, honestly, that alone is enough to make it work.
Interview with the Comedian: Niles Abston
After getting hurt as a college athlete, Niles Abston realized he didn't want to be in school anymore. So, instead, he dropped out and moved to LA to be a writer-director. Though standup comedy wasn't the original goal, someone suggested it to him, and Abston discovered a new interest — the comedy scene. "Somebody read something I wrote and was like, 'Yo, you're funny. You should say these things on stage,'" Abston told me. "I didn't know you could just do that." Once the opportunity was opened, Abston threw himself into standup. "I was really bad, but I just didn't stop," he said.
That drive and passion allowed the comedian to flourish — in writing, in standup, and in his overall comedy career. Aside from being a standup comedian, Abston writes for FX's Dave; created a docuseries about touring; put out Girls Don't Twerk to Jokes, his first special; created BASEMENTFEST, "a one-of-a-kind live comedy, music, and film festival experience;" and hosts Y’all Had To Be Here, his weekly podcast.
I had the pleasure of chatting with the comedian about getting to say whatever you want in a standup set, how he wants to live in a house in the middle of nowhere, and why uplifting community is the ultimate goal. Read below!
How would you describe your comedy?
Stupid. Why do people let me say this stuff? That’s it.
You grew up in a religious home and area in Mississippi. I once heard you mention in a podcast that, whenever you would try to talk about things, people would feel the need to bring it back to the Bible, but you always wondered, like, “What's your real opinion? What do you think about stuff?” I feel like a lot of your comedy is very much that: this is what I think about things, these are my thoughts. Do you feel like that need for freedom to say whatever you want for whatever reason played a part in your comedy?
It plays the biggest part of my comedy out of anything, because when you're raised in a very religious area — either area or home — you don't, especially as a child, have an opinion. Your opinion is whatever's in the Bible. Your opinion is whatever the pastor says. [After] 20 years of that, I find I get on stage, and I'm like, “Yo, this is great. I can say whatever I want in this microphone.” There's nobody being like, “But Jesus thinks this or this,” so it was mind-blowing. I think I gravitated to standup for that — like, I didn’t really care that I was bad and wasn't funny. It was like, “I get to say whatever I want for five minutes. This is amazing.”
Were you aware of that desire to carve out a space where you can say whatever you want when you started in comedy?
I really didn't realize it until about a year and a half ago. … I was watching the show with my friend Haley, and we were just talking about my religious trauma, … and we kind of just slowly realized, like, “Oh, that's why you love standup so much. That's why you like saying your opinion and talking about these things, because you just weren't able to growing up.” It's definitely a weird realization. But subconsciously, it just kind of brought me there.
From what I’ve heard and seen, writing seems to be your core passion. Is that true?
I just want to have a house in the middle of nowhere. Everybody leaves me alone, and I write my scripts. I don't want to do this standup or internet shit.
What is it about writing that draws you to it so strongly?
Just [being able] to stay in the world. Like, I feel like anybody can tell a joke, but can you create a story in a new world? That shit is wild.
You’ve said before that you started doing standup to get better at writing. I'm curious if you approach them in the same way.
I think they're both very different, but they help each other. Because, even the way I tell jokes, they feel like lived-in scenes a lot of times, and I think that comes from screenwriting first. Then, my screenwriting is getting way better because of standup, because the thing with standup is you get that instant feedback if it's funny or not. If you do that long enough, you know what's funny. So when you're writing the script, you're like, “Oh, I noticed this is funny.” I like for people to hit me up and be like, “Yeah, I read your script, and I laughed out loud reading it.” That's definitely the standup muscle helping it.
You’ve had some standup bits go viral online. What’s that like?
Yeah, you think I'd be doing a lot better in my career. Nah, it's really cool. It's like one of those things where, when you do something live, you're like, “Man, I know that was good, if only more people can see it.” And then you put it out, and more people see it, and it goes crazy. Like, “Oh, I was right.” It feels good. Especially to do it with standup clips; that doesn't happen. People don't share standup like that from someone who's not famous. Like, I'm not a name or anything. … To have that on my resume, I think just shows how good my jokes are — and it's a good feeling.
Do you think it's possible for someone to come up on social media and become the kind of comic that we idolize in our culture?
I hope so, because that's what I'm trying to do! [Laughs.] I haven't really seen it done. Most of the standard standup comics that are doing well right now have been doing it for a while, and they finally blew up because of a Netflix or HBO [special] or a big podcast. But you haven't really seen anybody become like a household name standup-wise and their only credit is social media.
You went to school for social work! Do you feel like that influences your comedy at all?
No, definitely. I encourage anybody to take, like, a social work class in college, because those classes really exposed the gray areas in life — that everything's not all one thing and what people really go through. I was going to school in Middle America, so the internships I was doing, where I was dealing with people who are living on the street and in families and all that kind of thing—I think there's no way you can't be empathetic just working in that field and studying in the field. I think that definitely has influenced my approach to comedy and art in general.
Something that amazes me about your standup is that you don’t pre-plan so much of what you’re going to say. It seems like you just get up there and go off.
I feel like if you do it long enough, it's okay, you know? Because, yeah, a lot of things will definitely be off-the-cuff, or I'll do a bit I haven't done in a long time, and I'll do it a different way. That's something I've prided myself on for years now. I never do a joke the same way every single time, because I know what the punchline is, and I know the punchline is good. It doesn't matter how I get there.
You don’t feel the need to repeat something the next night if it gets a good laugh?
Yeah, no. [It’s like,] it works, so let me figure out another way to get to it. And, you never know, just trying another way, you might come up with something even funnier than the punchline on the way there.
You’ve made a lot of your own content, from your docuseries to BASEMENTFEST. How has that approach impacted how you view comedy — both as a thing to do and as a business?
Having to do everything myself kind of showed me [that] a lot of these people aren't as good as we think they are — they've just got a lot of help and a lot of money. If you look at what me and my friends have been able to do over the last couple of years with literally nothing? I'm not really impressed by much. … It makes me more excited as things keep getting bigger and bigger. Like, what can I do next?
Bringing others with you into success and lifting them up — both your friends and local comedians — seems to be a major focus in your career. Could you just talk a little bit about why that is so important to you?
Because I know a lot of people on the outside looking in at the famous standup comedians, and they think they're all a bunch of assholes and stuff — but that's not what comedy is. Ask anybody that's not a super rich standup comedian — comedy is a community. We're family. I've been through things with these people. I've had awful moments and great moments with these people. So, any little tiny bit of success, that's who I'm sharing it with. It's really a no-brainer.
Do you think you'll kind of keep that tight-knit group of people? Or do you think it'll grow wherever you meet people you can help uplift?
Yeah, I mean, both, which is what I hope: Everybody gets a following, and everybody starts making money. That way, we can all build off of each other. And that way, when I go to different cities, I can help out some comedian that just needs a set. The goal is: everybody does well.
You once said your goal was to be a mixture of Jon Stewart and Chris Rock. What about that mixture appeals to you?
I don't want to get slapped or anything or apologize to J.K. Rowling, but I love both of them, … because I really want to get into documentary filmmaking and talking about real things. I love how Jon Stewart's been able to do that. … He took off [from] The Daily Show to make these documentaries that were beautiful. And then, I just think Chris Rock is one of the best comedians ever, as far as social commentary goes. People don't really understand. There's people younger than me that have no idea that regular things they say in conversation are bits and pieces of Chris Rock standup jokes. There are certain phrases that nobody was saying until Chris Rock specials dropped. That's how influential he was, and I don't know if anybody will ever be that influential again because of the internet and how widespread things are now.
What’s a joke you love that either never lands or lands really inconsistently?
I have a joke that the beginning of it doesn't really get much laughs because it makes people feel uncomfortable. But when I get to the end of it, it really goes crazy. [It’s] when I talk about the similarities between Jewish people and Black people. A lot of people kind of tense up when I started talking about that shit — and it's funny, though. I like making people kind of scrunch up because they don’t know what's going to happen at the end. [But,] I know you're going to give me this applause break at the end. I'm not even worried about it.
Do you kind of enjoy playing with that sense of tension and relief? Or is it just like that statement of, “I'm going to do what I want, because I know it's going to be funny. It doesn't matter how you feel?”
I love it, because I know where I'm going, so get tense. Look to the side. I don't care. Like, whatever; you're going to laugh in like 30 seconds, just like you did on the last joke. I don't know why you're tightening up. You've literally just laughed at the last one. So, yeah, I love it. I even have this joke … about how I just found out I'm Irish, and I don't vibe with Irish people. I don't really like ‘em. I was doing it at this bar in New York, and there's an Irish dude, and as soon as I started saying that shit, he just flips me off. And he's like, “Fuck you, blah, blah, blah.” Then, I finished the joke and got an applause break, and he bought me a drink at the bar.
Just listen. Shut up.
You can catch Abston performing at Union Hall's Y'all Had To Be Here on August 26th at 10 p.m. He'll also be performing at The Elysian from September 22nd-24th as part of BASEMENTFEST: Los Angeles. You can check out Abston on Instagram and Twitter as well.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Saturday Night Dead?
What's In A Show?
Over the past few editions, we’ve examined a bit about why Saturday Night Live is still around, as well as whether it even has a potential future after season 50. I think it’s safe to say that SNL is still around because of its power (as a “legendary” show and as a Lorne Michaels production), its ability to launch careers, and how it touches viewers’ lives.
Now that we’ve come to a conclusion on the big picture, I think it’s important to turn our sights onto the smaller details. Sure, SNL as an overall show is a cultural landmark, but it’s also made up of bits and pieces that the average viewer doesn’t think about. Have you ever thought about how a sketch is made? Sure, you may think that SNL is good or bad at writing sketches, but do you understand what it takes to create them each week? Do you know how to write the ending to a sketch? Likewise, do you know about the costume and hair department? Have you thought about the rotating sets and how they play a part? Have you ever wondered about the host monologue process?
Saturday Night Live is more than the players we see every week and Lorne Michaels. It’s a well (decently?)-oiled machine that has a number of moving parts that aren’t closely examined. So, in the next phase (but continuation!) of this column, we’re going to apply the question “Why Is SNL Still Around?” to those bits that are often overlooked. Might as well call this column Biology Class from now on, because we’re about to be doing a whole lot of dissection.
The Comedy Showcase
1. Netflix's This Fool, from comedian Chris Estrada
2. ‘Night after night I get harassed’: comedians call for safer working conditions
3. Kate McKinnon's episode of the podcast Good One, where she talks about her time at SNL