Movies and shows, old and new, have helped us to live vicariously through them. They have allowed us to travel far and wide at a time borders are shut and people are restricted to homes. In our new column What's In A Setting, we explore the inseparable association of a story with its setting, how the location complements the narrative, and how these cultural windows to the world have helped broaden our imagination.
*
When I first started performing stand-up comedy, I knew it was only a matter of time before I would start organising shows. I’d been interested in curation even before I started performing, analysing line-ups of comics and coming up, with my own dream line-up, which I changed every other day. When my boyfriend R and I first started producing, we started to approach every restaurant and bar we entered with a different lens. Which ones would work as a comedy room?
If you’ve gone to a comedy club, you’d realise that most of them look the same across the world. You have people sitting close together, a dark room with a spotlight on the performer, and a great audio system. You need the door to be closed with no sound or disturbance from outside able to percolate. Low ceilings are great too.
The logic is simple, if you think about it. Laughter is involuntary and spreads rapidly. It helps if the sound of the laughter can travel and grow in a room. The audience has to sit close and comfortably together, so they feel part of a group. It’s just easier for them to laugh then.
It’s not just the physical aspect. A lot of comedy (like any art) is about context-building. The best shows happen when the audience already knows your context — one reason why famous and popular comedians don’t need to invest time to build it for their fans. Someone who’s been watching you closely for a decade already knows what kind of life you lead and what your beliefs are. For newer comics, there’s always a host in a stand-up show — setting context, and also setting expectations at the start of the show, and between each comic.
Unfortunately, across the world, most comedians don’t start out performing in a comedy club. Open mics take place in shady restaurants and bars, in yoga studios, and salons. These places can’t turn their décor inside out for comedy at night. The setting here is not always ideal. Often, especially in restaurants, the audience is there just to eat. Comedy is nothing more than background noise.
Yet, comedians are taught from day 1, to not complain about the setting. People aren’t there to watch you? No problem. Are your jokes good enough to engross them though?
It’s interesting to me that an art form as dependent on the setting as stand-up comedy is, chooses to dismiss the setting while judging performance.
A good set should kill in every room — it doesn’t matter if the audience is drunk out of their mind, or there’s a brawl going on outside, or if the mic is not working properly and the people at the back can barely hear you. Comics perform unfailingly, every night, without complaint. We’re taught that difficult situations help your art grow. No comic will give up the stage time just because the venue is outdoors, for example.
When we do open mics, we tell the audience that comedy is unlike any other art form in that it needs to be performed to be practised. You can write a book sitting in a room alone, and send it to your editor for feedback. You can practice the guitar alone; a good musician will know when they’ve made a mistake and how to correct it. Unfortunately, in comedy, you only know if a joke is funny when you perform it in front of an audience. That’s why you need open mics. And the tougher the setting, the better clarity you get on whether the joke is good or not. Really good comedians can often make a tough room work. A lot of comedy is about using the physical setting to your advantage.
Last year, when the lockdown started, and social distancing became the norm, all comedy shows stopped. As comedians moved to Zoom, I saw a lot of my friends and fellow comics long to get back on stage. Most did regular online shows but it wasn’t the same, they all agreed. Zoom shows were… something else.
Comedians who could afford it bought better webcams and ring lights. Lots of them just performed in the brightest part of their room. They were often interrupted by some disturbance in a viewer’s house but they worked around it. Some kept the audience on mute, but a “hahaha” in the comments wasn’t the reaction they were used to, or satisfied with. In one Zoom show I saw, American comedian Mike Birbiglia had transformed his office into a studio, complete with a three-camera setup, a mic, and bright and colourful wallpapers. Bo Burnham famously created and shot his latest Netflix special right at home, with no audience or crew.
Even comedians who have put out their work on YouTube or an OTT platform talk of how different it is to perform live, as opposed to performing for camera. The live audience picks up nuances and subtleties that don’t show on camera. Your energy has to be different for YouTube, a platform that increasingly more and more people access on their small smartphone screens. Jokes that work live often don’t online.
You can go to any green room, and find five comedians who kill in every open mic but are not YouTube sensations. The setting changes everything.
Near Yari Road, Versova in Mumbai, there is a café called Leaping Windows. It calls itself a comic book library-café, and the basement downstairs is full of shelves of graphic novels and books. A nerd’s dream. It’s bright and warm and welcoming, and the chocolate malt shake upstairs is to die for. Most people in Andheri, full of models and small-time (and often A-list) actors and film journalists, have heard of this café. It’s common to catch a glimpse of a few talking scripts and shoot dates in the café.
When my boyfriend R and I first started producing comedy shows, we asked the owners of Leaping Windows if they’d be okay with us doing comedy in the basement. There was almost no logic to this. We just loved the café, and the food. It was close to where we lived, and Andheri West didn’t have regular comedy shows then. We did weekly shows there for two years before the pandemic.
The basement wasn’t like any other comedy club we’d ever been to or seen. The audience sat on mats on the floor, the lights of the room were kept on, because we couldn’t afford a spotlight. We had a mic but no one really needed it. And yet, in spite of all of that, we did some really amazing shows and open mics there. Rahul Subramanian did multiple rounds of his acclaimed crowd-work show. We did a special Game of Thrones-themed show just before the finale. We had people on Comicstaan come to test their material and younger comics do their first one hour at that venue.
For small producers like us, who run small venues, there is no hope of restarting shows properly any time soon. We didn’t have the bandwidth to do COVID-19 tests or socially distanced shows. Everything seems uncertain, sad, and scary. But I see open micers still do daily spots on Zoom shows and uncomplainingly write jokes and perform wherever they can — Insta lives or Clubhouse. And I feel we’ll survive this.
Read more from the What's in a Setting series here.
from Firstpost Bollywood Latest News https://ift.tt/3ziR5yZ
No comments:
Post a Comment