What Makes A Good Comedian?

This is a piece I was asked to write for the literary magazine The Lifted Brow in 2011. I was asked to write something about the world of comedy and stuff.

I hope you enjoy digesting it, dear reader.

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What makes a good comedian?

This age-old, caveat-riddled question is surely more complicated than the immediate conclusion that comes to mind (i.e. “Not being Jordan Paris”). It’s a question that haunts every soul who has ever dared venture upon the turbulent seas of light entertainment in the rickety vessels of subtle satire and witty observation, armed only with the buoy of self-awareness and the billowing wind of assumed superiority in one’s sails.[1] It is the big question for those who work in the industry of LOLs. It rests above such piffle as “What is the meaning of life?”, and “Is it okay to like the new Coldplay single?” Moreover, it’s pretty easy to see that the greatest of respect goes to those select few in the world of comedy who seem to have figured out some vague sense of an answer, either by bravely persevering, gig after gig, festival after festival, media appearance after media appearance over thirty hard, back-breaking years; or by drinking from the holy fountain of The Great Kart’uk, which lies hidden deep in the darkest of crags in the blackened depths of Mordor.

At least, I assume that’s what happened with Russell Gilbert.

I guarantee you, dear reader, that no matter how famous, critically acclaimed or financially swollen your favourite comedian in the world may be, not a day goes by in which at least a skerrick of concern doesn’t scurry through their mind, causing them to ponder, if only for a terrifying millisecond, that fundamental question: Am I funny?

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Pretty much anyone can be “funny”.[2] Being “funny” involves farting, falling over in public, drinking alcohol, wearing Crocs or observing that Fred Bassett cartoons are comically lacklustre. But being funny—intrinsically, undeniably, fundamentally funny, the Shaun Micallef, Groucho Marx, Zach Galifianakis, John Cleese, Maria Bamford, Stephen Colbert, Bill Cosby, Dame Edna Everage, Tina Fey kind of funny—that’s a whole different kettle of comedy fish. To be funny is the ultimate goal and crippling addiction of every comedian. We don’t just want to be people who tell jokes: we want to be people who breed jokes. We want to be wellsprings of humour from which a unique, interesting and fucking hilarious worldview flows, flooding the world with goodness and truth, brutally drowning all traces of mediocrity in its path.

We comedians desperately want this, and, on the whole, pretty much nothing else matters.

But how to know? How does one determine whether one has reached this goal? What if you think you’re operating on a Patton Oswalt level of funny, when in reality you’re just squeezing out slimy, derivative, Martin Lawrence-esque turds into the undiscerning ears of the public?

What if—what if Mum was right?

To me, these are very curly questions that will take years and years of perspective and a shitload of experience to be able to answer satisfactorily. But other people seem to quite firmly believe they have the definitive answers.

And those people are on Twitter.

Popping “Tom Ballard” into Twitter’s search function or doing a quick once-over of triple j’s official Facebook page results quite quickly in the discovery of punters who not only don’t like me and my “work”,[3] but who challenge my very adoption of the title of “comedian”. “Tom Ballard’s a comedian?” an anonymous avatar or forum poster will incredulously posit. “Um…aren’t comedians supposed to be funny???”[4]

When discussing my appearances on television, my stand-up comedy or my radio show, these detractors place the word “joke” within quotations (“I haven’t laughed once at any of his ‘jokes’…”), as if its proximity to my name is in itself a fertile ground for humour. I have been accused of being boring, try-hard, too commercial, amateur, lacking in life experience, rude, immature, condescending, ignorant, misogynist and, in some instances, excessively homosexual.

To me, such criticisms are like water off a duck’s back, in that they are bone-chilling and constantly present. Since taking over co-hosting duties on the triple j breakfast show and subsequently procuring the occasional spot on national TV, a massive learning curve in my life has caused me to accept that attempts at funniness inevitably inspire a variety of reactions, from the desired (laughter) to the less-than-palatable (“GET DA FUCK OFF ME RADIO, FAG-DICK!!!”).

When such responses first came to my attention, they genuinely threw me. The frequency and the strength of the vitriol that infected my Twitter feed, my Facebook and the comments sections of other websites shredded my confidence like a hairy Greek man collecting hot meat from a spit. The barbs of the keyboard warriors pierced my brittle armour of self-esteem as they questioned my comedic nouse, highlighted the chubbier and oilier elements of my physique and called for my removal from the public sphere, effective immediately.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me: I am not here upon this page to bitch. I’m well aware there’s nothing more grating than hearing those in privileged positions complain of the slings and arrows they must endure as if somehow their fortunate existence, when put in perspective, is anything less than Fate giving them a generous, slobbery blowjob.

I don’t wish to bemoan the criticism of my work. Rather, I wish to celebrate it.

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Award-winning comedic artist and willful mullet-grower Sam Simmons is not necessarily the kind of person that I would describe as “factually reliable”. My relations with Mr Simmons are littered with betrayal, pranks, homophobic graffiti and downright lies. Sam will quite happily fill your inbox with a series of sternly-worded emails about how displeased he is with your recent performance, asking you all sorts of sticky personal questions, cc’ing in senior management figures and employing curt and forward language.

Then, days later, he will walk right up to you, look you directly in the eyes and proudly inform you that the whole exercise was a joke.

Then he’ll go wear some bread shoes or talk about lazer monkey sandwiches or some shit.[5]

But Sam can, on rare occasions, be a fount of quality wisdom. The first time he ever acted as a radio mentor to myself and my co-host Alex Dyson, we remarked on the potent anger of approximately 50% of the audience who were texting in to the show or posting in forums on the triple j website. Mr Simmons, the bald absurdist, just shrugged. “50% of people hate me. 50% of people love me. If no one hates or loves you—if everything just likes you—you’re boring.”

He then answered a flashing phone line and convinced the caller that in fact they hadn’t called a radio station, but the residence of a man named Ian. He then hung up and informed us that “Ian” was a funny name.

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“H8tas gonna h8”—so goes the saying. What with a sense of humour being pretty much the most subjective thing around, comedy has always split opinions, but now the information superhighway has given 21st Century performers the ability to find out exactly how shithouse their detractors think they are. As my musical hero Ben Folds sings in his song Working Day,

Some guy on the net thinks I suck

And he should know;

He’s got his own blog…

When your goal in life is to be funny, some people are inevitably not going to like what you do, because their funny could well be your “funny”, and vice versa. I’ve accepted this. But it still gives me the shits.

Because comedians want to be liked. I don’t know all the fancy-schmancy psychology behind it—I’m not a Scientologist, I’m just a Muggle trying to get by. But I find that, generally, comedians will obsess over a crowd’s reaction and whether or not other people in the industry like them and will invariably be able to describe to you in detail the handful of people in an audience who were merely chuckling when, in the opinion of the rest of the room, we’ve been killing it. We get worked up about reviews and cringe when we watch ourselves performing[6] and get paranoid about the future and sometimes the past and regularly about the present.

That’s because we need to be liked in the right way. It’s relatively easy to get up on a stage and make an audience laugh—once you know the basic tricks, you can work in a switcheroo or two, a few pull-back-and-reveals and a couple of callbacks and you’ll be accepted as a perfectly serviceable comic. Those with ambitions to be funny, however, aspire to make audiences laugh in ways they’ve never laughed before, with original ideas and different stories and unexpected punchlines, kicking the very notion of being hack in its hacky dick. The highly-principled comedian is terrified of selling out or being perceived to have done so; perhaps relatedly, there is no greater reward than meeting one’s comic hero and making them laugh. That trumps every paycheck, every undeserved sexual encounter, every illicit drug, every VIP event, hands down.

…

Probably doesn’t trump getting paid to be sucked off at a VIP event whilst tripping balls, though.[7]

This is why comedy awards can seem so redundant to me: the people who want comedy awards so much are really the people who should need them the least. The sweet taste of validation should actually flow from the guffaws, smiles and atmosphere of a comedy room, as opposed to the “outcome” of a slapped-together panel that’s subject to personal vendettas, the giddy politics of the comedy industry and, well… just… not really finding something funny.

Having said that, I have won a comedy award and received a five star review, so whatever opinion you’re now forming in your no-doubt-award-less head is highly likely to be wrong.

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So what makes a good comedian?

I really have no fucking idea. But I’m trying to figure it out as best as I can, no matter what @bitchy_vampire86 has to say about it. I can only hope to maintain my sunny disposition, trust my comedy instincts and focus on those who appear to think I’m on to a good thing.

Please – wish me luck.

If you like.

If not…I’ll deal.