Puppies are evil! Being Contrarian in your Stand-up
Find the funny by taking a contrarian stance in your stand-up writing
Hello stand-up comedian (or anyone else who wants to write funny)
In these posts I give you inspiring prompts to fuel your writing. The Stand-up Comedy Writing Games (TM) for you to play with in this post are:
Big up the Bad
Take down the Good
Both get you taking a contrarian stance which is the rocket fuel behind a lot of stand-up.
──────────────────────────────────────────────
Is is possible to be funny by being moderate and reasonable? I guess you could be if you do it to an immoderate and unreasonable degree. However, a quicker route to finding the funny is by adopting a contrarian stance.
When you take a contrarian stance you deliberately go against the normal, reasonable, or socially acceptable consensus. And there are a lot of great stand-ups who do this!
It’s about finding a view that right-thinking people generally hold, and then passionately arguing the exact opposite. You might actually believe what you’re saying or you might take the stance to be provocative or absurd. Here are two approaches:
- You either take something universally loved and argue why it’s absolutely terrible
- or you take something universally hated and argue why it’s actually brilliant.
If the argument is a bit of a stretch, or patently ridiculous (but apparently genuinely held), this all adds to the comedy.
The subject you’re arguing could be a massively polarising political issue or it could be as trivial as straws (which actually, come to think of it, have become a massively polarising political issue).
In one of my Zoom stand-up material generation sessions we explored Daniel Sloss’ attitude to Death.
As Sloss says, society dictates that we treat death as a tragedy because “every life is precious”. He then takes a totally contrarian stance by cheerfully asserting that he doesn’t find all deaths sad. He argues:
“All I’m trying to say is I think some people deserve to die. Most of the time death is awful. 60% to 65% of the time death is. But can we admit that occasionally death is spot on?”
In response to the audience’s reaction, he pushes back by asking, with mock disbelief:
“Every death has devastated you? You’ve never secretly enjoyed one of them?”
He concludes by saying:
“Every life is precious? Every life is a miracle? No. No, no, no. Life is not precious. You can make it accidentally. How precious can that be?”
Watch the clip here
Similarly, George Carlin says that when a natural disaster strikes, the normal response is sympathy. But thene he points out that mankind has spent centuries polluting rivers and destroying forests, adopting the contrary attitude of cheering for the disasters. He says:
“So when nature strikes back and smacks man in the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy.”
Bill Burr is an absolute master of the contrarian stance. In one famous bit, he watches Oprah Winfrey on TV, with his girlfriend (who he enjoys winding up while they watch TV together). Ophrah is introducing a guest. Burr says:
“She’s given her this big ridiculous intro like, ‘She’s done this, she’s done that, and she does the most difficult job on the planet - she’s a mother.”
Hearing this he turns to his girlfriend and says:
”Really? Being a mother is the most difficult job on the planet? Oh, yeah, all those mothers who die every year from black lung from inhaling all that coal dust…What would you rather be doing, drilling to the centre of the earth shaking hands with the devil... Or would you rather be up in the sunshine, running around with a couple of toddlers that you can send to bed anytime you want?”
Watch the clip here
Speaking of motherhood, we also looked at a sequence in the class where Ali Wong, going against the consensus view of breastfeeding as being beautiful, discusses her painful experience of breastfeeding her hungry baby in the most extreme terms!
Here I’m looking at the structure of the routine using my SHEP struture (set-up, hook, escalation, payoff).
If this is new to you, in a nutshell you start by setting up the subject (giving the audience the information they need – no more and no less.) This SET-UP can be funny in itself but sometimes is just straight forward (in which case it needs to be shorter).
Then the HOOK reveals the comic angle. The ESCALATION heightens that and the PAYOFF buttons the bit. Having used it with hundreds of comics I’ve found it’s a helpful way of shaping routines and stories.
Where was I? Oh, yes Ali Wong on breast feeding. In the set-up, Ali says that a lot of young women have anxiety about giving birth. She then goes on to say that giving birth “ain’t nothing compared to breastfeeding” (which is the hook).
This then heightens in the escalation with some intense language: “Breastfeeding is brutal”. “It’s chronic physical torture”. She also has a great parody phrase where she captures the idealised image of a new mother nursing her baby. She says she thought it was supposed to be:
“this beautiful bonding ceremony, where I’d feel like I was sitting on a lily pad in a meadow and bunnies would gather at my feet”.
She goes on to say:
“breastfeeding is this savage ritual that just reminds you that your body is a cafeteria now. Your body doesn’t belong to you any more.”
In the payoff, she switches to her talking about her baby girl. (And here we come back to the animal analogies from my first post.) She says that when she’d get hungry, her daughter would:
“yank my nipple back and forth like that bear fucking up Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant.”
Quite a full-on animal analogy! She concludes by saying:
“I saw that movie, and my nipples were like, ‘I feel you, Leo!’”
Watch the clip
Try it: The Contrarian Writing Exercise
Try this writing game to play with taking a contrarian stance on a topic.
Game 1: Big up the Bad Pick a subject: a public figure, a daily annoyance, or a cultural trend that is universally agreed to be terrible or annoying. Now, argue passionately for why it is actually wonderful and find the absurd logic to justify your stance.
Game 2: Take down the Good Take something that society universally loves, respects, or agrees is “good” and argue why it’s actually terrible.
──────────────────────────────────────────────
Stewart Lee describes stand-up as taking an extreme position then justifying it. Don’t use a sarcastic voice. Commit to the stance 100%.
Let the audience laugh at how staggeringly unreasonable you are. Or perhaps how they secretly agree with you.
──────────────────────────────────────────────
I’d love to hear what you come up with.
What’s the beloved topic you’re going to take down? Or the dreadful thing you’re going to big up?
And please share links to comics (including yourself) doing just his.
Leave a comment below or reply to this email.
See you next week!
— Chris