Joe Randazzo - Funny on Purpose: The Definitive Guide to an Unpredictable Career in Comedy: Standup + Improv + Sketch + TV + Writing + Directing + YouTube

FOR KAT AND CORMAC AND AUGUST

Copyright 2015 by Joe Randazzo

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Randazzo, Joe, 1978
Funny on purpose : the definitive guide to an unpredictable career in comedy : standup + improv + sketch + tv + writing + directing + youtube / Joe Randazzo ; foreword by John Hodgman.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4521-2839-9 (alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4521-3559-5 (epub, mobi)
1. Wit and humorAuthorship. 2. ComedyAuthorship. 3. Stand-up comedy. I. Title.

PN6149.A88R36 2014
808.7dc23

2014031094

Cover design by Neil Egan
Interior design by Alissa Faden and Neil Egan
Illustrations by R. Sikoryak
Illustrations on pages 142143 by Amanda Sims

Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com

Some years ago, I had stopped being a literary agent and was looking for a new job. I chose writing for magazines because those still existed then, and they still paid money, so now you know I am very old.

I was writing in my best magazine style: long, twisty sentences full of clever wordplay and profound thoughts and adverbs. I didnt want my prose to be merely luminous; I wanted it to be luminously. It was dumb. I was just writing about cheese and whiskey and junk. After a while my editor, Mark Adams, told me to calm down. He told me to be myself: Go ahead and be funny, he said. I was offendeddeeply, naturally, luminouslythat he would boil me down to that one dumb word. Anyone could be funny. But Mark corrected me: funny is an asset. Not everyone can do it.

George Saunders has talked about how the day he realized it was okay to be funny was like the day he realized he had been fighting his whole life with one hand tied behind his back, and now he was able to use both fists. (If you dont know, George Saunders is a very famous mixed martial arts fighter. He is notorious for his ground game, which is extremely brutal, but also hilarious, with hints of the surreal.)

Now, I have never punched a human into a blood puddle like George Saunders has. But it is true: once I took Marks advice, I knew what Saunders meant. I got more paid work with funny, yes. But more, being funny allowed me to get serious as a writer in a way I never had. Because I was being myself. And myself wanted to write seven hundred hobo nicknames in a book of hundreds of fake facts (we also had books then). And that is why you know me as the famous American fake-fact humorist JOHN HODGMAN and not as that guy who wrote about cheese for Mens Journal that time.

Also I went on The Daily Show. That helped, too.

So there you have the secret to having a career in comedy. Be funny. Be yourself. Go on television. Of the three, television is the easiest to accomplish, because there is so much of it now. Or so much television-equivalent mass media. Recall that when my story began, in the ancient past, the web was still largely the province of a small group of relatively affluent, tech-savvy Caucasian people, and getting your work in front of a wide audience still meant scraping before sundry media gatekeepers. Even RADIO, the most ridiculously old-timey and nonprofitable of mass media, was tightly controlled by a cabal of public-radio programmers who met once a year in a secret tomb beneath the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul.

But by the end of the last decade, phones had put both the Internet and pretty good A/V equipment in the hands of a much broader population, video and podcasting gave all those people instant access to a massive global audience, and Twitter proved that Mark Adams was actually wrong: pretty much everyone can be funny, at least a little bit, from time to time.

Because humans like comedy, and comedy tends to attract young people who have the Internet and live as much on attention as food, that means there is a lot more of it out there than there used to be. In fact, more careers in comedy have been launched in the past five years than in the previous five thousand (factoring in smaller populations and the Black Death, which was a bad time for standup).

I hope you are sobered by this statistical fact even though I made it up, because it is true, and also you drink too much. But I hope you will not give up. As in all of the arts, fortune favors the persistent much more than the merely talented. And with Randazzos book in hand, you have a tool that has never existed before.

Like many crafts, comedy as both a practice and a business requires a set of skills that historically have been closely guarded by a guild of bitter weirdos. The etiquette of submitting packets to TV shows, how to ease yourself into a writers room, how to handle failing onstagethis is the kind of nutty, bolty wisdom that is normally only passed down verbally, from elder to apprentice, in unguarded moments in some green room full of cast-off couches and a tub of moldering hummus.

The difference with Joe is that, unlike almost everyone else in comedy, he is not secretly a monster who wants you to fail so he can continue to scrape out a livelihood in a professional landscape he doesnt understand anymore. He has gathered this information and stripped it of all sabotage, plus he has written it down, so you can enjoy it with your own, fresh hummus.

But if getting on television or a television-equivalent isnt as difficult as it used to be, it means that the first two secretsbeing funny and being yourselfare even harder. And this is the real value of this book. Read the interview with Paul F. Tompkins; read the interview with Pete Holmes; and read the ones with so many others contained herein who recount when they stopped imitating (which is where all art begins and bad standup stops) and how they began to understand their own taste, their own preoccupations, their own voices.

Every time you take to the stage or the page, you are presuming to waste the time of strangers, and it is best to appreciate early that, in reality, no one cares about your dumb musings. The imperative to speak comes from you, so you had better know why you are doing it. This sounds like a big question, but if I can offer only one thing to the wisdom Joe has expressed and collected here, its this: its a really small question.

When I was asked to talk comedy at the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner in Washington in front of the president of the United States, I said yes automatically because: free drinks, and I love to ride that Acela. I began to write some jokes, but they were all terrible. Because it turns out, most jokes are not funny. Is there anything more depressing and unfunny than a joke book?

I realized that this was a very specific and strange opportunity, and there was no point trying to be funny until I understood what I specifically wanted to say to the president of the United States. The true but unprofound answer was: I just wanted to know if the story I had heard was true. Did he actually give Leonard Nimoy the Live Long and Prosper salute when passing him on the streets of Chicago? Was the president a nerd?

Now you may have seen the president and I exchanging the split-fingered greeting that night on YouTube, and you may think my grilling of the president on his nerd credentials was not very funny. Luke Russert didnt like it either. Maybe you two should be pals.

But I have never been badly served by stopping before typing a word or taking a step on a stage and asking myself: Why am I doing this? What do I have to say