It’s our job to be irreverent and dangerous, to question authority and take you through a spooky mental haunted house so you can arrive at your own conclusions.” To which Marc Maron replied: “Maybe add ‘to be funny’ to the list.” Over the weekend, Whitney Cummings tweeted: “Comedians did not sign up to be your hero. (No philosophers want to be comedians, except perhaps Slavoj Žižek.) This can make them rather pompous. Because the only way I can tell my truth and put tension in the room is with anger.”Ĭomedians increasingly want to be philosophers. Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette was a Netflix sensation in 2018 precisely because Gadsby deconstructed her duty to make people laugh: “I must quit comedy. The Closer, Dave Chappelle’s final Netflix special, is a prickly monologue about cancel culture and why he’s not actually transphobic, with occasional jokes. Some of the most acclaimed comedian-fronted projects of recent years - including Master of None, Feel Good and Bo Burnham: Inside - see laughter as a secondary concern. While old-fashioned one-liners and wry observations are doing just fine, many of the innovations in comedy are in the realm I call post-funny.
What do you call a comedian who doesn’t make people laugh? A podcaster. With a successful podcast, a comedian can circumvent the usual gatekeepers and build a cultishly loyal fanbase without even having to leave the house or - and this is crucial - worry about being funny. Stand-ups love to hear themselves talk and a rambling chat is a much more congenial vehicle than the intense, time-consuming labour of writing and honing a tight one hour of killer material. The symbiosis of comedy and podcasting isn’t hard to understand. Two early podcast networks, Earwolf and Nerdist, were established by comedians Nerdist’s Chris Hardwick compared podcasting to the comedy LP boom of the Sixties. In 2009, just as the format was becoming mainstream, Marc Maron launched the interview show WTF and Joe Rogan recorded the first episode of what became The Joe Rogan Experience. Stand-ups played a foundational role in the podcast industry. Twenty years on, Hicks, who died of cancer in 1994, wouldn’t need an HBO deal he would be hosting a podcast. They didn’t know what to do with him.” Miller said that in 2002. But back then the comedy business just hadn’t matured.
“He’d be on HBO, interviewing people, saying whatever’s on his mind. “Today he would be a mad prophet of the airwaves,” comedy manager Jimmy Miller says in Cynthia True’s Hicks biography American Scream.
In the UK, Hicks was acclaimed as the stand-up who might define the Nineties but back in the US he felt stuck. “Please relax,” he said during a particularly intense riff. The 30-year-old Texan could be righteously indignant or disarmingly sweet, hilariously petty or shockingly sincere, flamboyantly profane or deeply moral - and he thrived on the dissonance of these tonal shifts. I had seen Hicks’ sensational Channel 4 special Relentless earlier that year but I was unprepared for the rock-star electricity in the room. The most exciting stand-up comedy show I’ve ever seen was Bill Hicks in a student union in the autumn of 1992.
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