‘It’s a tough gig even with an audience’
Local comics who thrive on live performances struggle for laughs during COVID clampdown
When I contact Rob Bebenek for a story about comedy in the time of COVID, the Kitchenerraised comedian has just woken from a late afternoon nap, still groggy, trying to get his bearings.
“I slept through my afternoon alarm,” he confides, snapping slowly to attention. “I tend to stay up super late and get up early. I don’t have a schedule.”
It’s the classic comedy lifestyle and I’m impressed the affable Grand River Collegiate grad has been able to maintain it in the face of an international pandemic that has closed down comedy clubs, ended live gigs and relegated comedians, like everyone else, to an extended period of house arrest.
“On a normal day, I find it hard to fall asleep before 1 a.m.,” confides the 30-something jokemaker. “My brain starts firing up.”
Which begs the question: how does one ply one’s comedic trade in lockdown?
Watching Bill Maher’s “Real Time,” with its awkwardly inserted canned laughter, and Tom Hanks’ self-conscious monologue on “Saturday Night Live,” where every tentative punchline was greeted with awkward silence, you realize how important it is for standup comics to perform in front of a live audience.
“Scripted jokes delivered to no audience are unlikely to translate,” notes Waterloo-raised comic Courtney Gilmour about Hanks’ Borsht Belt wipeout.
“It’s a tough gig even with an audience!”
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make the effort.
“I think it’s natural and healthy to process crisis situations in ways that don’t involve humour,” insists Gilmour, disputing the cliché that comedy is tragedy plus time.
“But I don’t think there’s a pause on comedy. Most of the jokes I’m seeing are about the personal aspects of social distancing and isolation rather than poking fun at victims of the virus.”
Even if telling jokes is acceptable, Bebenek insists the unique alchemy of humour means there’s no way to effectively put them across while hunkered down in your basement.
“You can log on to a musician playing music and it doesn’t seem weird,” he notes matterof-factly.
“But you do the same thing with standup and you seem like a psychopath!”
It has to do with rhythm and timing and the idea of punchlines as heat-seeking missiles that need an audience to detonate.
“Most of my friends who are comics are trying to figure out what their next move is,” notes Bebenek.
“You can write 5,000 jokes and you’ll never know if they’re funny unless you get onstage.”
When I ask for his best Corona joke, he points out that when it comes to making light of a pandemic, it pays to tread carefully.
“You can’t make fun of death,” he notes bluntly. “People have lost their loved ones. Most of what I’m doing is making fun of how stupid a lot of people are.” What would that look like? “I feel bad for the Corona beer company in all of this,” he emails after some thought.
“They were down 36 per cent BEFORE the quarantine even started. But you just know there was a moment in head office when the CEO was like, ‘Hey, there’s a new deadly virus going around. I wonder what they called it? ... OH MY GOD!’ ”
It’s a good joke, not only because it’s based on reality, but because it doesn’t spark feelings of dread.
In the pantheon of COVID jokes by Waterloo Region comics, how unique is it? á “It’s taken a global pandemic for us to finally use all the frozen bananas in our freezers to make banana bread,” quips Gilmour. á “It’s crazy that all this started from a Chinese Ozzy Osbourne tribute band!” cracks Waterloo comic Ben McKay, linking COVID-19 to a legendary bat biting incident. á “This pandemic has actually been great for me,” chimes in Kez Vicario-Robinson, a nonbinary comic with a personal bent. “I haven’t been misgendered in over a month!”
Even in print, these jokes are funny.
But in an industry where success is measured by how successfully you “kill” an audience, it’s not enough.
“I know it seems like comedy would be shut down right now, but it hasn’t at all,” counters Gilmour, who co-hosts an Instagram live stream variety show twice a week.
“We are resilient attention seekers very accustomed to little to no audience.”
Live streams are one of the more successful options, with local improv hub The Making Box offering free classes and shows, including an online performance by Colin Mochrie that drew 500 people.
The no pay/pay-what-youcan ethos may not generate huge profits, but like all the companies filling your inbox with “sincerest wishes for you and your family in these troubled times,” it’s about building an audience for later.
“I’ve seen a lot of people make jokes online like ‘Jeez, after this I’d consider going to an improv show!’ — insinuating that that’s not something they’d want to do usually, but hey, at this point they’d go to any event!” notes Vicario-Robinson.
“And every time I see that I have a bunch of mixed emotions: part of me is very much ‘Oh heck yeah! Finally! They’ll see, they’ll all see! It’s an art!’
“And the other part of me is like ‘Hey! People! I can think of far more unappealing and uncomfortable events to go to than an improv show, that’s all I’m saying! You don’t want to see a bunch of 20-something’s pretend to be ghost ducks for 10 minutes? Dude, you gotta get your priorities straight!’ ”
But while live streaming may work for some comedy forms, when it comes to standup, Bebenek says there’s no substitute for a crowd of slovenly halfdrunk nightclub rabble at which to lob comedic smart bombs.
“You can do sketch comedy and put it online,” he insists. “But more than any other form of comedy, for standup you need an audience.”
He pauses emphatically. “Shouting at the void of the internet is the worst idea!”