How nerds are ruining comedy

“How do we get more cool people to join our improv group?”

We belonged to that slacker start-up movement of the 2000s: the college improv team. It was that holy experience shared by thousands of outgoing students every year, each of whom believes he alone has discovered some rare, precious gem, like the kid who stumbles upon a late-night ASSSSCAT broadcast or wonders why he isn’t doing more of the stuff he sees on “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” in his theater class. Rather than studying or applying for internships, these likable but easily distracted students spend their time rehearsing, performing and talking shop with a group of eight to 15 funnymen, waiting for graduation to move to Chicago, LA or New York and duplicate the comedy success they experienced in college.

Of course, college improv teams are a dime a dozen. Every university has at least one, if not three or four offshoot groups from the original. (This year’s College Improv Tournament has over 90 entries, not to mention hundreds more who are too small or underfunded to travel.) You can’t take a class at UCB, iO or Comedy Sportz without hearing at least a few people say “I did improv in college.” They remember their college improv years with the same nostalgia former NCAA football players remember their alma maters.

You can always tell if a guy did improv in college if most of his pictures are of him doing stupid shit on stage.

One of the memories that stands out to me from from that time was that shameful, why-are-we-talking-about-this conversation, not just because it symbolized the Inception-like depth I descended by obsessing over this crap, but because a few of the conclusions we reached surprisingly still ring true for comedy analysts (i.e., the people who ruin and suck all the fun out of it). So if you hate this kind of stuff, stop reading now. Some of the following analysis may frighten you.

The first major conclusion was a description of the rise and fall of comedy institutions as different personality types come into the picture.

We began by identifying three personality qualities that we looked for in potential members. We recognized that all comedic performers project at least one of these qualities in order to evoke a response from an audience.

1. Funny. He needs to have that uncanny ability to crack people up and a natural drive to perform in front of others. The person who can make you laugh with a facial expression or the sound of his voice.

Imagine, for example, any comedic institution you’ve ever seen. SNL. The Second City. The Simpsons writers room. Your college improv team. The Roman Catholic Church. All of them began the same way, with the same type of people.

Stage 1. Enter Comedian Zero. Comedian Zero is that rare, off-beat, triple-threat “cool-smart-funny” genius who doesn’t fit in with any of the established hubs for comedy. So he creates a new base to explore, preach and practice his own comedic philosophy. He identifies an audience, and he caters to it, slowly building a community of followers. As an alternative, largely underground movement, it’s still “cool.”

"And COMEDIAN ZERO said unto the people, 'Blessed are those who support their scene partners.'"

Stage 2. At this point, the community’s reputation is still coterminous with that of Comedian Zero. He might attract other “cool” performers, but most of them will be inspired by his accomplishments to create their own unique communities. “Cool” performers are trend-setters and innovators, not followers. Rather, the next generation will be mostly “smart-funny” performers, the ones who have spent years and years writing clever jokes and cracking up audiences, but just haven’t made that transition to using their humor to get laid or broaden their fan bases. They see Comedian Zero and the scene as an opportunity to make that final step to “cool-ness.”

Some early "smart-funny" followers help Comedian Zero scare farmers by making crop circles.

Stage 3. Comedian Zero exits, due to death, retirement or some kind of severance. The “smart-funny” people take over the scene. The community, coasting off the success of Comedian Zero and his immediate disciples, enjoys a brief reign in the mainstream. However, the limelight has lost its luster, due to the departure of the founder. Meanwhile, other “funny-smart” people, having lost their only real incentive to join the community — the prospect of being “cool” for once — migrate elsewhere, working on their own projects to showcase how funny they are.

Comedian Zero lets slip a comment that the Pharisees control the media.

Stage 4. Those who remain are “smart” people, the fans who admire the talent of the “funny-smart” generation. The “smart” people see themselves as almost as funny as the previous generation, and that with enough hard work and research, they too will be “funny.” The “smart” people read, write, talk, reflect, analyze, dissect, and make dorky flow charts about comedy. The community is now an institution. It begins focusing on itself and its own image more than the work it’s doing, coming up with several clever ways to reinvent itself.

After coming up with a few ways to target cool and funny potential members — clever promotional campaigns, invite-only parties and “rap battles,” none of which really worked — we mapped out our current performers within a “cool-smart-funny” Venn diagram, hoping to get a sense of where we were headed. In our eyes the diagram classified people on how they got laughs on stage rather than who they were as human beings.

So to avoid confusion I replaced cool, smart and funny with terms whose opposites are less offensive: Smooth, witty and silly. It’s not really an insult to call a performer “not witty,” “not silly,” or “not smooth.” The specific terms tell us more about a performer’s style, rather than leaving us with a misleading personality profile.

As a test, I used the new Venn diagram to classify some of today’s most famous comedians:

You'll notice that the above names are all cool, smart AND funny.

You probably disagree with a lot of the above, and if you were to make your own version, it would probably look very different. Go for it. Apply it to your favorite comedians, to the current cast of SNL, to the mainstage performers at your improv theater. See what it says about them, about you, about what comedic traits are valued where.

I like my categorization because you start to see some common traits within the groupings. The “silly” group features brilliant character-actors, the “witty” crowd includes the best writers, and the “smooth” performers tend to play self-assured characters with “rules” of how the world should work. The “witty-silly” are cult-heroes, the “silly-smooth” are sexy and often musically inclined, and the “smooth-witty” often play leading straight men in movies and television. I had trouble filling in the “smooth-witty-silly” spot, but so far it seems reserved for comedy legends.

Should we be doing this? You could argue that the subjective nature of comedy, and the wide spectrum of the things people find funny, lends itself against trying to classify and analyze comedic performers. It almost feels like a crime to pigeonhole a comedian. To assign labels to a performer is to strip him of what makes him special, reducing his colorful talents to muted bulletpoints, like pinning a monarch butterfly against a poster board. Indeed, when I mentioned this blog to a fellow friend working in comedy, he warned me: “If you write this kind of stuff, people are going to be really awkward around you.”

We’ll find out if my friend’s prediction comes to pass. In the meantime, I think for the more right-brained people, despite how few of us pursue careers in comedy, looking at things through a microscope is the only way to process the world around us. Despite how creepy and sterile it may seem, it’s a little exciting. Professional sports, once purely a subjectively-viewed industry, eventually gave birth to fantasy leagues when analysts started keeping track of stats. Some argue that stats and computer averages are destroying sports, but most people are happy to have a new, intimate way to participate in and talk about something they love.

So brace yourselves, folks. Armed with our PowerPoints, spreadsheets and TI-83s, we’re going to drag comedy out of the closet and force itself to admit what it’s always been: a place for nerds to call home.