Smart

A long time ago I almost got into a knock down drag out fight with another comic and a booker about the intellect of stand up comics. I made that statement that you had to be bright to be a stand up. A successful stand up. They said not true. I still stand by this. To be a good comic….not a gimmick, not a hack…a genuine talent acknowledged as successful by the comics that work with you, you need to be a smart person. Sometimes its hard to tell, that’s all.

In Boston there is an unusual percentage of scientists and college educated stand up comics. That is because there is an unusual amount of colleges and universities here. Don’t take a genius to see that. In New York, I used to know a lot of lawyers who went into comedy. Greg Giraldo and Mike Sweeney (head writer of Conan) both came from a legal background. So, yeah, there are obviously highly educated people in comedy.

Then there are people like me. I suck at being educated. Even before the brain damage, I had trouble being formally educated. Verbally oriented subjects were easy for me. Analytical math and sciences like chemistry sounded like the adults in the Peanuts tv specials. For that reason, college and I didn’t mix well. The prerequisites in math and science discouraged the hell out of me because the majority of time in these classes was spent in a confused state. As soon as the math equations started building a second tier, I was fucked. There were too many levels and letters to make sense. Letters aren’t math. They are letters. Until I learned to play the piano, left and right confused me too. I think of them as treble and bass with sounds. My guess is that somewhere along the line, I had some kind of learning disability that I was smart enough to get around undetected. And I am very intelligent, just a bad student with social issues.

Some of the most brilliant minds that I know in comedy did not go to college. Some didn’t even finish high school. In some societies that put a higher value on formal education, this is grounds for less than adequate intellectual value. It is sad because a GPA does not make us bright. Try to get a normal person to find a premise, spin it into something unique and weave it into an act and see what happens. Not only does it take experience, it takes a mind that can spot a concept that is unique to their voice and has not been done by others. Knowing that it will garner the response of a laugh. A class in comedy can teach you what the techniques used are but it won’t teach you to tune in to the idea and cook it into a funny thought. 

To be good in stand up, it helps to be smart. To be great in stand up, you have to be brilliant (or a really great cheat that works very very hard). And that doesn’t mean bookish. It means sharp fine tuned thinking in a manner different from the rest of the herd that only a uniquely intelligent mind can produce. It means Louis CK, Greg Giraldo, Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Joan Rivers, David Cross, Bill Hicks. Firecrackers in God's box of crayolas.