Mock Stars: Indie Comedy and the Dangerously Funny

As a work that charts the trend and offers comprehensive analysis on indie comedy, which the book doesn’t entirely claim to be, it’s a little lacking. “If you want to get historical about it…,” Wenzel writes before briefly rifling off the anti-humor of Andy Kaufman, the 1990s alternative comedy movement and even Kurt Vonnegut as the influences of indie comedy. Seeing as how it’s a book on the subject, yes, I would have liked to get a little more historical about it. The introduction reads a bit like that friend, half out of breath, trying to convince you to check out this new band while you’re just trying to hear the story of why the concert was so good in the first place. So it would have been nice to get more descriptions of the ephemeral magic that happens at these independent shows, including at least a few more of these unconventional jokes and various crowd reactions. Oh well, these moments are often nearly impossible to describe in writing.

As a survey of indie comedy’s main players, however, the book is charming, capturing the two dozen or so performers Wenzel sees as influential. While sometimes unbearably self-referential (we get it, you were nervous interviewing David Cross, but you’re a journalist, not to mention henceforth a supposed authority on this subject, so get on with the interview, dude!) it’s great to see Oswalt’s genuine thrill when he hears of Wenzel’s use of “potato skins” as a synecdochical symbol for an entire type of venue. It is used to capture the mainstream clubs that usually serve the appetizer along with the two-drink minimum, and it ties into Oswalt’s poetically logical use of bachelorette parties as a sort of symbol for the crowd that indie comedy is avoiding: the self-centered, this-night’s-about-me! people who come to only drink and not think. (To be fair, potato skins are still delicious, while bachelorette parties are always terrible.)

Some of the best insights come from a sidebar written by Andrew Earles, half of the Earles & Jensen duo. In the short exercise. Earles takes Opening Night at Rodney’s Place, an HBO special that aired in 1989, and walks us through a set of performances that appear surreal now, dripping with the elements-silly gags that tell you when to laugh, sexism-as-a-punch line jokes- that contrast what indie comedy allows. It’s close to a manifesto for alternative comedy more than indie, but it’s still a “fascinating time capsule, a mess constantly grasping at straws, an overdose of unaware noncomedy” that highlights a turning point. Earles writes, “after examining Opening Night, it’s astonishing to consider that Mr. Show debuted in close to the same HBO time slot only six years later.”

To be sure, there are comedy clubs today that can not be called anything near mainstream. A certain club I’m partial to in Cambridge, Mass., has a bit of a reputation for cheap covers, discerning crowds and artistic freedom. And anyone can see the inherent danger of blindly extolling any indie trend: We’re not like them! We do things however we want here-no rules! Wait, where’s your band t-shirt and faux, preemptive cynicism? The same goes for pigeon-holing performers as mainstream. Last Sunday, I watched a local comic destroy with a playful, absurdist, sprawling bit about ham. It didn’t pander at all. And the audience was obviously grateful for it. It killed. Was it at a rock club full of hipsters? Nope, it was a crowd of 250+ people, locals in the sense of the word that would make most comics shiver with images of impenetrable stoicism-in a place where comics traditionally do more safe material than even mainstream clubs: a Knights of Columbus hall. Sometimes it’s about being a good comedian wherever you perform.

But a book more or less about the democratization of comedy is like a book about the cake-ification of smiles. I’m all for it. The kind of awareness it seems to encourage is a good thing, as the public still often fails to distinguish genres in comedy the way they do in music. So, if you go to more than a few comedy shows a year, the book will help with understanding what you’re seeing-as well as what you might be missing. And if you haven’t seen a live comedy show since the 80s, after reading, maybe you will.

Mock Stars, from Speck Press, is now on sale for $16.00