Respect the Rhetorical Circumstance!

I was reading my daily email from The Creative Independent, a series of brief interviews with artists of all sorts about their creative practice and inspirations. Today’s was with the comedian and musician Jaboukie Young-White, who said something that struck me about his dual practice.

In stand-up, you do a bunch of intellectual labor to get a reaction out of people, whereas I’ve gone to concerts, and musicians will, in between songs, be like, “Water,” and everyone’s going crazy, dying laughing, and I’m like, “This room is so hot right now. If I could do a tight five, it would crush so hard.”

Yep. As I mentioned in the prior post, our audiences are prepared for something. And if we don’t deliver it, we lose them quickly. But some of that preparation is beyond our control.

Being an early-career standup comedian would have to be the worst job in the world, because you’d constantly be facing a cold room. On open-mic nights, the people before you wouldn’t be very good either, and it’s hard to tell a joke that enlivens a room rendered dull by boredom. They’re drinking, they’re having conversations with their friends, they’re getting an easy laugh from their buddies by mocking the people on stage. A bored room might be the best possible outcome; it could be actively hostile.

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I don’t have my copy of Cathy Park Hong’s brilliant book Minor Feelings at hand right now, so I’ll have to perform an injustice by paraphrasing. In one of her later essays, she talks about taking classes in stand-up comedy and improv as part of her self-training as a performing poet. She says poetry readings are among the deadliest social events we know of, that every poet knows it, and that we replicate all those bad performance habits anyway. She says she can’t count the number of times that a professional poet has neared the end or her or his reading by saying “Only two more.” It’s like going to the dentist, where they kindly tell us that the pain is almost over. She participated in that herself for a long time, and finally decided that there had to be a better way.

My friends in the Duke writing program who were trained in composition programs used to talk about “the rhetorical circumstance” of a piece of writing. What conversation are we entering? What kind of contribution do we intend to make? Is the mode of conversation gentle and luxurious, or quick and combative?

So let’s think about the rhetorical circumstance of reading our work. It’s theater, and specifically monologue. All eyes are on us… people are quiet and attentive… we’re facing the group, often standing while they’re sitting… and we’re on our own. That’s a mode that carries powerful performance and audience expectations.

If we’ve ever read our work aloud, we recognize that so many performers don’t recognize their responsibilities to the room. They haven’t rehearsed, they lose their place, they shuffle papers, they apologize for what they’re going to read, and they haven’t any sense at all of how long ten minutes is. I was about to write that they give us a little backstory between poems and thus break the spell, but that’s not quite right, because they never tried to cast a spell over us in the first place. We’re all polite audience members, we don’t burp loudly or start talking to our neighbors the way we might in a nightclub, but we’re waiting for the pain to end.

Let’s go back to Jaboukie Young-White’s statement, and focus on the term “tight five.” Every professional comedian has a five-minute set that they use on talk shows or talent competitions, and it’s sharpened to a razor’s gleam. It’s not tossed off, it’s not improvised. Even if the performer looks casual or awkward, that’s the role they’ve taken on; the performance of that character has been highly refined.

Here’s an example that’s easy to enter, Drew Carey’s first televised standup set, on the Tonight Show in 1991. Listen to the intro: “He’ll be appearing this weekend at The Funny Bone in Schamburg, Illinois, and then Tuesday through Sunday at The Funny Bone in Naperville, Illinois.” This is clearly not a comic who has made it yet. But after this performance, he almost immediately got a TV show. He comes on stage at :20 into the video, and he’s done by 6:55. It’s old-school comedy in the Dangerfield mode, and it’s a little dated now thirty years later, but this awkward schlubby Clevelander has perfected every scrap of his stage persona, down to the glint off his glasses in the stage lights.

When we read our work, no matter how dark or how complex or how sophisticated, we become entertainers. We have entered the rhetorical circumstance of performance, and we have to respect that. We become a very specific version of ourselves for those minutes, and we have to win the room’s trust. Even harder if that trust has been violated by prior performers.

Practice. Know your timing, and your time limits. Don’t apologize for your work. Don’t rustle pages around and lose your place. Make eye contact.

That stage is yours. Stand up there like you fucking own it, and then leave it better than you found it.