Chamberlain! | MY immediate involvement notwithstanding, The...

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July 30, 2011

MY immediate involvement notwithstanding, The Earwolf Challenge is fast becoming one of my favorite shows to listen to. (Maybe that’s gauche, but honestly, there’s SO much in each episode that the contestants don’t get to hear until the show airs. Caroline does a better job explaining my excitement here.)

This past week, Brett Hamil of Ham Radio was taken to task- as felt by many in the show’s forums, a little excessively- for submitting a pretty conceptual sketch about hack comedians. Scott Aukerman of Comedy Bang Bang took the forums to share his thoughts on the topic, and I paste them here as they are terrific and in no way exclusive to the Challenge:

Seeing a lot of comedy at the UCB here, I see young comedians bringing up “hack comedy” all the time. They bring it up so often, you’d think it were a thing the general public cares about, and that they all could agree is a terrible problem in our society. These are usually young comics who haven’t figured out what they want to talk about themselves yet, so they use it as a crutch, like ironic racism or puns (in other words, the very same crutches I use.)

Whenever I see this, I’m usually disinterested and zone out, and wish they would talk about something they really cared about. I don’t know, maybe that IS the thing they really care about, since comedy can take over your whole life once you start doing it. But I don’t think most of them see a lot of hack comedy around them. After all, they’re mainly performing at open mics and the UCB, two places not known for performers of the usual definition of “hack” comedy. (Side note: I don’t like the term “hack” very much. It’s too easy. If you care about comedy, there are shades and levels that are so interesting to dissect than just generalizing someone as such. I’ve seen people level the accusation of someone being a hack many times, and quite often they don’t even know what it means. They’re just calling someone that whose jokes they don’t like very much. But that’s just a pet peeve of mine…)

Now, it sounds like Brett is around shitty comedians a lot, from his description of middling in casinos and whatnot. So he is definitely coming from a place of experience. And, in any case, the point of his sketch was all about skewering the other guy- the guy who was upset at it, right? I think the point the judges were trying to make was not that Brett didn’t have the right to take potshots because he hasn’t paid his dues enough to make fun of other comedians. They were trying to say he doesn’t have the right because he hadn’t ENTERTAINED US with several minutes of his OWN comedy yet. Brett literally started the sketch with about a minute of “bad” comedy. This is generally uninteresting to me, and probably to the judges. I was super excited to hear whatever Brett considered to be one of his really great sketches, so I could get a good idea of what his style is. I found it very disappointing that I didn’t get that opportunity. So that’s what I think Matt meant when he said “bad song choice.” He could see the talent, and could tell that Brett is good - it’s just he didn’t care for the tune Brett was singing.

Now, don’t cry foul and say I’m being a hypocrite - after all, yes, I was on a show starring the guy who played Blueberry Head. I’ve taken potshots at everything from bad improv to a comedian whose style I didn’t care for. But I should’ve been focusing my time instead on writing something funny myself. The best analogy I can come up with is - I was listening to Ben Folds’s (otherwise perfect) record “Rockin’ The Suburbs” the other day. And whenever that song comes on, I always skip it. Why? Because i KNOW Limp Bizkit is shitty - that’s why I’m listening to Ben Folds!