Komedy Klass: "Buy-In" Earns You 20 Valuable Seconds

The importance of making a connection

Detail from Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” via Wikimedia Commons.

***Thanks very much to everyone who submitted a piece! I really enjoyed reading them. It was a pleasant break from writing yet another column that basically says “I think what the president is doing is inadvisable.”

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One of the hardest bombings I’ve ever witnessed started with the comic asking the crowd: “Do you guys know the show Dragon Ball Z?” Nobody knew Dragon Ball Z, which is a Japanimation show that other Japanimation fans know as “the one for nerds.” The crowd practically said “NO, WE ARE NOT FAMILIAR WITH THE THING YOU WISH TO DISCUSS” in unison, but that didn’t stop the comic from doing five full minutes on Dragon Ball Z. And he bombed so hard that the president should probably visit that comedy club once a year and solemnly lay a wreath on the stage.

That comic needed to learn about “buy-in”, which I’d define as “the audience’s level of interest in your subject matter.” Suppose you meet a stranger at a party: If you talk about things they’re interested in, they’ll probably enjoy the conversation. But if you drone on about fucking Dragon Ball Z — or some other shit they don’t care about — they’ll pull the “I’m gonna refill my drink (and then disappear into the crowd)” trick lickety-split. And comedy interactions are like social interactions: It helps to talk about things that people care about.

Comics are at a disadvantage because we don’t know what our audience cares about. We have to guess, and I’d recommend that most times, comics should play the percentages. Many people have worked a job, traveled by airplane, and eaten at McDonald’s, but few have encyclopedic knowledge of early ‘90s Japanimation. And believe me when I tell you that in standup, when you hit on a premise that resonates, you can feel the audience perk up. That buy-in is a gift, it gets the audience on your side, and every word you utter from that point forward is wisdom straight from the mouth of Confucius. And that lasts for about 20 seconds. And then it’s back to folded arms and “what funny thing have you said lately?” But for 20 seconds, you and the audience shared a soul.

This week’s Komedy Klass Piece of Interest deals with something that’s of interest to a lot of people: raising kids. The piece comes from Mike in New Mexico, and Mike is adding to a long tradition of commenting on the strange things that mini-humans do. No less a wit than Mark Twain developed a habit of making notes about his children’s behavior, which inspired Mike to start taking notes of the little things his daughter does. Mike sent me those notes — just little vignettes and snippets of kiddie weirdness — and they’re really funny. Here are some examples:

As her sister solemnly laid one of those blue diaper pail refill rings on my head, the little girl declared, “NOW YOU ARE KING.”

If you’re tired of your kid, you can take a REALLY long time counting in hide-and-seek.

How does one impress on a child that she, in fact, does not already know how to play the piano?

No one ever told me how satisfying it is when your child hurts itself doing something you explicitly warned it not to do.

The little girl carefully moderates her hyperbole, lest you think ill of her: “I’M SO HUNGRY I COULD EAT THE TOP OF AN ELEPHANT.”

I could teach a class now in how to get a girl’s entire outfit on without waking her up, but I kind of fear what the market for that particular school of esoteric wisdom looks like.

I find these really funny. And I would have found them funny even before I had a kid; after all, I had met kids, and I was broadly acquainted with their work. Parenting material obviously works best with parents, but non-parents still get it — you’re not in a Dragon Ball Z situation. The universality of kids’ antics is probably why comics like Jim Gaffigan, Ray Romano, and Nate Bargatze have gotten huge largely on the strength of their kid-based material.

When you’re talking about common experiences, you increase the chances of a nail-on-the-head specific observation. Like this one from Mike:

The little girl does not appreciate my frank and vocal critical assessment of Moana 2.

Yes — GOD yes. When you have kids, you have to watch all sorts of kiddie crap, and some of it makes you want to dunk your head in acid. I haven’t seen Moana 2, but I watched Mary Poppins Returns with my nephews and loudly shat on it for its entire two hour and 21-minute run time (which is 51 minutes too long for a kids’ movie and two hours and 21 minutes too long for that kids’ movie). My nephews loved Disney’s forced march through a land of reheated whimsy, though, and they didn’t appreciate my criticism, even though I reminded them several times that I’m an award-winning writer and therefore correct.

This one is relatable, too:

Wait, crap, I forgot to do Chanukah.

Again: nail-on-the-head. In my house, our Chanukah tradition is googling “When does Chanukah start?” and finding out that it started three days ago. (Plus, if I’m doing the googling, it’ll be “when is Hchannikuh?” because I’m not Jewish.) And the “crap” in Mike’s “Wait, crap” is relatable because when you screw up a holiday as a parent, you feel bad for cheating your kid out of holiday magic. Unless you’re a Jehovah’s Witnesses, I suppose, in which case saying “Happy WEDNESDAY” to your child on their birthday is a centerpiece of the faith.

There’s a danger to broad, relatable material, though: It’s often bland. After all, lots of comics cover these topics — you may have noticed that I’m basically advising you to talk about the categories that were parodied as hack 35 years ago on Stand Up and Win. When you get buy-in, the audience is saying: “We’re interested in this topic.” But then you have to say something interesting. You have to make an original observation on a topic that people think and talk about all the time. And that’s one reason why comedy is so hard: You have to be original and relatable at the same time.

But, as a first step, I’d recommend focusing on the relatable. Crawl before you walk, and definitely crawl before you attempt a triple backflip over a tank of piranhas. Once you’ve built up trust, you can get weird; I’d stay tuned if Patton Oswalt started talking about Dragon Ball Z, because I know he’ll get somewhere funny. Comedy — especially standup and essay writing — is a conversation, and that conversation goes best when people care about what you’re talking about.

If you’d like your piece to possibly be the focal point of a future Komedy Klass, please send anything — an essay, a sketch, standup, whatever — to KomedyKlass@imightbewrong.org. There’s no deadline and nothing to sign up for; this is just a thing I do sometimes. And I enforce a strict “positivity only” rule both from myself and in the comments section, because no one will want to submit anything if their work will be ripped apart by the the circus of Russian bots and sexually frustrated losers that makes up most comments sections.

And your piece is more likely to be picked if you’re a subscriber. So, there’s that.

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