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DZ-83: A Very Thematic Stand-up Special!

What can screenwriters learn from the storytelling techniques used by stand-up comedians?

8 SEP 2021

Show Notes

Standup comedians can keep audiences gripped to their every word for over an hour, and often bring them to emotional climaxes by the end. So how do they do it and what tools can apply to scripted narratives?

For this deep dive into standup, Stu and Chas are joined by the super-talented comic and podcaster Alice Fraser. Which is rather fortuitous. Because not only are we schooled on comedy techniques, but because Alice also has a Masters in Narrative Rhetoric.

So as we dive in to NANETTE by Hannah Gadsby, BABY COBRA by Ali Wong and IT’S THE FIREWORKS TALKING by Daniel Kitson (with more than a passing reference to Alice’s own show SAVAGE and INSIDE by Bo Burnham), we analyse narrative structure, transitions, set-ups and pay-offs used by stand-ups…

But we end up focusing on exploring thematic tools - particularly the Aristotelean concepts of the rhetorical triangle:

- *logos* (how the story is told); 
- *ethos* (who the storyteller is); and
- *pathos* (how the audience emotionally engages).

With these powers combined, storytellers of all kinds can produce work of thematic power and resonance. Or just funny.

And in backmatter, we discuss adapting Savage for the recorded stage with Alice!

This episode brought to you by ScriptUp – https://www.scriptupstudio.com – use promo code DZ10 to get 10% off.

Enjoy!

"She starts alternating between stand-up and like just pure kind of anger and emotion without trying to make anyone laugh at all."

— Chas Fisher  |  DZ-83: A Very Thematic Stand-up Special!

Thanks to our Patrons, especially Thomas, Garrett, Bjorn, Randy, Jesse, Theis, Sandra and Khrob.

As always: SPOILERS ABOUND and all copyright material used under fair use for educational purposes.

Resources

Transcript

Read the transcript for this episode.

Chapters

  • 00:00:00 – Q: What can screenwriters learn from the storytelling techniques used by stand-up comedians?
  • 00:03:25 – Alice Fraser on Comedy
  • 00:07:54 – › Comedy as a tool for confronting difficult emotional truths
  • 00:12:03 – › Presence, politics, and visual storytelling in BABY COBRA and NANETTE
  • 00:15:44 – › How format shapes stand-up structure across cultures
  • 00:22:33 – Comedy tools to be explored
  • 00:26:21 – NANETTE by Hannah Gadsby
  • 00:29:03 – › Ethos, logos, pathos as structural framework for comedy
  • 00:34:04 – › Unifying themes and audience-driven meaning in stand-up
  • 00:41:38 – › Joke structure as incomplete story and the fugue form
  • 00:45:15 – › Jokes as distance, intimacy, and audience manipulation
  • 00:48:47 – Transitions in and out of theme
  • 00:52:39 – › American vs. British structural approaches to stand-up narrative
  • 00:58:42 – › Catharsis mechanics and the retrospective reframe
  • 01:05:51 – › Tension as meta-commentary on gender and unresolved pain
  • 01:08:32 – BABY COBRA by Ali Wong
  • 01:13:02 – › Club bits vs. connective tissue in long-form comedy structure
  • 01:20:05 – › Reprise as structural skeleton: the trunk and branch model
  • 01:29:26 – › Audience participation, the Betty Crocker principle, and earned subtext
  • 01:34:39 – › Heightened dialogue and visual imagery conjured through language
  • 01:37:57 – IT'S THE FIREWORKS TALKING by Daniel Kitson
  • 01:42:47 – › What stand-up reveals about art that moves audiences
  • 01:49:02 – › Language as colour grading and hyper-real specificity
  • 01:55:30 – › Status shifts as a structural tool in comedy and drama
  • 02:00:06 – › Character voice as persona and the narrator's ethos
  • 02:04:45 – Key Learnings
  • 02:07:41 – › Layering emotional groundwork for recontextualization
  • 02:14:39 – Backmatter - Adapting SAVAGE
  • 02:17:03 – › Performing tension for unseen audiences
  • 02:22:53 – › Wide shots, private moments, and embodied scripts
  • 02:24:35 – › Adapting the illusion of intimacy to screen
  • 02:28:17 – › Narrator versus character and the writer's persona

Films

KEY IDEAS

The Unloaded Gun

"The whole structure of Savage is kind of your unloaded gun, loaded gun scenario. I repeatedly introduce ideas with low stakes only to bring them back with higher stakes."

— Alice Fraser (00:06:12) · Setups Payoffs

Ethos Logos Pathos

"Ethos, logos, and pathos is what I think about. So ethos being who you are in relation to the audience. Why should they listen to you? What's your position? Logos is the structure, and that's the joke structure. Are the jokes funny? Do they work as jokes? Does the story make sense? Does the story follow? Does it, if it is non-linear, are all the pieces in place? Do they come back in a satisfying way? Does the logos work? And then pathos, why do I care? And that's, you know, that can be sad or it can be, it doesn't need to be sad, but it is incredibly important. You know, if this math professor is telling you math problems that all make sense, I don't give a shit. Are these math problems relevant to my life? Maybe I give a shit."

— Alice Fraser (00:33:11) · Rhetorical Triangle · Theme

Joke as Shield

"A joke is a shield between you and the audience. Or it can be a door between you and the audience. It can be an invitation and depends on how you use it. And I think certainly in Nanette, Hannah Gadsby has comments on the fact that she has been using jokes as a distancing mechanism, as a way to distance herself from her traumatic experience, a way of rewriting those traumatic experiences, a way of getting the dig in before other people do."

— Alice Fraser (00:46:25) · Emotional Truth

The Betty Crocker Problem

"How much work do you let the audience do? How much work do you demand of the audience? How far do you guide them? And how much do you tell them? Because at a certain point, it's the Betty Crocker cake with the powdered egg inside. There's no interest for the audience. They're not engaged because you're doing all the work for them. There has to be space for them to come in and bring their egg and feel part of it."

— Alice Fraser (01:30:22) · Audience Complicity

Status and Character

"You can absolutely change how a character, if a character is a villain or a hero, by bringing in someone higher status or lower status than them and having the way that they interact with that new person change. So you can have someone who's seemingly lovely and then they treat a serving person badly and you know they're a villain. Equally, you know, you can have somebody who seems in control and is very reassuring and comforting and then someone comes in who's higher status than them and you see them behaving as a sycophant and you immediately lose respect and they can never regain that status."

— Alice Fraser (01:58:36) · Status

Catharsis

"That is the process of catharsis, which is more often associated with tragedy than with comedy. It's that in its very most basic form, you attach the audience to the characters. You invest the audience in the process of the character. So the crisis of the character becomes a proxy for the crises of the audience. And then the resolution of that crisis is cathartic for the audience because they have attached to the character. And so in that way, I think of the structure of Nanette as being this process of she couldn't tell that story at the front of the show. She has to give you all of this context and build-up so that when she reveals the second half of this story, you know who she is."

— Alice Fraser (01:01:11) · Catharsis

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We are @stuwillis, @mehlsbells and @chasffisher on Twitter. You can find @draft_zero and @_shotzero on Instagram and Twitter.