Idea sex

"What I need," said Andrew Watts, "is a gang."

One of the obvious challenges of stand-up comedy is its single-handedness.  You write alone, perform alone, succeed alone and die alone.  This fosters a natural tendency for solipsism.  Stand-up comics are far more likely to see others as rivals than do improvisers or comic actors working in, say, sketch comedy.  I wonder how much this strange individualism hurts stand-up as a form.

In an essay in the Wall Street Journal Matt Ridley posits that human development accelerated not because of any physiological change in our bodies (Neanderthals had physcially larger brains than we do now) but because of trade.  The exchange of ideas that happened synchronously with the exchange of goods and services created the collective brain that has taken us from the Serengeti to cyberspace.  Ridley sees 'ideas having sex' as the basis for innovation: -

Dense populations don't produce innovation in other species. They only do so in human beings, because only human beings indulge in regular exchange of different items among unrelated, unmated individuals and even among strangers. So here is the answer to the puzzle of human takeoff. It was caused by the invention of a collective brain itself made possible by the invention of exchange. 

The life of a stand-up comic stands in direct opposition to this idea.

Much of this isolationism is self-inflicted (the circuit is overpopulated by socially dysfunctional loners) but there is a cultural insistence in operation as well; one of the few absolute taboos in the industry is joke theft.   Recently Freakonomics ran a terrific piece on this: -

More often than not, however, the norms deviate from copyright: for example, copyright protects expression but not ideas, but comedians’ norms protect expression as well as ideas. Or authorship: under copyright law, two individuals who cooperate in creating a work are considered joint owners of the work. In contrast, if one comedian comes up with a joke’s premise and another thinks up the punchline, under comedians’ norms of ownership the first owns the joke and the latter has nothing.

The essay goes on to say: -

The law is not always necessary to foster creativity. Using informal group norms and sanctions, comedians are able to control joke-stealing. Without the intervention of copyright law, comedians are able to assert ownership of jokes, regulate their use and transfer, impose sanctions on joke-thieves, and maintain substantial incentives to invest in new material.

I'm not sure that I agree with this.  Gaining a reputation for stealing someone else's material (and it is considered theft) can kill a career so many comics deliberately avoid exposure to other comedy forms for fear that any exposure could contaminate their material.  The only defense against an accusation of joke thievery is "I came up with it independently" and this is partially effective at best.  In no way am I condoning joke theft; simply observing that this enforced isolationism that is a reaction to this fear has a downside.

Comedians, playwrights and novelists still live with a romanticised creator-as-auteur notion that is outdated as it excludes the possibility for collaboration and therefore stymies innovation.  The accusation of collaboration or worse hangs permanently over Shakespeare.  Yet collaboration has been de rigueur  in other comedy forms since long before the writers' room on Sid Caesar's show and the Second City technique of writing down and refining sketches that were originally improvised.

The rest of the world collaborates.  The idea of the scientist as solo genius died with the Manhattan Project.  Creative conferences like MaxFunCon and SWSX abound and multiply. yet when stand-up comedians gather there is a miasma of jealousy, envy and paranoia.  A common criticism of stand-ups when they join writers' rooms is that they don't play nicely with others.  In Ridley's terms they don't like their ideas having sex with other people's ideas.

Strange, as this is the only sex many comics are likely to get.