Stagecraft: The Art of Comedy

Actor and writer Jonathan Biggins shares his secrets of writing and performing comedy, drawing upon his latest play Australia Day and twelve seasons of the Wharf Revue. This article was compiled from a question and answer seminar at the 2012 Association of Community Theatre conference at NIDA.

Comedy is a very useful way of telling the truth. We are the King’s jester, given the licence to say things other people can’t.  We can criticize the King, as long as we make him laugh. The great benefit of comedy is that it does allow you to say unpalatable things, because the pill is coated in sugar.

However, you still have to obey the rules of drama; that is maintaining character and the reality of the situation. What kills comedy is self-indulgence or not keeping your eye on the main prize, which is telling a story.

Some of the most successful plays ever written are comedies, because they engage us, for example the works of Tom  Stoppard, Neil Simon, Alan Ayckbourn and David Williamson.

If you write comedy, it is good to collaborate. Otherwise your only benchmark is, ‘Do I think it’s funny.’

The biggest secret of writing anything is cutting it back. Less is more.

The most successful comedy has the audience catching up. Once the audience gets ahead of you, forget it. We tend to do things that rip along, even having the audience say, “I’ll have to see that a second time to catch it all.” So the dialogue is more compressed, shorter, and, as you write, do what Tom Stoppard does - he re-drafts every page as he goes.

The funny thing about comedy is that it’s almost always at the expense of someone or based on some degree of cruelty. You are laughing because it hasn’t happened to you. The classic Australian style of humour is the cartoon showing the man hanging off the end of a building with another man hanging on to his trousers, laughing hysterically. The tag is the first man saying, “For gorsake stop laughing, this is serious!”

Nationalities laugh at different things. British humour is more text based. German humour is more physical and slapstick. People used to say Americans had no sense of irony but their comedy has evolved quite a lot and is full of irony these days.

Once I watched a theatre packed with the Samoan community watching a Samoan stand-up comedian. The audience was killing themselves but I couldn’t see anything funny in it. It was all about cultural identification.

Our cultural groups are defined by not only what you include but also what you exclude. I agree with the song in the musical Avenue Q that everybody is a little bit racist. We all have those feelings. As the song says, “Ethnic jokes might be uncouth but you laugh because they’re based on the truth.” 

I always say if you can stereotype a people in a positive way, why not a negative way? If you can say Germans are industrious and hard working, then equally you could say they can be humourless. I don’t think there is any real danger in that. 

We don’t set out to deliberately offend people, but you always will offend someone. You have to educate the audience to have a thicker skin. 

Certain people are given licence to make jokes. It’s widely accepted that you can do black jokes if you are black. In Avenue Q, Gary Coleman objects to black jokes, then he tells them a Polish joke. It’s like Indians accusing us of being racist when they invented the caste system.

You say comedy is at the expense of someone else. Have you ever gone too far?

We are considering writing a sketch about refugees. We did South Pacific Solution The Musical some time ago. Nothing much has changed.

But you can go too far. We did a sketch on a story of an Arab living in Jerusalem. He lived for 55 years in the same house, went out for a coffee one day, then while he was out somebody changed his locks and moved in. I found the absurdity of that amusing. He didn’t. 

The whole thing was about the changing demographic in Israel. The sketch was not meant to be anti-Israel but we had complaints. Someone pointed out it was a mistake to set the sketch to a tune from Fiddler on the Roof. He said the sense of what we did over-rode the literal meaning of what we sang. I thought that was fair enough. The biggest sin was that it wasn’t funny enough.

Are there some subjects you wont touch?

No one ever seems to like sketches about paedophiles.

We can’t easily make jokes about land rights. You can’t black up.

Militant Islamists don’t lighten up. You do have to be careful. There are extremists in every group, and I am annoyed at that because that is censoring through fear. That is suppressing what may be a legitimate criticism.

So you won’t do a Muslim sketch?

We’d be wary to make it more generalised. This is the irony. You can knock (Catholic Archbishop) Cardinal George Pell, but he is not going to come around and kill you. That is why it is great to see Muslim stand-up comics emerging. They are given the licence, but even they would be wary that cultural sensitivities can be physically dangerous.

Aside from politics there were plenty of questions and comments from the floor.

What happens if you are putting on a show full of comedic parts and jokes, but not getting too many laughs? Should you shift emphasis to be more physical?

The writing might not be any good. People say there is no such thing as a bad audience. We know that is bull. Some audiences are more responsive. You can’t hear a smile. You might think, ‘Oh God this audience is dead.’ Then they go ballistic at the end.  So you think where have you been all night ...thanks for your support!

The thing about comedy is, the harder you work the less funny it gets. It’s not unlike being with dogs, inasmuch as you should never let an audience see fear. The most important thing is to put an audience at ease. As soon as the audience smells fear they do not feel comfortable.

I remember seeing an opera when the tenor cracked on a note. The creative tension was gone. We spent the rest of the night worrying it was going to happen again. And I think that can happen with comedy.

I auditioned for the play Lost in Yonkers but I did not get the part because the director didn’t think I could be funny. What should I do about that?

If you are doing Lost in Yonkers and do it accurately you will be funny. A sense of timing and audience awareness is helpful. If people are casting funny people that is a disaster. Stand-up comedians are funny because of their material. A comedic sense of timing is an advantage, but if you are playing the reality and truth of situation Neil Simon has done all the work for you. If you are playing it truthfully and accurately it should work. Obviously there are other types of comedy where a sense of awareness and exaggerated comedy is useful.

I bring my relatives in to shows and encourage them to laugh and clap. To give permission for the audience to laugh. What do you think about that?

Yes, it is an ancient theatrical tradition; they call it the clacque. To pay people to laugh. It tells the audience this is funny. It’s best, of course, if they have see the hilarity without prompting.

Images: (from top) Jonathan Biggins apeaks on comedy at the ACT Conference; Drew Forsythe, Phil Scott and Jonathan Biggins in the 2011 Wharf Revue - Debt Defying Acts; and Jonathan Biggins & Drew Forsythe and Amanda Bishop & Jonathan Biggins in Sydney Theatre Company’s 2010 Wharf Revue: Not Quite Out of the Woods (Photo by Tracey Schramm.)

The Wharf Revue 2012 - Red Wharf: Beyond the Rings of Satire plays at Wharf 2 Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company from November 1 - December 22, 2012 - Read our review.

Originally pubished in the Septembr / October 2012 edition of Stage Whispers