Comedy books for a comedy skeptic

I have a hard time with stand-up comedy. By that I mean, I can’t watch it. I feel such strong second-hand embarrassment watching a person go on stage to make jokes to a possibly hostile crowd that I usually can’t enjoy the jokes.

Yet, I don’t mind content about stand-up comedy. I loved The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (though I have to admit, my least favorite parts of the show were her stand-up performances.) I think stand-up comedy translates well into works of fiction because you get to watch a person turn their struggles and experiences into a (hopefully) successful comedy set as a signifier of their personal growth. Everything is grist in the comedy mill!

So it isn’t a big surprise that I read and enjoyed Dolly Alderton’s Good Material. The main character, Andy, is an unexceptional stand-up comedian in his thirties who was just dumped by his long-time girlfriend and does not understand why. Even as his life unravels (he needs a new place to live, his sparse comedy gigs barely pay the bills), he can only focus on conducting a detailed post-mortem of his relationship.

It is a little odd to read a book by a female author from the perspective of a whiny man who can’t quite figure out where to go next with his life. Yet, she writes him as funny and humble enough that I, at least, couldn’t help but cheer for him. I didn’t find his stand-up jokes funny, but it turned out that was the point of the book. During one of his stale and toothless sets of observational humor, the audience jeers him and a culture writer takes him down as the face of all that’s wrong with stand-up comedy.

Yes! I thought. Observational humor is boring! Successful comics draw on their full human experience for a show—not just presenting as an empty box out of which come jokes. The experience made me feel (what else) tremendous second-hand embarrassment for Andy, but it pushed him to finally write comedy based on his rage and misery and, most importantly, that actually had something to say about the human experience.

All this is to say, I think a fictional work about comedy is most successful when it doesn’t try to be laugh-out-loud funny but instead uses comedy as a vehicle to show someone’s growth.

Inspired by Good Material, here is some further recommended reading:

1. Romantic Comedy - Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel is almost the inverse of Good Material, with a comedy writer falling in love instead of dealing with heartbreak. I crushed the book in about a day. It was funny (not in a stand-up way 🙂), charming, not over-the-top, and delightfully romantic.

2. You’ll Grow Out of It - Not a book about comedy, and not a work of fiction at all—just a book of essays that made me laugh out loud. The author is a comedian and apparently quite well known but I was (unsurprisingly) not familiar with any of her comedy work. But this was a great book for vacation reading.

3. The Fallback Plan - An older book (2012) I picked up at the library. This has some of the charms of Good Material (aspiring artist’s life is in shambles, they try to find a way through), though this one is set in the year after college graduation when the protagonist moves back to her childhood home. It is a short, funny read that happens to be written by a fellow Northwestern alumna!