Podcast of the Week: The Comedy Nerds

New York comedians, Dan McInerney and Dustin D'Addato have been doing The Comedy Nerds since mid-2008, focusing their show on topics and issues in comedy, more than looking at people and news. They do all of it, of course, but I appreciate the thematic direction.

Going thru my backlog of podcasts I came across an unheard (by me) episode from December of 2008: Hacks and Cheap Jokes. More than anything, the show is a good example of how hard it is to pin down claims of good-vs-cheap comedy. McInerney sets it all up with a good question his friend asked him: "What is the definition of hack? Or is it just anything you don't like?"

They underestimate fans of comedy by suggesting that hack is an "industry term" for a concept that doesn't occur to most audiences. D'Addato figures that few fans think beyond "that person is funny" and "that person's not funny." He adds "Most people aren't going to get too deeply into, you know, the theory about why a person's funny or not."

It is pretty common to see unexamined positive reactions to comedy. When it's funny, it just is. On the other hand, when a comedian isn't funny, almost everybody has a theory about why. The theories are usually full of holes, but that's no more common with the audience than with comics themselves.

D'Addato sets up a nice foundation for the definition of a hack comic. Basically, a comic that tells familiar jokes in a familiar way. This, of course, implicates every single comic at some point. And that's fine. Moshe Kasher, Andy Kindler, and George Carlin are not hacks. Their work is original, honest, and impressively effective. But if you're unwilling to say that some of their jokes are typical in style and content, you're just not being honest.

The discussion on the episode expands to movies, and McInerney stumbles a bit when he argues about the quality of specific films. He says of Airplane!

To me, you can just feel that the people who made Airplane! were just, were really into it and were just you know just love these dumb jokes and were like, 'Look at all these dumb jokes everybody. Isn't this so funny? Aren't we all just having fun?' Whereas like, those disaster movies just feel like cheap cash-ins, they feel really lazy.

D'Addato challenges that argument.

But are you sure that it's that and it's not just because at the time, that we were a little bit more just impressed with it at the time that it was happening? That we were younger and therefore more susceptible to laughing at those things? And now there's an establishment associated with it that there isn't associated with the disaster movies.

McInerney relies too much on quality being determined by his appreciation, or "feeling" about the comedy, but he does hint at the importance of originality. The argument of originality is always a tough one, and they try to tackle it, but that's one hefty beast that won't fall over. The secret to being original is probably just to get credit first. Or if you're second, to do it better. And "better" means…? Yeah. I'm not sure either.

They talk about Family Guy, hockey fights, and broad appeal. And they proclaim, very confidently, that "Dianne Wiest" is funnier than "Diane Keaton." Not as an actress. As a punchline.

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