Here’s the entire sets of two comics in a row. Standup comedian Peng Dang and standup comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. I am only showing this because one of the comics had his set viciously edited and released without his consent. This here is what live standup is. It’s raw. Comics riff off what previous comics say sometimes. That’s just some of the context you would need to understand a joke when you’re not in the actual room. Other contexts are that these two comics knew each other, so a bit of ball-busting is among performers on the same shows is never far from the norm. And another piece of context is that Tony is doing a guest set on this show. So nobody in the audience was expecting him to be performing there. In other words, these were not specifically his fans. They were actually fans of Peng who was on the lineup. So that's who's in the crowd and that's who is laughing at the jokes.
In this one, the first comic does a SUPER pandering, intentionally joke-free “bit” about wanting people to be nice to Asians. Plenty of other actual jokes about Asians in there as well, but the pandering plea is the important one to note. It's got a tiny joke at the end about soy sauce, but the meat of it was literally saying "please don't be so mean to us." So the next comic, Tony, went with a contrast joke by going super obviously overboard mean to Asians. That contrast is where the humor is and that’s what the crowd is laughing at. Those laughs you hear are the honest reactions of a crowd who saw ALL the context. It’s in Austin, one of the most liberal cities in America. And they’re all laughing. Liberal people are all laughing. And they’re laughing because they understand the comedian doesn’t hold those views. The ridiculousness of the overreaction is what’s bringing out the laughs. Now, could Tony have accomplished that with different wording? A different tone? With a different outfit? For sure. Maybe he should have and maybe he shouldn't have. It's not for us to decide how we want artists to do what they do. It's for them. If you view standup as a business that you own, sure, weigh in and choose how it's done. But if you view comedy as an art form, then we can never dictate how they should be doing things. It is not up to us at all. And when we pressure comedians (getting their agents to drop them, having people threaten venues until gigs are cancelled) to always perform how WE want in every moment, what we've actually done is put unnatural pressure on the art form to be made into what we decide instead of what the artist wants. That's dangerous.
So this is just some of the context necessary to understand what's going on here. There's tons more that I could only know by being in that room that day. I don't know what the sound system was like. I don't know what was in the news in the area that day. It all goes into how the crowd receives a performer. But I'm giving you SOME of the context.
Most likely, many of you have already made up your minds about these comics as humans. You've weighed in on how "you would have done it" or what's ok and what's not ok. And now that you have tons of new context, you likely won't change your opinion at all. That's human nature. Once our minds have been made up, we have trouble changing them. Despite new evidence, we want to continue holding to our emotion. Especially if we've posted our views in writing. That makes it even more difficult to reform an opinion. So this is not going to sway many people. But for those of you who can see that this isn't quite what has been presented to you previously, maybe it's time for you to speak out. Jump into the discourse about it. Honestly, we shouldn't even be talking about somebody's workout set from a bar room we've never been to. But now that we are, it's really not fair to the performer or to standup comedy in general that a narrative derived from a sneaky, out-of-context edit is the only one out there.
Live comedy is the best! It's wild and uncensored and exciting and hilarious and cringey and interesting and uncomfortable and just super fucking fun. It should never be released without permission from the comedian because sometimes we take chances. We try things that might not work but we need to try. To go for something to see what works and where the lines are. The only way to figure that out is by trying stuff in these types of shows. If it doesn’t go over, our punishment is that we have to deal with the bomb. Bombs sucks. But if people start filming these then the result is comics won’t be able to try stuff. We won’t be able to grow. It holds back the entire creative process. These aren't standup specials. And when people see a bootleg set they tend to treat it like a special, to analyze it like we carefully picked out every word, to rate it against the best material of other comedians. And that's not fair to the set, the performer, or to process.
I show this only because of the previous betrayal. Viva live standup comedy!