Stories in Stand-up

Some notes from a writer and literary critic on a particular way to tell a story that should resonate with would-be stand-up artists:

Many writers fall prey to the quintessential American notion that bigger is better. They overload their sentences, adding more adjectives, more descriptions, more component phrases, tangents and appositives to form sprawling, syntactical centipedes (like this one) whose many segments and exhausting procession repeat themselves and say the same thing in different ways, with different words, and exhibit an entire ideology: that prose’s sensory and poetic impacts exist in direct proportion to the concentration of words.

Brevity often invites speculation and facilitates a dynamic interaction between reader and writing.

So too with the audience, who come wanting to laugh.

Telling tight, concise stories, which are attentive to timing, rhythm, and the comedic element, works.

Stories with half-assed ornamentation that attempt to instill in the audience a particular impression of the comedian generally fail.

As Aristotle tells: "if one wishes to become master of an art or science, go to the universal, and come to know it as well as possible."

Devin Durden (Jan 7, 1991 - Oct 4, 2012)

Devin Durden treated us to his unique perspective on life this past Spring in a routine he called Hard Jobs...

You ever think about the gimmicks car dealerships use to get you to stop in? Like the popcorn machines? “Hey, come check out our cars and we’ll give you some popcorn!” Do they think that’ll work? Do they think there’s a couple out there who’ll fall for that one? Are they picturing the guy looking around and then spotting the popcorn machine and stopping dead in his tracks and grabbing his wife and saying, “Oooh! Babe, they’ve got Orville Redenbacher over here! Let’s buy a car!”  

Speaking of hard jobs, how about a stripper? It’s bad enough you have to dance nekked in front of people, but what if you don’t look that good? You’re pulling the day shift. The only guys coming in are toothless farmers. You’ll be dancing and they’ll be throwing quarters at you, ‘cause that’s all they’ve got. That’s gotta hurt.  Then if you give ‘em a lap dance they’ve got all those snaps and button fasteners on their overalls that you gotta watch out for. If they just came in out of the field who knows what they’ve got on them overalls. Burrs and thorns, manure. Pretty soon your ass is all pocked and pimply and there goes your bread and butter. No one wants a stripper with a pock-marked ass. I get that. Having a clean, smooth ass is a big deal for a stripper, but here’s something I don’t understand: what’s the deal with doing coke lines off strippers’ asses? Have you seen this in movies and videos? Am I the only one who’s new to this? Is that like some match-made-in-heaven, peanut-butter-and-jelly thing that I don’t know about?

Thoughts and prayers to Devin's family and friends, who have the hardest job of all right now. Devin once wrote, "I know that I have had a lot of funny things happen in my life that, on a simple level, I think I can share with an audience to give them a good laugh." He did that. He made us laugh. 

May this slice of Devin's humor play some small part in lifting the terrible burden of his loss from those who love him. May it help us carry him in our memory.