Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-up Comedy 2nd ed. by Oliver Double (review)

Oliver Double’s Getting the Joke, an extensive and approachable book, is both a “how-to” manual and a homage to the work of many stand-up artists from the United States and UK. The book is divided into four sections, all useful on their own or in conjunction with one another. The first section consists of twenty-eight short, conversational chapters. These chapters break down the many nuances of stand-up through performance analysis, interviews with comedians, and Double’s personal experience as a comic. The second section provides an appendix of writing and performance exercises that Double has found to be successful in the stand-up courses he teaches at Kent University. The third section of the book is a glossary of comedians, giving a brief description of each artist’s career history and comedic persona. The final section of Getting the Joke is a detailed bibliography of books, articles, interviews, live performances, and recorded stand-up performances.

In his introductory chapter, Double contends that the typical manual of stand-up comedy often misses important contextual and historical information that aid comics in becoming fully entrenched in the art form. The book begins with his musings on the elusive definition of stand-up comedy, asserting that beyond “telling jokes,” stand-up consists of three elements: personality, direct communication, and present tense. These elements support Double’s claims that stand-up is a uniquely audience-dependent genre of performance, and that comics’ development require learning how to interact with myriad environments. Albeit succinct though notable is Double’s review of the history of stand-up comedy in the United States and UK. He traces the overlapping origins of the performance form to nineteenth-century vaudeville and music hall performances. This kind of attention to history and the larger elements of comedy make this text a useful classroom guide insofar as Getting the Joke debunks notions that comedians are simply “born” with the ability to make audiences laugh. Double, then, refuses to dilute stand-up to straightforward joke-telling, and instead elucidates historical lineages alongside the skills imperative to develop a fully formed stand-up routine.

In the first section of the book, he also attempts to understand how comics craft their personas, approach politics and history, and use or reject joke-telling conventions. The chapters, quick and easy to digest, address concrete challenges of stand-up, such as how to deal with hecklers. However, Double also calls attention to more abstract and subtle components of comedy, such as the “energy exchange” to which comics must be attuned in order to handle both the difficulties and thrills of this risky performance form. One of the distinct pleasures of reading this book is how he weaves his theories of humor alongside the voices of stand-up comedians. In fact, I would argue that Double forwards both performance material and testimonies from comics as those that guide his assertions. In this sense, this volume works not only as a handbook for students, but also as an archive of popular stand-up comics from both the United States and UK.

The appendix for teaching stand-up provides practical performance, writing, and character-development exercises that would similarly be useful for many kinds of performance-based courses. Each activity gives explicit instructions under the heading “How it’s done,” and follows with “What it’s for.” Double emphasizes that these are not meant to necessarily be funny, that the comedy “should gently grow out of the activities rather than being forced into life” (459). Rather that creating instant jokes, the exercises are meant to bring students’ best performance qualities to the forefront and teach them how to manage and refine the art of stand-up. The appendix is a creative and useful section for any instructor seeking to find new ways to integrate comedic performance and writing into their classroom.

As is so often the problem with books that take on the...