![]() ![]() It’s where you feed off the energy of the room, and develop a feel for the exact moment when the crowd will turn on you. You might know something is funny intellectually when you write it, but you don’t really know without the reaction of a live audience. The Cellar is where you can get dark and experimental. Save the polished material for your Netflix special. Just the opposite: Its intimacy and ephemerality are its magic. Stand-up in this setting is not meant to scale. It is where comics get their reps, where they go to test their jokes-and very often their most objectionable and least-developed material-in front of a live audience. ![]() What he doesn’t seem to realize is that it is neither.Ī comedy club is the dojo of stand-up. This is what I’ve been thinking about as I’ve watched Elon Musk treat Twitter as a comedy club on the one hand, and the universal town square on the other. Imani Perry: Can Twitter’s failings spur a better social media? Just the way the social web has flattened and homogenized culture, it has warped the purpose of the comedy club. They were accustomed to having the time and space for their art to ripen while performing in private clubs, and suddenly found themselves exposed before a global audience. But I did come to understand the complexity: Like everyone else, comedians must assume that, when in public, they are being recorded for internet distribution. ![]() I was not above mocking the comics I know about this new practice. Why would comedians, of all people, accept such defeat? That they would tolerate turning the Cellar into some kind of SCIF struck me as not only somewhat pathetic but a dire threat to the art of comedy itself. And many comedians share the view that no topic is off-limits so long as it can be made funny. Comedy is, at its core, about revealing truths-all truths, including nasty, taboo truths. My view was simple: If you don’t want people to hear your jokes, don’t tell them. I understood that the stakes seemed ferociously high, but the idea that the answer to this challenge was to literally bubble-wrap people’s iPhones seemed absurd. Comics were worried about being taped surreptitiously, going viral against their will, and then getting canceled. The club’s rationale had to do with Twitter, and with YouTube, and with the rest of the social web. So it was particularly distressing the first time I saw a bouncer distributing padded envelopes and insisting people seal their phones inside them before entering. The Cellar, which was more or less my second home during my early 30s, is a warm and intimate-to-the-point-of-claustrophobia club that I have loved unconditionally. I first noticed this new phenomenon at the Comedy Cellar, in Manhattan’s West Village. R ecently, comedy clubs have begun doing this thing that seemed, when I first encountered it, both wildly hypocritical and more than a little sad. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. ![]()
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