The last few weeks have given rise to innovative forms of Internet comedy: live-streamed variety shows, a renaissance of front-facing-camera character bits, and, last month, on YouTube, a Zoom table read by the cast of the Netflix show “Big Mouth.” The laughs are a godsend but can sometimes have a better-than-nothing quality, especially when it comes to standup. A notable exception is “Tip Your Waitstaff,” the recurring joke-running sessions hosted by Mike Birbiglia on Instagram Live, where he and another comic bounce new material off of each other in real time.
“Tip Your Waitstaff” ’s premise is simple: Birbiglia and the day’s guest each select a regional comedy club whose waitstaff will receive donations from viewers and then spend a half hour running jokes. Joke running, also called joke bouncing, is an established part of standup comedy that is almost never acknowledged publicly, let alone dissected and mythologized in the manner of joke writing, crowd work, or bombing. “It’s the step before you bring something onstage,” Birbiglia explained to me recently, by phone. Comedians often run or bounce jokes on the sidelines of clubs or over the phone, testing the potential of jokey premises, vague ideas, and personal anecdotes. It’s a trusting process, exposing at once how comics talk to each other about their craft and think about jokes at their dimmest stage.
The comedian John Mulaney brought a list of jokes in a Word document during his session. The comedians Roy Wood, Jr., and Jacqueline Novak had notebooks. Ali Siddiq had scraps of paper. Birbiglia had his written out on colorful index cards pinned to the corkboard behind his office desk. He is a prolific joke-bouncer and joke-writer: for each of his four hour-long specials—his most recent, “The New One,” premièred late last year—he estimates that he generates five additional hours of material. Novak recalled how Birbiglia taught her to bounce jokes to help her build confidence. “He started reading me all these ideas—half-baked, not even half-baked,” she said.
For punchline-heavy comics like Mulaney, who worked at “Saturday Night Live” early in his career and said, of standup comedy, “I don’t like to be technical about it, but there should be a joke, like, every second,” the sessions took on a one-upping quality. Other comics took the time to ruminate. The comedian Maria Bamford spent her session unspooling one long tale about a disastrous visit to the Harvard Lampoon. During Novak’s session, after a lengthy run about pizza and burgers, she attempted a physical bit about addition and subtraction. Addition: march confidently forward. Subtraction: totter over. She sat down again and picked up her phone. Birbiglia gave her an empty look.
“Do you have more on pizza?” he asked.
It was such a flat rejection that Novak gave an incredulous laugh. “If I seem a little deflated, it’s because I’m still recovering from Mike’s absolute silence to my math stuff,” she joked.
“I like the math stuff!” he protested. “It’s just a thinker.”
Joke running is conversational, but it flows according to a format: comics delineate turns to avoid confusion about who can lay claim to which lines. “There’s an etiquette,” Novak said. As far as content is concerned, anything goes. The results aren’t always elegant, or even funny, but the process can jar perspective, and riffing on controversial topics helps expose the “potholes,” as Wood put it. “It’s the most productive way of joke writing,” Mulaney told me.
During his session, Mulaney ran jokes with a straight face. “I hope my expressionless adding of details and pitching of tags comes across as my delight,” he said. He brought a list of “front halves” or setups—“promising rookies,” he explained.
“I have a small bit, it’s like half a joke,” he began. “Has anyone ever opened an orphanage and thought, Let’s make this nice?”
“I like that!” Birbiglia said.
“The other day I was watching an ad for heartburn medication,” Birbiglia said, starting his turn. “All I could think was, that pizza looks so good. I’ve gotta get some of that heartburn-medication-brand pizza!”
“ ’Cuz the cheese really pulls,” Mulaney tried, solemnly.
“Maybe some Robitussin dipping sauce,” Birbiglia said.
“I want to go to the concert in the antidepression commercial!” Mulaney replied. “The first part is always the same, too,” he said. He got up from his desk and stared moodily out the window at the street. He turned back to his smartphone screen. “It’s, like, what’s in the yard that you, in a good mood, would go do?”
There were a surprising number of pizza jokes among the guests, as though even comics who didn’t usually do timely humor were too overwhelmed by current events to think beyond the basics. “I think all my debate material is dead,” Wood lamented, flipping through his notebook. Instead, he was working on a premise about the absence, due to relative poverty, of “black preppers”—smart material because it grounded the coronavirus crisis in a broader observation about racial inequality. Wood started his session by outlining the deeper issue, which, he explained, is always where he starts. “The point I’m trying to make is that even buying four months’ worth of guns and supplies is income inequality,” he said. “Most black people, statistically, they can’t. It’s racist.”
“It’s prepper privilege!” Birbiglia offered.
“You can’t even pay for the pizza you ate yesterday! And you’re supposed to buy four months’ worth of fucking pizza?” Wood said, gaining steam. “You’re asking me to prepare in case it gets bad. Bitch, it’s bad for me now!”
For his session, Wood, who spent up to twenty-five days on the road per month in the early years of his career, nominated his home-town club, the StarDome Comedy Club. Mulaney nominated the DC Improv, where he opened for Birbiglia during college; Birbiglia used to work the door. Allyson Jaffe, who manages a staff of fifty at the DC Improv, told me that she has cried a couple of times on the floor in her office in recent weeks. Mulaney’s half-hour “Tip Your Waitstaff” session raised more than five thousand dollars in donations for her club alone. “It’s really helping us get through this hard time,” she said.
By the end of last week, when Birbiglia announced at least another week of “Tip Your Waitstaff,” it started to feel increasingly naïve to expect that his guests would ever reënter any semblance of the professional world that they left behind. Comedy, like everything else, is changing under its participants’ feet. Some spoke of clubs almost as a thing of the past. “The whole thing is that you’re packed in tight and the ceilings are low,” the comedian and “Saturday Night Live” cast member Melissa Villaseñor said, sadly. “They’re going to have to space everyone out.” Yet running jokes, by its very nature, even on Instagram, leads to delicious anticipation of a live crowd, and preparation creates its own momentum. “That’s very funny,” Wood said at one point, shifting in his seat. “I’d do that onstage tonight!”
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- How people cope and create new customs amid a pandemic.
- What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.
- How much of the world is likely to be quarantined?
- Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus.
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available.
- We are all irrational panic shoppers.
- The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome.
- How pandemics change history.
