Startups and other advertisers have been paying Vooza to include them in videos that take the piss out of the whole “startup” scene...It’s something that’s been pretty darn successful. So far, Vooza’s clients have included email newsletter startup MailChimp, app analytics platform Tapstream, branding firm Eat My Words and others. The companies pay to have their brand worked into a segment written by Vooza’s writers and featuring its cast of characters — the video then goes out to Vooza’s own audience, and can also be used by the company in any way they wish.
It’s a business model that can be classified as branded content or sponsored product placement, but Ruby says that he thinks of it more as “a throwback to the old school TV advertising model when the stars of a show would do the ads, like Johnny and Ed schilling for Alpo."
It’s a fresh angle that could be hitting at a good time for its niche…Founders nowadays know it’s good for business to be funny. It’ll be fun to see what comes out of Vooza in the future.
Nothing has generated interest among the VC (and entrepreneur) community like a series of about 30 mockumentary videos about a company called Vooza...The weekly videos surfaced in 2012. Rife with subtle sarcasm, the two-minute clips provide "insights" that actually lampoon startup culture — particularly the culture surrounding technology startups.
When he was a child, he loved trains and going to the movies and taking a bath. My grandmother once told me this story about him: When he was about 12 years old, she came home and found water leaking down the stairs. She followed the trail of water and found my father sitting in the bathtub and reading. He was so consumed by his book that he didn't notice the faucet remained on. She told him he would have to clean up his mess. His response: "I can't. I just took a bath and I'm all clean."
He was in the Israeli military and served as a tank commander. I am convinced that sitting in a steel box in the middle of the desert drove his lifelong obsession with air conditioning. He was a man who could never have it cool enough.
He came to America to go to college. He knew hardly anyone in the US. He started off living at the YMCA. He worked at El Al airlines. He went to Columbia.
He then went to work as a journalist. He worked at Women's Wear Daily and in between covering his normal beats wound up covering the Six Day war in Israel since he was back home when it occurred. That job is also how he met my mother. My grandmother was a lingerie designer and my father went to interview her for a story. My grandmother said, "You should meet my daughter. She's learning how to type and she's seeing a therapist." That was enough of a hook for my dad. They met and realized they both loved some of the same music. Three months later, they were engaged.
After that, my dad went to law school at NYU. He graduated and went to work in the D.A.'s office in Manhattan. He was an Assistant DA while there, working alongside Rudy Giuliani for a while. I think he saw some pretty awful stuff while working that job. NYC back then was a seedy place. He then went on to work at the U.S. Attorney's office working on white collar crime, racketeering, and stuff like that. Going after Wall Street types and mob guys and the like. After that, he went into private practice. I don't think he liked that nearly as much as putting the bad guys in jail. He eventually left the law entirely and went to work in the garment industry. But he always thought like a lawyer.
He and my mom had an interesting relationship. The prosecutor and the hippie. The teetotaler and the druggie. The logician and the artist. Surprisingly, they managed to make this civil war work. I think it may be because of their mothers. Both of them had intrusive, overbearing mothers that they rebelled against. A large reason their marriage worked is because they left each other alone. He'd be in the basement working on his model trains, she'd be in the garage sculpting. But we always ate dinner together as a family. I think that was important.
He was from Israel but he didn't care about Judaism. I remember asking him if he cared whether or not I married a Jewish woman. He said, "If I cared about that, I wouldn't have moved to America." He didn't give a shit about religion or synagogues. He'd go along with it for my mom. But it seemed to have no impact on him.
He loved Jeopardy, trains, The New York Times, playing bridge, animals (especially his fish), crossword puzzles, WWII history, High Noon, Churchill, Reagan, John Wayne, the Marx Brothers, Abbot and Costello, Stephen Wright, Rita Rudner, MGM musicals, Twin Peaks, cable news, and singing.
Eventually, my mom got sick with MS and they moved out to Trinidad, California. The mild temperature there was good for her disease and she had a great view even when she couldn't move. I think her disease was more painful for my dad than it was for her. He felt helpless. My mom took the p.o.v. that "my journey is now inside my brain." I don't think my dad could see it that way. He saw her slow decline as a travesty. It tore him up. When she passed about six years ago, I think it was a big relief for him. It seemed to lift him out of depression. He joined a song circle. He played bridge. He made new friends. He met his "lady friend" Carol that he was with for a couple of years. I asked him why he didn't call her his girlfriend. He said, "After a certain age, a woman is a lady and not a girl."
He was a gentleman. And he never wanted to be a burden on anyone. This is the email he sent when he found out he had cancer:
Hi kids,
I was diagnosed today with advanced metastatic bone and lung cancers.
The prognosis is not good.
I've had a good run and don't mind dying, but I do fear the pain and helplessness that come with this disease.
Let me know if you want me to update you. I don't want to burden you with this needlessly.
I love you very much.
Dad
Their disagreements were more entertaining than their agreements, complete with knitted brows, are-you-serious head-shaking and gentle (or not) barbs. Mr. Siskel once taunted Mr. Ebert about his weight: “Has your application for a ZIP code come through yet?” Mr. Ebert came back with a dart about Mr. Siskel’s receding hairline: “The only things the astronauts saw from outer space were Three Mile Island and your forehead.”
Hey, thanks @mattruby, for quoting me on Rodney and Groucho. bit.ly/tjgYxG
— Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago) November 27, 2011
I was watching the Oscars, and I saw Jennifer Lawrence on the steps, and I thought: That was the perfect acceptance speech. How do you avoid the envy and appearing arrogant? How do you say the perfect thing, now that you're not an underdog anymore? I don't think she did it on purpose, but you see that and see how she behaves, and you're like, it could not go any better than that. If I was writing an acceptance speech, I would have it start with someone falling off the steps.
Do you write out your jokes word for word, and then when you perform go from an outline and then speak off the cuff with just the general idea? OR do you memorize everything word for word and then rehearse it to the point that like an actor it comes natural?
I am able to develop funny material organically or by writing but once I perform it for the 2nd time, it starts to sound robotic. I want to be able to keep that natural off the cuff sound.
Also to get over the hump of being funnier in real life than on stage would you just recommend more stage time?
After you take an idea to the stage, I'm assuming you'll record your set and then make changes to your new bit to the words are how you like them. Then do you write the bit down word for word just for memory sake? Or just leave it as an outline and let your brain do the work?
Eater presents our newest video series We Love Food, in which a group of comedians tackles the weird, wild, and wacky food world news of the past month, from the overturning of the soda ban to Michael Wolff's anti-restaurant rant.
When it comes to monologue jokes for late night, I've heard other good comics say there are two (or maybe three?) different formulas that are used, and every monologue joke fits within this basic format (I want to say Jeselnik said it on a podcast, but not 100%). Anyway, when I write my normal bits I'm not conscious of structure / formula, and I'm not sure what these monologue "formulas" are... do you know?
amendment: I actually do understand one of the formulas, is to take a headline, read it back, and then just add a punchline to the end of it. So, not sure what the other one or two formulas are.
I'll say anything but I don't really get what the question is.
Obviously there's a lot of formula. You want all the formulas? Just...uh...watch a monologue. They aren't exactly hidden. Phrases that get repeated: "Or, as X calls it..." Different hosts might lean on some more than others. There's like 10 in common use. Then there's non-formula jokes which might account for <50% of the monologue but are 99% of the work. I will say this though - the formulas are used because the audience needs them. It's not because writers are lazy. The audience just reacts to them without needing to do any joke math. I can come up with a genius joke on a topic and - guess what - the formula one will get the bigger laugh. So, if anyone has a problem with joke formulas, take it up with the creeps you hang out with, not me!
Re: "The audience just reacts to them without needing to do any joke math." Are TV audiences dumber than comedy club audiences? Why are the formulas necessary on TV but not at clubs? How does having to generate so much material every night force you into using formulas (or whatever ya call 'em)? Or does it?
-Are TV audiences dumber than comedy club audiences?
I'm the wrong guy to ask here because I think they're all aggressively incompetent. On a micro level, it obviously depends on the club and the tv show. But a TV audience generally has more distractions.
-Why are the formulas necessary on TV but not at clubs?
Have you been to a comedy club? Have you seen the genre of comedy called "iPhone autocorrect jokes?"
How does having to generate so much material every night force you into using formulas (or whatever ya call 'em)?
Eh, it's like I said - mostly for the benefit of the crowd. But, also worth noting, is that the news is THE SAME ALL THE TIME. Same holidays, same crimes, same stupid celebrities, same events. It's all the same. You got two sentences to write something that's (A) funny and (B) makes sense. "The B has to 'be' there." That's a phrase from my new comedy workshop seminar I just invented. Want a joke on China? guess what, child labor and eating dogs. Does China have other references? Sure - but are you going to be the guy who mentions "The Long March" to 1 million households under the assumption they know it? Probably not.
And I know we shouldn't talk about "authenticity" here, because (a) that subject tends to derail everything else, and (b) we're now supposed to pretend like it doesn't matter. But it DOES matter, and I think critics who refuse to worry about authenticity are actively ignoring something profound. The problem is that people misapply the term. Authenticity is not about literal honesty. If an artist says, "I'm a fake person who makes fake art as an extension of my fake experience within a fake world," I view that artist as deeply real. And I'm not arguing that this is how David Bowie thought about himself, because I have no idea how he thought about himself. But it's how I thought of him. I think he was way more authentic than most rock musicians.
I set foot in my first theme park in 1969. It was Six Flags over Texas, outside Dallas. I loved it so thoroughly that, all the way back to Chicago in the car, I conspired with my sister to build a scale model of it.
Well, that never happened. But I still remember the baffled joy I felt on leaving the place, thinking: Wow, someone did this, someone made all this, some grown-up sat down and designed the little Mexican back alleys and cowboy boardwalks, the fake bird sounds.
In a sense, these stories were that scale model, much delayed.
But also, while working on “The Wavemaker Falters,” I noticed something: if I put a theme park in a story, my prose improved, the faux-Hemingway element having been disallowed by the setting. Placing a story in a theme park became a way of ensuring that the story would lurch over into the realm of the comic, which meant I would be able to finish it, and it would not collapse under the conceptual/thematic weight I tended to put on a so-called realist story.
I'm about a year and a half in and have an audition-type set for a local booker who could help me get to a lot of different, new stages...
I'm wondering about structuring it, a 6 minute set. The advice I most often hear is start with your second best and close with your best, then basically alternate by perceived strength of the jokes: 2,4,6,8,10,9,7,5,3,1
I can't really do that. My best two jokes are both about a minute and a half long. They both work well and get 3-4 good laughs. Problem is my 2nd best joke is about Hitler and includes an impression and I just can't open with it.
Is it suicide to open with your best joke? Are you bound to be a let down for the rest of the set? I've done it before (to get attention from the getgo) and it felt a little flat until the close. I could open with my more mediocre stuff that can come off as persona building and then close super strong with my two best, but wonder if this risks losing the audience/booker's attention before I get to the real meat?
i think you're overthinking it. i never heard of that alternating thing before. but yeah, you wanna open and close strong. and i wouldn't open with a hitler impression or whatever. heh.
it is not suicide to open with your best joke. it builds confidence in the crowd (and in you). also good: if the opener joke explains who you are or your p.o.v. of the world or makes you seem self-effacing. all those things help get a crowd on your site.
if you're not feeling ready to be seen, you could always tell the booker that. he might be impressed that you wanna wait a lil' bit to get more material together.
overall, i wouldn't sweat it too much. oh, one other thing you can do: watch late night sets to see how people structure those if you really wanna suss out if there's a "formula" that works.
good luck!
I'm wondering if you've opened a show before with what you felt was your best material and if you found it had any significant positive or negative effect on how the rest of your act went? I mean, I realize this can be a pretty subjective thing and to get a sound read would probably necessitate a good number of reps with it - basically, I realize that it's kind of a silly question.
What's in the back of my mind as I wonder about this is the Talking Funny show on HBO (Gervais, Seinfeld, Rock, and CK were talkin about being comics) and CK mentioned how he would start to open with his closing material in an effort to strengthen the rest of his shit (it's in the first 10 minutes of the show.) Just raise stakes and put the onus on more. Maybe this applies only to a certain level? The 5-minute-set level guys should just focus on working on X plus Y and not bother worrying about higher mathematics? Like, focus on crawling to get on your feet before you begin to worry about a sprint or jumping hurdles?
I've never found a negative consequence to opening a set strongly. If you can kill up top, do it. If you can kill at the end, do it. If you have to choose between just one of those, I'd choose to end strong.
Re: CK, he does that to make his material better. That can be a good idea if that's your goal. When you're trying to improve a set, you do different things than when you're showcasing. When it's time to showcase or record or "be your best," then you should prob close with your strongest (or close) material.
My uncles were all funny. My dad wasn’t funny, but my uncles were all funny. Now I go back and I like him better than them, they were manipulative funny. [AST, 2006]
When you write from your gut and let the stuff stay flawed and don’t let anybody tell you to make it better, it can end up looking like nothing else. [Pitchfork, 2010]
Well, I think “likability” is an overused word. I don’t watch people ‘cause I like them; I watch them because they’re compelling. Sympathetic is a little different … Likable just thins you out. Working to make a character likable is what kills most TV shows. [Vulture, 2010]
Nakamora - not sure about the spelling of this one, but this is named for a line in a Taxi episode — “Paging Dr. Nakamora” — that got a huge laugh at the table read (for some reason beyond my understanding), so the writers added a bunch of callbacks to it throughout the script. At the taping of the show though, the first mention of Dr. Nakamora got no laugh, and every subsequent mention was increasingly painful for the writers, and the actors, and the audience. If your episode has a joke that dies immediately, but you know it has several callbacks yet to come, that’s a Nakamora.
With my stand-up now, I’ve realized there are two types of jokes. One type is me talking about miscellaneous topics and getting laughs. That would be how I feel my first two stand-up specials come off. The second type is, you get a laugh, but you also get the feeling that the audience is saying, “Thank you for saying that!” I find the second type way more satisfying. I found it in Buried Alive, where after the show, so many people around my age said, “I’m glad you said that, I don’t feel ready to get married, I’m scared of my friends having babies, and yes, it is hard to meet someone you really like.”
With this new material about texting and stuff, this has been even more pronounced. So many people have come up to me and talked about how they and their friends have been going through this same shit. I almost write stuff with two goals now: to have it be really, really funny, but also have ideas that resonate with people. When people come up to me and say, “Holy shit, man, I can’t believe you said that, that’s exactly what I’m going through, and I hate that shit too.” That’s way more meaningful than, “Funny shit, dude!”
It is what I try to emulate. I try to do a show where if you took the jokes out it would still be an interesting speech. And that's where that comes from.
I think talent is overrated. Talent's important but the real accelerant, the real coefficient that's the mystery number is hard, hard frickin' work.
I've always felt about my stuff that I'm like a standup comedian onstage. I treat the scenario exactly like they do. Every time I hear a standup comedian talk about his craft or what he's doing, like that comedian was ripping off my jokes or taking my material or I did this joke and it bombed and I took it out of the set or the next joke i told murdered, I think, "That's exactly how I play music onstage."
Well you're in your little room
And you're working on something good
But if it's really good
You're gonna need a bigger room
And when you're in the bigger room
You might not know what to do
You might have to think of
How you got started in your little room
Da da da
“I would quit while you’re ahead. Really. It’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and you write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.”
With your stand-up, a lot of the material is personal stories. Is that something that evolves over time? It seems like the personal stuff is common among the more established comics. As a comic, is that where you eventually want to get to?
Yeah. When I started off, I was very premise-based and I would say an outright lie about my life just to get to a joke. I would do that kind of stuff at open mics. A couple things happened. One was I realized I’m not a great pure joke writer like a Dan Mintz or Anthony Jeselnik, let alone like Emo Philips or someone. So I was like “well, I can’t sustain this.” And more, I have things that I think are funny and it’s more of my take on them that appeal to me. I knew I wasn’t going to write an hour of very tight, impersonal jokes. The second thing was I was opening for Mike Birbiglia a lot. He took me on the road in 2005 and I opened for him on and off for like two years. Opening for him was huge for me cause I was going across the country every week. He and I did 30 days on the road together straight on a bus. I had to do stand-up every night, sometimes two shows a night. I was doing 30 minutes in places like Columbia, MO and I wasn’t ready to do a half-hour. Those things were big for me. Watching him and how he was able to dissolve mining real life for comedy, I just liked it. And then watching Paul F. Tompkins at Bumbershoot in 2006, I remember seeing him tell just three stories from his half-hour set and how many jokes he pulled out of those stories. Just the amount of jokes from the set-up to the whole story, it was packed. That really appealed to me. So I just started doing that. And then it becomes just more comfortable on stage because you believe what you’re saying and it doesn’t feel as detached. I still talk about TV shows and bullshit, though.
Where you do want to go with stand-up? Do you have an end goal in mind?
I would like to do theaters. That’s my goal. I said this to [Parks and Rec creator] Mike Schur, who’s an old friend of mine, when he asked why I was performing so much. I said “Cause I’d rather make Bring the Pain than The Hangover.”
Why is that?
It’s more personally satisfying. Bring the Pain means more to me than The Hangover does. Raw and Delirious mean more to me than 48 Hours and Trading Places and The Nutty Professor. The other thing with movies is, if George Carlin’s act was a movie, it would be a dystopian post-apocalyptic thriller. There’s something about movies that’s so cooperative and so fake. There’s something about movies where they’re upholding Judeo-Christian values that I just think is corny. I like movies, but with stand-up you can really affect people’s thought process. You’re not just an entertainer, you’re a writer, you’re a philosopher, you’re a pastor, you’re so many things. Dave’s act, Chris Rock’s act, Billy Burr’s act, Stanhope, Attell, shit is dark, man. But it’s a real reflection of the world that you just don’t get anywhere else. So that’s what I like about stand-up. If someone said to me you could be a really successful comedian or you could be a really successful TV and filmmaker, I’d pick stand-up every time…I just think stand-up’s the coolest thing ever. That’s the bottom line. I love Chappelle’s Show, but I think what I love most about it is how much it’s like stand-up. Stand-up’s just really interesting. So hopefully I’ll be in theaters based on this mixtape.
We had a great deal of trust in each other. But sometimes with writing you just can’t tell, especially if you’re writing under pressure. Diamond and I were writing the final scene of Some Like It Hot the week before we shot it. We’d come to the situation where Lemmon tries to convince Joe B. Brown that he cannot marry him.
“Why?” Brown says.
“Because I smoke!”
“That’s all right as far as I’m concerned.”
Finally Lemmon rips his wig off and yells at him, “I’m a boy! Because I’m a boy!”
Diamond and I were in our room working together, waiting for the next line—Joe B. Brown’s response, the final line, the curtain line of the film—to come to us. Then I heard Diamond say, “Nobody’s perfect.” I thought about it and I said, Well, let’s put in “Nobody’s perfect” for now. But only for the time being. We have a whole week to think about it. We thought about it all week. Neither of us could come up with anything better, so we shot that line, still not entirely satisfied. When we screened the movie, that line got one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever heard in the theater. But we just hadn’t trusted it when we wrote it; we just didn’t see it. “Nobody’s perfect.” The line had come too easily, just popped out.
I finished it all up in Cavendish and I was in the music room upstairs when John and Yoko came to visit and they were right behind me over my right shoulder, standing up, listening to it as I played it to them, and when I got to the line, 'The movement you need is on your shoulder,' I looked over my shoulder and I said, 'I'll change that, it's a bit crummy. I was just blocking it out,' and John said, 'You won't, you know. That's the best line in it!' That's collaboration. When someone's that firm about a line that you're going to junk, and he said, 'No, keep it in.' So of course you love that line twice as much because it's a little stray, it's a little mutt that you were about to put down and it was reprieved and so it's more beautiful than ever. I love those words now...
Time lends a little credence to things. You can't knock it, it just did so well. But when I'm singing it, that is when I think of John, when I hear myself singing that line; it's an emotional point in the song.
Finally, about a week before we went to air, and the night before our final sound mix on episode 201, they relented. I can’t say what exactly changed their minds, but I suspect it was mostly the collective passion on the subject from the creative team. While we were certainly not unanimous in how much we were opposed to the choice (I was ready to quit entirely, others were more willing to just make the network happy), we all agreed that is was not going to feel like the same show we had aired the first season...
for me, it was a lesson in standing up for what you feel is creatively the right decision. Would the show be getting better ratings with laughs on the sketches? Perhaps. But it would no longer have been the same show for me personally, and I would not have returned for our third season, which we’re currently in pre-production on.
You need a much humour as possible in a show like this. That was something I leaned from working on the X-Files. I learned so much from Chris Carter, who was the creator of Millennium about serial killers. It was hard to watch, and depressingly dark and I knew for Breaking Bad - a bleak show with cancer and criminality - that it would need to be leavened with humour. So we go for moments of absurdest humour but the moments have to feel real and derive from behaviour that the characters would perform.
I don't see what the purpose of the bit is...All your doing is just saying that to the audience. You know you think that. You know they think that. What's the point?...What I think you need to do in bits is – and what I try to do is – have a moment of discovery. I try to have that moment in the bit where I go, "I used to think this but now I realize it's that."
Which if you watch Patton, he does that a lot. "When I was 35, I used to think..." and he hits the funny from that side and then he goes, "Now I'm 42 and let me tell you people, I was wrong!"...From that moment on, I realized that I don't want to be the guy who gets up and just barks at the audience...I have a lot of bits where I try to turn it on myself and ask why do I feel that way? Oh, it's because here's my flaw that makes me see the situation like this.
“It just seemed right,” he suggests. “You go on instinct. I don’t know. As an artist, are you supposed to know every reason for every brush stroke? Do you have to know the reason behind every little tiny thing? It’s not a science; it’s an art. It comes from your emotions, from your unconscious, from your subconscious. I try not to argue with it too much. I mean, I do: I have a huge editor in my head who’s always making me miserable. But sometimes, I try to let my unconscious act out. So why did I do it that way? I thought everyone would feel it. That even if they couldn’t say what it meant, that they would feel it.”
