By day, Zach Hall and Lane Pilkington are copywriters at Saatchi & Saatchi NZ. By night, they are standup comedians. They say that intersection has given them a unique perspective on what bravery looks like. There’s no laugh track, and no safety net.
‘Wow, you’re so brave for doing that’ is something Zach Hall and Lane Pilkington hear a lot as standup comedians. But is bravery really what it takes?
When people tell Hall that he’s brave for doing comedy, he assumes that means they don’t find him funny. Because, he says, if comedy is done well, it doesn’t look like bravery. It looks easy.
But, there was one night during their recent performance of the “The Lane and Zach Show” at the Melbourne Comedy Festival that made them think about bravery a lot. Pilkington and then Hall recount the tale below.
The bravest person in the world
Hi, I’m Lane.
I opened my set with this joke: Do you know who I think the bravest person in the history of the world is?
If you want to hear the punchline to that joke, please purchase a ticket to a show, because I don’t work for free. But I’ll let you know one thing. It definitely isn’t me.
The single most common thing an audience member who came up to me after our show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival told me was, “You’re so brave.”
It was never “You’re so funny, so intelligent, so cool.”
But ‘you’re so brave.’
I’m not brave. I’m a coward.
I’m scared of dogs, heights, the dark, commitment, Uber pools and the sprouts that grow off potatoes when they’re in your pantry for too long.
Creating our hour-long show for the Melbourne Comedy Festival was anxiety inducing, time consuming and financially irresponsible.
It was driving seven hours to test out material in Gisborne just to perform to three people spread out in a 120-seat theatre (with a venue that didn’t even have batteries for their microphone and told us ‘you’ll just have to yell.’)
It’s weird. It’s absurd. It’s uncomfortable. I love it. You experience a full range of emotions and end up with something you’re proud of. I feel the exact same way about the creative industry.
It’s sharing absurd ideas, constantly looking for a new angle, problem solving on the fly, refining work, then refining it again. How is it brave when I’m doing what I love?
Tepid applause
It’s a Thursday and our numbers are so light they’re not even numbers. It’s just number. Of the four presales only one person showed up and he doesn’t really count. It’s Lane’s mate. Alone in the front row.
Footsteps crunch up the stairs, and we peek around the curtain. The staff had been offering free tickets to the pub patrons downstairs and found us three people who I’d deliberately avoided flyering earlier because they looked sober and unhappy. They opt for the third row back, crossing their arms to send a very clear signal that they’re not interested in being spoken to.
We hear more footsteps. Stompier ones. Oh awesome, it’s the guy we’d seen smoking half-spent cigarettes outside. He drags a fold-up chair from the side to create a row of his own while swigging straight from a communal water bottle I’d seen at the hydration station downstairs.
Lights dim. Lane puts on his loudest, most official voice.
“Are you ready for the Lane and Zach show?! Iiiiit’s Zaaaach Haaaaall!”
Tepid applause.
I step up, heart racing. I’ve done this long enough now to know the next thing out of my mouth decides how the entire set will go.
“Hello – oh that’s loud. Can you turn that down a touch, Lane?”
Yeah, it’s over.
This should be comedy gold
While I wait for him to find the volume, I adjust the stand, which immediately collapses. The mic squeals as I catch it with my elbows. This should be comedy gold, but I look out at a crowd that feels sorry for me.
Don’t pity me, you lovely idiots. Laugh. Laugh at my misfortune. I can make this work if you laugh.
Lane, in his attempt to turn down the volume, accidentally turns the lights up instead.
They feel like outdoor heaters now. Yeah, that’ll make me seem more confident: highly visible beads of sweat.
“Don’t worry folks,” I say, as I fix the mic. “This is all part of the show.”
Laughter erupts – from the show next door.
I start to disassociate as I go into my routine, floating outside of my body, watching myself bomb with the others. It feels like one of those clips from TV show The Big Bang Theory where they take the laugh track out. How could anyone find this funny?
Twenty minutes pass and I bail. Five minutes short. I don’t think anyone minds.
Lane takes the stage, launching straight into: “Do you wanna know who the bravest person in the history of the world is?”
Without a beat, the man in the fold-up chair, now brandishing a can of beer they don’t even sell here, points at me and shouts: “That guy!”
Sensitive to context
What’s tough about comedy is how sensitive jokes are to context.
The same jokes, told in the same way, can kill on one night and die on another, and it’s as much to do with the environment you create as it is to do with the crowd’s taste.
There were things I could’ve done better. But by the time I got to my first joke, I seemed unprepared, nervous and a bit desperate.
Compare that to another night, when we had the same amount of people and crushed it. The difference was they found us on the festival website and paid money to see us.
It felt like a proper comedy show with comedians who knew what they were doing. Through that lens, everything reads funnier and more intentional. That night, my deadpan delivery and slightly awkward stage presence read as stylistic choices instead of inexperience. A part of the act.
Obviously, I don’t think context is the only thing that matters. The morning after the terrible show, I spent five hours rewriting my whole intro. The creative can always be better.
What’s undeniable though is that context has a huge influence on how an idea is seen, and unlike the creative, it’s something that everyone on the team has the power to improve. And the more absurd an idea may seem, the more important setting the stage is.
Because new is scary. It takes guts. But if the media rallies around it, the strategy backs it up, and the clients are there to feel the energy surrounding it in person – it won’t feel like an idea you’d have to be brave to make. It’ll feel like an idea you’d be silly not to.
