If you read me elsewhere you might know I also listen to rap quite a bit. In fact, there are so many cultural and artistic overlaps between rap and stand-up comedy I decided to invite a long-time friend & genre expert to have a chat about it. Among many other things, Cesare Alemanni has written a book about rap (if you read Italian: it’s this one) and is also a stand-up fan in his own right. Find a translated & very much edited version of our conversation after the warm-up (which is already back, by the way).
You can’t talk about stand-up and Black culture without mentioning Paul Mooney, who sadly passed away on May 19. This comedy legend might be known to those of you who’ve watched Chappelle’s Show, but his role in American stand-up history is much more important than that. Not only did Mooney write for the much more celebrated Richard Pryor, he was a prolific and uncompromising stand-up himself, with one of the most relevant critical voices on race in the US comedy landscape.
You can find lots of Paul Mooney’s stuff on YouTube, so I suggest you do. R.I.P. Paul Mooney.
Here we are. It’s not the first time I have people over to talk comedy with me in this newsletter (this was the first time, check it out if you haven’t yet), but I am especially happy to share this chat I had with Cesare Alemanni. Cesare is one of my best friends and a fellow comedy fan, but also someone who knows a lot about rap and takes cultural matters very seriously. We have been talking about stand-up a lot in the last few months, so we decided to combine his experience as a rap historian with my comedy obsession and have a chat about these two distinctively American art forms.
NB: Rap and stand-up. Let’s start from the most obvious: both of them are authentically American. But what does authenticity mean in the two contexts?
CA: For me it’s about quality, really. What I think is good rap is mostly American — there’s a range of moods and sounds that come from the African-American tradition and experience, there’s no way around that. In order to be good, rap needs to draw from that. Non-American hip-hop artists share a grammar with it, and it can be interesting, but it’s not the same. There’s also something with rap from the late 1980s till late 1990s. It condensed everything that rap could be at its highest level: kind of a classical age against which everything else can be defined (either as post- that or as a mannerist reference to it). Besides we can also speak of "locational authenticity", with different cities developing their own "idea" of what rap could and "should" be. Be it New York boom-bap, L.A. G-funk, Atlanta trap, New Orleans bounce, Memphis horrorcore, Houston chopped-n-screwed... Rap is a very lively language that grows with and within its context. Very much like stand-up, which often reflects the evolution of language and society.
NB: In a perhaps trivial sense, I think accents influence our perceptions of both art forms a lot. For me, an American accent in stand-up delivers an attitude and an atmosphere that makes other linguistic expressions of it seem less spontaneous, less authentic. I try to step away from that association, but having discovered stand-up around 2007 my taste has kind of been molded around the talent that was surfacing around that time. It was talent that had been brewing in the 1990s, in the wake of the 1980s comedy boom. If the boom peaked with Seinfeld in a way, there is a whole post-Bill Hicks school of comedy (a lot of it associated with Boston, but also elsewhere) that has a much more confrontational style. I think for a lot of people it’s become a kind of blueprint of what comedy is supposed to be — which has its pros and cons, of course. Louis CK, Bill Burr, Joe Rogan, but also Marc Maron, all of them found respect in a global way (in what we now know is a post-TV world), but maintained a sort of underground allure. That type of enlightened entrepreneur underdog quality, a sort of “Bill Hicks that lived”, makes that particular brand of stand-up more confrontational and, so to speak, “authentic” than, say, the more self-contained, theatrical style of English or international performers you can see at the Edinburgh Fringe.
CA: That’s right.
NB: Let’s move on. Stand-up evolved alongside music a lot: Lenny Bruce was a jazz comedian, but Bill Hicks was very much a rock comedian, he was even in a Tool record. When does rap come in?
CA: Eddie Murphy in Delirious was very much disco, he embodied that type of night club Black culture. He even has a 1985 song with Rick James, the genius himself. "Party all the time" is the title, pretty straightforward. Not sure what the missing link between Murphy and them would be, but the two most hip-hop comedians are definitely Chris Rock and Dave Chapelle. Not just because they often collaborated with rappers, but because they brought something of a battle rapper attitude into stand-up.
NB: Absolutely, I think at one point Rock even wanted to be a rapper. And Chappelle did do that big hip-hop concert movie with Gondry, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. When I saw Chappelle live in Amsterdam Mos Def came out on stage at the end. He did a couple songs, but there were maybe three people dancing, everyone else had their phones out. Is there anything you recognize in stand-up that you also find in rap?
CA: There is definitely an observational quality to both. Not so much in terms of the “ghetto CNN” stereotype, but rather in terms of sheer artistry, and generally being sensitive to culture shifts and able to catch things at a deeper level, with artistic acumen.
NB: Well, there is also that Lenny Bruce quote that said something like: “There is no ‘what should be,’ there is only what is”. In this sense there is a meeting point with rap (maybe more with gangsta rap) in terms of being uncompromising, challenging the audience and so on.
CA: Yes, but I mean something beyond the rhymes and the message. The way you say things is almost as important as what you say. If you take someone like Trevor Noah (whom I don't really dig, but I nonetheless think possesses some of the best delivery/acting skills in stand-up) and then you put him next to certain stand-up comedians you see on Italian TV, there’s no comparison. Sometimes you hear a very good idea for a joke, but the performance is too long-winded, the delivery is flat, and it kind of loses most of the punch. Move that to rap and that's exactly the difference between a great flow and a mediocre one, between a good lyricist who is a boring rapper and an MC with wit, gusto and charisma. You can have an amazing rhyme scheme, but it's the way you spit it that makes waves. It's the usual issue of "finding a voice" and not just "having things to say" (an issue that, by the way, is 100% overlooked in Italy, which explains all the cringe that's going on in our pop culture since ever). The same "voice-finding" journey happens in stand-up. Just take someone like Nate Bargatze (a personal favorite) who has built his dead-pan delivery to fulfill the "super-average" (almost super-dumb) persona he wants you to buy into. And it works because they go very well together. In both rap and stand-up, a lot of what is at stake is cadence: it's all about how it fits and conveys your "message" and your "persona".
NB: This is very central issue. Actors and other performers can change their personas, while rappers and comedians cannot — unless of course they start acting, directing, doing podcasts and whatnot. We’re back to authenticity again: knowing who you are as a performer, what you can get away with. If you’re like Hari Kondabolu, who is a really smart writer, you can pull off a slightly weaker timing. If you are like Felipe Esparza, the whole act is kept together by your charisma and confidence. It’s funny because Kondabolu jokes quite a bit about his own persona: he has a feminist dick joke that evolves into a Tumblr conversation with one of his super-woke followers, and also an anecdote he tells about Tracy Morgan (who is super physical) telling him he should talk about eating pussy because it would be hilarious to deliver that with his nerdy face. More generally, I think that if you bake the conflict directly into your persona you can pull off almost anything. Bill Burr is an example of that: the struggle with the demands of toxic masculinity is at the core of everything he does. The conflict is authentic, he’s not just a random cis guy making a trans joke at his first open mic.
And, speaking of conflict, what do we say about the emphasis on punchlines? What do the rap battle and the comedy roast have in common?
CA: It’s pretty obvious there is a common grammar, you need to have that final pay off. Other than that, there is a very different vibe. In a way the roast is a sort of carnivalesque exorcism of the dissing, you say things you woulnd’t say in another situation maybe.
NB: True, but in stand-up there is also a culture of calling people out for stealing jokes and stuff, making comments on people’s careers. I think the punchline is at the heart of the quantifiable quality of success in both art forms. And their immediacy — especially in standup, with the laughs and all.
CA: In rap you have that too, at live shows. And, although it is representative only up to a point, let’s not forget rap battles are very much reliant on an immediate response from the crowd.
NB: You’re right. We could say the punchline is a form of verbal control over reality, an artistic currency you exhange for the audience’s love.
CA: There’s definitely a form of power involved. Both rappers and comedians want to seduce their audiences, even if they might do so by offending them or objectifying them. They also want to lead them, I think.
NB: Speaking of currencies and quantifying success, what about the capitalist nature of rap and stand-up? Because on one hand we have the Lenny Bruce, post-Bill Hicks narrative of rebellion, going against the grain. But I think stand-up is also an individualizing art form, in a political sense. If you look at Joe Rogan and Doug Stanhope, who kind of embody that countercultural ethos, they are pretty much libertarians, they focus on individual speech a lot, doing your own thing, also (I mean Rogan here) making your own money. I think there is a cynicism — a capitalist realism, if you allow me to just drop it there — to a lot of stand-up for sure.
CA: Seinfeld and Jay-Z…
NB: Exactly, we were talking about it the other day. This untouchable quality of objective financial success, the self-made American celebrity. Seinfeld is always seen as this very sophisticated observational writer, but his persona is all about American individualism and the self-evident value of success. If you watch Comedian, a documentary he shot right after the series, there is a scene when he introduces this younger comic to his manager. And you see this older man dropping a stack of cash in this guy’s hands, and it’s so garish.
CA: I think it’s also this spiritual idea of taking things lightly, because they don’t make sense anyway…
NB: That’s right, but that’s also why he is the least political of all. He doesn’t say bad words, he makes the same jokes over and over, he really came out on top of the stand-up boom. He definitely incarnates the capitalist spirit of stand-up.
CA: Seinfeld is kind of like the Jay-Z of stand-up, but I think he’s way less interesting than Jay-Z, who is really a "larger than life" figure. I think Kevin Hart represents another evolution in the relationship between stand-up and rap: if Chappelle and Rock are kind of like 1990s NY hip-hop — a blend of Nas, Wu-Tang, A Tribe Called Quest — Kevin Hart is like a Lil Jon. He brought back a very physical, "don't discuss, just shake that ass", attitude to the game.
NB: I think Kevin Hart is a true artist in his own right, he’s got that struggle with masculinity — a little like Burr, but then also the whole theme of being short. I think he’s the “new” Eddie Murphy in some ways, too. But I do roll my eyes when I see every special is 15 minutes longer than the previous one because he has to add an even longer intro, purely with the purpose of showing you he had the money to do it. There is definitely a whole narrative of coming up and making money, but he is also respected by his peers, including Rock and Chappelle. It does add to the “self-evidence of success” we were just talking about…
CA: Yeah, it does.
NB: OK, I guess that’s a wrap! Thanks for the chat.
CA: It was a pleasure.