I chose Walter Benjamin and his piece The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction because a great deal of my personal research deals with the perception of art. I’m used to art I cherish being labeled as craft or base entertainment, while simultaneously I’ve caught myself casting aside art forms that didn’t fit into my definition of the word. Perhaps it is foolish to seek answers for such an arguable topic, and a case could be made that I am no closer than where I started. Whatever the case may be, What follows is a look at three key elements of Walter Benjamin’s essay and an exploration of their applications to stand-up comedy.
Part One: The Word Art
As I was reading Benjamin, I couldn’t get away from this notion of ranking different art forms or what’s more, drawing lines in the sand about what constitutes an art form. No matter where his argument went, I got a sense of an underlying unworthiness of these younger art forms. Questions of effort, clout, agency, technical prowess, capitalism, and of course, reproducibility are raised when determining what gets placed in a museum and what gets sold on Canal Street.
In all honesty, I’ve grown to hate the word art. In the early days of my research, it always seemed to crop up during my interviews with comedians. I was fascinated with whether stand-up comedy constituted an art form in the traditional sense, and I was even more fascinated with how comedians viewed their industry and their own work. Many agreed that comedy was an art form, but few were willing to call themselves artists. “I think comedians would be embarrassed even to call it an art,” Christian Finnegan told me, “Because the whole point of a comedian is popping the balloon.” Finnegan has been a comic for over twenty years and he even called stand-up the purest art form of all, yet refused to call himself an artist. This is when it became clear to me that, at least to them, the word art had more to do with a stigma than it did with a definition. Its connotation far outweighed its denotation. Comedy is linguistically interesting because if it is bad, people say it isn’t what it is. Bad comedy is not said to be comedy at all, meaning that if the art isn’t successful, it ceases to exist. As Josh Gondelman put it, “Funny is an adjective. Comedy is a noun. You can say, ‘That’s not music,’ but you could never say, ‘That’s not sound.’”
English is a sloppy, messy language. Between the Latin, Greek, and Old German tangled up in English, our language isn’t a real language at all, but a few languages in a trenchcoat stacked on top of each other. The word art seems to be losing its clout and gaining a certain flexibility, in the same way that swear words mellow with time. I once heard someone remark that you could describe an expert plumber by saying, “He fixes toilets so well, it’s an art.” Often, art seems to describe not what someone creates but the way in which it is created. In the same way that signing a urinal and placing it on display can be art, telling a perfect dick-joke or fixing a toilet can be art as well. And this isn’t because of some quasi-deep grandiose claim, this is because the word art, so saturated in our sloppy language, has come to mean more than we realized.
Part Two: The Aura
The aura within a work of art, be it present or lost, appears to be Benjamin’s key concern in his piece. He writes, “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” Someone could reproduce an exact copy of a Monet, yet it would be worth a fraction of the price because the painting lacks the original aura or essence within it. Part of the greatness of a work of art isn’t about quality, but the feeling of greatness and magnitude, as well as the presence, however etheral, of the master.
Aura echoes in the comedy world, arguably more so than other art forms. There’s something about stand-up comedy that is impossible to define and can disappear as easily as it appears. It is something in the air at a comedy club when the comics are killing, and it is a fool’s errand to try and recreate the aura. It seems to be beyond language, hence the expression, “You had to be there...” when the retelling of a great moment from a show meets silence at the water cooler the next morning.
The difference between a live comedy show and a taped special is parallel to Benjamin’s distinction between the stage and the screen in terms of traditional dramatic theater. As he writes in Section VIII, “The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance.” In form this is true, and particularly affronting in taped comedy shows. Firstly, the comedian’s act is typically sliced and reorganized in editing. Secondly, the camera during such shows always insists on cutting to the audience during laugh breaks, similar to the laugh track in tradition sitcom TV, there to convince the at-home viewer that the jokes are perhaps funnier than they thought. To this end, anyone who has ever been to a live TV taping is aware of the level of artifice that goes into making the in-house audience laugh and clap for so long. This is the epitome of the magician-surgeon metaphor in Benjamin-- all the magic is gone and replaced with something that is cold and sterile.
Lastly, the TV taping is often a water-down version of the material. Some material is left on the cutting room floor, and any colorful language is overlaid with a jarring “Bleep!” While there are, of course, dirty jokes that are better suited for dingy comedy clubs, there are also brilliant premises that never see the light of day because the network wants to play it safe and doesn’t want to lose any advertising money. The late Bill Hicks did a guest spot on David Letterman in 1993 that was deemed unfit for the air, and it didn’t surface until two years ago, when Letterman presented the footage in full as a tribute to Hicks. After the video plays, Letterman says, “I’d not seen that videotape or any part of it since that night, and seeing it now it raises the question, ‘What was the matter with me? What was I thinking?’ That was just tremendous.”
Also integral to aura is the beauty in the small mistakes that occur in live art that cannot be transferred to film. Sometimes the greatness of a comedian is measured not by the strength of their punchline, but their ability to complete that punchline when a waitress drops a glass in the middle of it. My favorite memories in clubs are often moments when something gets messed up or the crowd is too drunk and the comedian has to find their way out. I was at a show the other night watching Brendan Eyre tell a joke I’d heard him tell a million times but for some reason he jumbled the punchline. He even laughed with the crowd saying, “You’d think this was a new joke or something. Nope. It’s my oldest joke. And I just fucked it up.” So much of comedy is about those little moments of community and part of the fun is that you have to be there.
Part Three: Reproduction and Repurposing
As Benjamin outlines in the opening of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, there is a long history of human artwork being reproduced. He writes, “Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men.” From Greek founding and stamping to the printing press we have been able to recreate something repeatedly, but the advent of photography and film changes this process tenfold by its ease and immediacy. While there is definitely a loss of aura with photography, Benjamin also concedes that for the first time in history a reproduction can actually tell us more, not less, stating, “In photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens.” This means that the standards by which we critique a reproduction need to evolve as the technology has evolved. A reproduction, whether created by a master, pupil, or third party, still has a story to tell.
Because stand-up comedy, like dance, doesn’t produce a tangible art form, a strict definition of a reproduction doesn’t apply. However, jokes and bits are often reproduced and reworked in the form of street jokes. A street joke is a joke that gets tossed around with no identifiable source. The best example of this is the aristocrats joke (the subject of a documentary of the same name) which dates back to vaudeville. It is a joke wherein the punchline stays the same but the details of the joke change depending who’s telling it. If the comedian is dirty the joke will be dirty, if they’re surreal the joke will be surreal, and so on. Even though it is the same joke, the process of reproduction shows us details about the joke and the comedian that we wouldn’t be privy to otherwise, not unlike Benjamin’s claim about a new photograph from an old print.
Similarly, there are often situations where the reproduction of another comedian’s material is encouraged and enlightening. In the realm of parody not theft, a comedian can kill by doing a joke in the style of another comic. There is a huge yearly Halloween show at The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn where dozens of comedians go on stage and do another comic’s act. The show would make no sense to someone who didn’t know the comics being sourced, and the whole conceit of the show is about playful reproduction. While many acts are simply a showcase of a comedian’s signature act and style, others are reworkings that call upon us to reconsider the legacy of a great comic. For example, there was an impression of a sober Mitch Hedberg, whose jokes predictably all bombed because they weren’t told in his classic stoner voice. There was also a pitch-perfect Andrew “Dice” Clay who simply recited the Donald Trump Access Hollywood leak as Dice and killed with the audience. While he was merely using one man’s words and another man’s style and manner of speaking, the juxtaposition of these two anachronistic figures was powerful and painted them both in new lights.
Because of the theoretical nature of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, it remains a text for the study of art in many different contexts. It is a meta-critique, looking to invite us to reevaluate our evaluations. As I continue reading and rereading Benjamin’s piece, I can’t help but be brought back to my central question of the meaning of effort. I have the feeling that non-traditional art forms like photography, film, electronic music, and stand-up comedy (and basically all of modern art) go through these growing pains because their effort is much easier to question.