Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Comedian Ed Reggi
I can’t tell a joke without messing up the punchline, and I’d rather watch morose Ingmar Bergman films than listen to a standup comic. So for the semifinals of the standup competition Make Me Laugh St. Louis, I brought Ed Reggi to translate.
A Second City alum, he did standup for a while himself. “I called my dad Chim Chim Gorilla,” he says, recalling his silent, hairy father, who paced the house in boxers. “Chim Chim had a Facebook page, and I got added by primatologists all over the world. I never wanted to tell them.”
Reggi gravitated to the congenial art of improv, but he still ghostwrites for several standup comics, and he catches local comedy wherever he is.
“Not the headliner who’s traveling in,” he clarifies. “Local comics are a different beast. There are a lot of common themes, like sex, and there’s what I call the current news segment. That’s getting harder, because it changes so fast, and these days you really have to gauge your crowd.”
Tonight’s amateurs will have four minutes to make us laugh.
“You should always have a short set under your belt,” Reggi says, “so you don’t have to chop off an eight-minute one.”
“So there’s an arc?” I ask, now mildly intrigued.
“Yeah. At the end of the day, it’s all storytelling: beginning, middle, and end.” This reminds him of the magic “rule of threes,” and he tries to explain the “recall”: You make a joke in the beginning, reference it in the middle, circle back at the end. “If I go see a comic and they’ve used the joke only twice, I think, ‘Their show can’t be over.’ Threes somehow complete us; there’s this balance—or maybe it’s the imbalance, ’cause if you think in twos, and then there’s a third…”
I drain my Manhattan and nod.
Chris Rock makes audience members lock up their cell phones, Reggi says, because of all the social media. “If your joke is told out in the world and the audience comes in already knowing it, it’s not funny.”
We walk into Moulin, and I introduce Reggi. The guy coordinating the competition instantly invites him to be a judge.
“What will you look for?” I whisper as we’re seated.
“Authenticity,” he says absently, looking past me at the empty Judges’ Row. “Is this all on me?”
A few more judges show up, and Reggi relaxes. “Their truth has to be embedded in their act,” he continues. “If they are telling someone else’s truth, that’s acting. I’m not saying they can’t do that, but we can detect it. When the material’s really personal and authentic—it’s the phrase we use every day: ‘You can’t make that up.’
“Ellen DeGeneres has that classic one where she calls God and gets put on hold,” he says, chuckling. “Key and Peele, I actually got to work with a bit back in Chicago. I stage-managed a couple of their early sketch shows. They are all character.”
He lists more criteria: stage presence, originality, writing, the crowd’s reaction… “I look at whether they are fighting the audience or riding the wave or still on the beach. The first 30 seconds, they’re adjusting, getting their bearings, but you can kind of feel it if they fall off. Did they get right back on? That’s a skill in itself.
“And I also look for—is it just poop jokes? Now, don’t get me wrong; I’ve laughed at a lot of poop jokes in my life. Jim Carrey’s career was based on a three-minute poop joke. But if the whole routine is just one note—” He breaks off. “Look, they are gathering the comics,” he whispers, as though we’re about to see some secret temple rite. A motley group of youngish guys and one woman clump near the bar.
“What’s always funny?” I ask.
“Puberty, dating—everything that’s connected to our bodies. Comedy’s actually physical—it’s visceral. Once you crack that code, you don’t have to keep throwing out other jokes. Just push on that one topic, refine it, go deeper.”
Sure enough, one of the first jokes is a poop joke. I wince, then wonder, “Why are we so easily offended by standup?”
“They say comedy is public and tragedy is private,” Reggi says. “When comedy slips over to private—for you or for the comic, especially if they turn serious or vitriolic…” It stops being funny.
“I like tragedy, too,” he continues, “but we deal with that during the day. Comedy is a pure escape. Some crowds have paid too much; they’ve been in traffic; they’re rooting for you to fail. Tonight has that baked in, because it’s a competition. People think, ‘I’d better save that laughter.’ They learned that from American Idol.”
Someone’s doing current events now: “Whenever I’m at a party and someone asks me to do The Robot, I just start stealing American jobs.” Sex does seem to be everybody’s fallback, and there are a lot of droopy lines about therapy. Maurice, a pharmacist, cracks Reggi up when he deadpans, “I’m proof of what happens when young black kids from the South Side of Chicago get an education. They learn to sell drugs legally.”
After the dramatic buildup, none of these people will wind up winning; turns out online applicants are also contenders. Which is almost funny.
