A Piffany About Sports (and Comedy and The Olympics)
It all started with good intentions, didn’t it?
I could be referring to the above image, capturing the first-ever 100-meter dash that opened the first “modern” Olympics in Athens, Greece, circa 1896. But I’m also referring to this Tweet of mine from just a few days ago, when I asked my followers to chime in with their answer to my question: “Who’s your pick for the Comedy MVP so far in 2021?”
For the past six years, as part of my podcast, The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First, I’ve sat down with The New York Times comedy critic/columnist, Jason Zinoman, for a year-end discussion and dissection of the year in comedy through the lens of comedy’s most valuable performers. I allow Jason to define MVP his own way, while I have mine (which dates back to a 2010 counterpoint I wrote to Bill Simmons, who attempted to rewrite comedy history from 1975-2010). Anyhow. The first and best and perhaps only reply came from the one and only Marc Maron, whose pushback I felt immediately. “Yeah. Great, Sean. Just what comedy needs. Make it more like a sport.”
At least David Alan Grier found the humor in our exchange.
But wait. Before I go on about sport, can we agree upon whether comedy, or specifically even stand-up comedy, is an art or if it’s a sport, neither, or perhaps both?
Certainly Whose Line Is It Anyway? or the late Comedy Central series, @Midnight, the hosts awarded and delegated points. ComedySportz and Theatresports predated these shows and most obviously treated improvisation as a game to reward performers onstage whilst entertaining their audiences. Performing comedy requires skill and oftentimes athleticism. As wordplay both written and oral, comedy also might possess great lyrical qualities. Emphasis on might. Reminder, too, that might does not make right. Not all comedians are creating works of art up there. They’re merely in it for the wins.
Therefore, comedy qualifies as both art and sport.
Even if the scoring remains entirely subjective for each subject subjected to the comedy. For the comedians, the scoring seems to exist solely upon a pass/fail basis. They treat laughs and/or applause as individual and collective victories. Heckling might feel like a loss in the moment, unless the comedian defeats the heckler. Silence can mean anything the comedian wants it to, good or bad. Afterward, comedians definitely qualify themselves as either good sports or sore losers, regardless of whether or not critics such as myself or Jason Zinoman deliver our own verdicts.
Alrighty then. I’m glad we got that out of the way. Now I can move forward with my originally-planned epiphany about sports…
TO BE CONTINUED
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