Is stand-up comedy art?
It’s not a fine art. but there’s an artistic process at work with stand-up comics who write their own material. It’s a process of reinterpreting the world so that people are seeing the world your way, through your prism. It’s your vision, your way of seeing things. And I am very careful about my writing so I am technically a writer, which technically is an art form. You know, Arthur Koestler, in the book “The Act of Creation,” suggested there was a triptych and a three-part identity to certain artists. And one of them was the jester. And he said, the jester tells jokes and the jester is funny. If there is a bit of a serious idea or a philosophical underpinning to his jokes, then he is also the sage. But if he takes jokes that have ideas underneath them and puts them into what we call marvelous language, then he is a poet as well. There’s some combination of these things at work in stand-up comedy. I want to read you a letter sent to Mother Jones magazine a couple years ago. The writer
