If You Can’t Find One, Fake One

Seen In: King Of Comedy, Punchline, Raging Bull

The Movies: Some directors prefer to cast actors instead of proper comedians in their stand-up flicks. Which doesn’t seem fair to us.

It’s like asking a fireman to bake you a cake when your kitchen’s on fire. Surely you’d get the fireman to put out the fire, then bring in a baker to help him make the cake. That's just common sense. We’re not sure where we’re going with that.

But sometimes the actors are up to the task –De Niro’s King Of Comedy character Rupert Pupkin would get on laugh on any circuit.

And why Hanks didn’t switch careers following his Punchline turn baffles us. Every joke in the trailer alone is enough for a headline slot at the Apollo.

Still, we’d recommend our first bit of advice over this one. Actors are great, but our favourite stand-up flicks all feature actual stand-ups in lead roles, even when they’re playing other stand-ups. Man On The Moon and Funny People are two of our favourite examples.

Real Life: After we signed up for the School Of Comedy, we found out that a genuine stand-up would be warming up for us: Markus Birdman.

And then, after us, more proper comedians – the people the audience had actually paid to see – would perform.

So… the audience would be exposed to real comedy before experiencing our fake comedy.

And they’d be forced to sit through our pretend jokes before seeing the routines they’d given up their valuable time to see. Brilliant.

For some reason, this didn’t exactly soothe our already frazzled nerves…

Next: No Boats