He's also very much an insider in the tightly knit world of standup, somebody who's probably logged thousands of hours standing in spotlights in front of brick walls, which means there's no working comedian of any age with a brain in his or her head who wouldn't be willing to follow him as he leads them into more personal terrain than they're maybe used to visiting in interviews. Judging solely from the lineup of talking heads assembled here—a murderer's row that includes Larry David, Whoopi Goldberg, Amy Schumer, Jimmy Fallon, Martin Short, Christopher Guest, Janeane Garofalo, Kumail Nanjiani, Jason Alexander and forty other boldfaced names—he's a man who commands an extraordinary degree of trust, and this is confirmed when you hear the subjects open up to his skillful questions.
Freddie Prinze, Jr., for one, talks about how he was more or less ordered into standup comedy by his grandfather after his troubled dad, star of TV's "Chico and the Man," committed suicide, in order to "fix what your father fucked up." Nearly every other comedian who's included in the "origins" portion of the documentary shares some version of a tragic, or at least uncomfortable, backstory, as well as a feeling of emptiness that could only be filled by hearing the laughter of strangers. Comedy as catharsis and a means of public sharing also gets a segment; the emotional peak is Maria Bamford talking about the first time she used her stint in a mental hospital as fuel for a routine, and heard audience members shouting out their own traumas in response. We also hear secondhand stories about Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Sam Kinison and other standup legends whose demons fueled their art and set fire to the personal lives.
The problem, unfortunately, is that Pollak's film isn't content to zero in on the assertion promised by the title: "Misery Loves Comedy." That phrase clearly holds true for the people interviewed here: to some degree, they're all people whose unhappiness drove them to make people laugh, then perhaps try to steer that laughter towards shared introspection. ("What kind of clown are you?" somebody asks Bill Murray's Bozo-garbed bank robber in "Quick Change," to which he replies, "The crying on the inside kind, I guess.") But that's not the focus. In fact it's often difficult to say what the film's focus actually is; a more accurate title might've been "Bits and Pieces of Interviews with 50 Comedians," but that wouldn't fit on most marquees.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46moKydoq56rbvVnqpmm5%2BisqXFjGtnam0%3D