About the Author
Hi, my name is Dave...
picture by Martine Cotton
Although I started out doing improv comedy from the age of 12, I always knew the real goal was to get on stage by myself and make an audience laugh on my own terms.
That turned out to be a lot more difficult as my life took the unexpected turn of ending up in Japan. Making people laugh, creating jokes and delivering them in a way that connects with an audience, is hard enough under normal circumstances. It took on a whole new dimension of difficulty by doing it in Tokyo, where the language and culture are about as far from the English speaking world as one can get.
Some people said that it wasn't even possible. Even if you learnt Japanese, they told me, the best you could hope to do was act out the roles that Japanese people expected of a foreigner in comedy. In other words, learn what the audience wanted and simply act that out. It was impossible, people said, to perform "western" style comedy in Japanese because comedy does not cross cultural boundaries. There might be some overlap on very basic things, like pratfalls and physical humour. Beyond that, though, different ways of thinking in different societies gave rise to different kinds of humour, and they were not compatible.
The conventional wisdom, however, did not match up with my personal experience. As my Japanese improved, I found that I could get laughs for jokes that fell outside the paradigm of cultural incompatibility. Eventually I was able to perform stand up sets in front of Japanese audiences and get a room full of people to laugh.
A lot of what people were saying about comedy was wrong. And as I considered staying in Japan and continuing to perform there, I had to ask some deep questions about the nature of humour. How far is it possible to go? Where are the boundaries of culture? If culture isn't holding me back, then what are the determining factors that might influence or restrict my degrees of success?
Answering these questions took me in directions I didn't necessarily expect. A reader of the book might be surprised to find so much focus on the brain and evolution. However, I had to answer whatever questions that came up, because they weren't merely academic for me. The feasibility of comedy and the degree to which it is universal among people had implications on where and how I would live my life.
What I have come up with is a book that is consistent with all my experiences with comedy, and the all important maxim that anything can be funny.
It's a book that finally answers fundamental questions about what comedy is, and presents practical, usable advice on how to be funnier. No book can make someone a fully fledged comedian. But with this book, people can understand why, how, and when things are funny and when they aren't.