April Benavides talks to Victor Varnado and Marina Franklin of ‘The Awkward Comedy Show,’ now available on iTunes and DVD. If you prefer to read, here’s the transcript:
“Comedy, plus blackness, to the nerd power,” that’s the tagline for THE AWKWARD COMEDY SHOW, a film that premiered on Comedy Central recently. The tagline gives you an idea of the unique viewpoint of the five comedians featured—Victor Varnado, Marina Franklin, Hannibal Buress, Eric André and Baron Vaughn. In many ways, this is the anti-Def Comedy Jam, with the comedians bringing the arrogant street-wise swagger of computer programming, Shakespearean drama and playing the tuba. Joining me from the film are writer/director/comedian Victor Varnado, familiar to many from Late Night with Conan O’Brien, as well as comedienne Marina Franklin, often seen on Best Week Ever and Jay Leno. Welcome, Victor and Marina!
Marina: Hi!
Victor: Hello, April!
April: Victor, this film is your creation. What inspired you to produce it?
Victor: Well, to be honest, I saw a comedy special, which was horrible, on Showtime once and I was like, “This is horrible, I should do my own comedy special.” And I put together an idea with my friends and then made a film around us because a lot of my friends are black comedians who are not necessarily doing, I guess, the regular thing that you think most comedians will do and so just because we all fit into this particular category, that’s when I came up with the idea with the Awkward Comedy Show to be a nice little package for us all to perform in.
April: Well and unlike a straight standup concert film, Awkward Comedy Show incorporates interviews and animated skits—what was your idea behind doing that?
Victor: The idea behind doing the interviews and the animation…well, there were two things—one, because the comedians on the show, I wanted people to get to know them personally because I think that endears you even more to their performance when you sort of know where they’re coming from and how they think. And Marina was brought to the show because I wanted her to, more than anything, be a liaison between some of the comedians that were on the show and the rest of the audience because of all the comedians on the show I thin Marina is probably the most well-known from when we started the Awkward Comedy Show and she was just perfect, I mean, she’s kind of, I would even say walking the line, she’s definitely like—has a foot in both of the worlds.
Marina: Thank you [laughs]
April: Do you agree with that, Marina?
Marina: Well, yeah. I work pretty much mainstream as well as outside of, in that when I say I mainstream, that most the clubs in New York City, I guess that’s what you mean, right, Victor by walking the line
Victor: That is exactly what I meant.
Marina: …and I perform, you know, pretty much all the clubs in New York, whereas when we did this a couple of the comics, actually most of them, weren’t really in all of the—maybe like one club in the city—so there was a lot of dialogue as to: what did they have to do to get in and kind of step over to the next level.
April: Right. Well in the film, you have audience members describing the material they expect from black comedians in stark contrast to the routines that you all do. Do you find that audiences aren’t sure how to respond to you when you first take the stage?
Marina: Well, I actually address it in my act. I do a joke about not being a sassy black female comedienne; I find that audiences oftentimes expect that from a black female performer. Sort of that, you know, “Mmm-hmmm” routine. And it’s not that I’m saying that’s a bad thing, it just that I address it right of the bat that I’m not doing that. Because oftentimes when I start my set and I’m just standing there, I can kind of feel like a drop in the audience, like almost like a disappointment, like “Oh no! She’s not gonna do that thing that we like so much!” and so I address it, I say that, the rest are doing it and, surprisingly, the audience is like cheering as I start doing sort of that, “Mmmm-hmmm, Yeaaah, Mmmm-hmmm” and I respond to that by saying, “Oh look at that, it’s like the sun just came out.” [Laughter] So that’s how I address it.
Victor: For me, it’s often that an audience doesn’t know how to respond when I take the stage. They’ve never really met a black albino comedian before. In fact, the barista at Starbucks doesn’t know how to respond to it. [Laughter] So, I think that I just attack that as much as I can. I just talk about what people might be thinking or feeling and just make that part of my act. Try to bring people into the world from my point of view, always.
April: Can you remember the moment in your life when you realized, “Hey, I wanna make people laugh for a living”? And was that related, maybe, to a moment in your life when you realized, “Hey I’m a nerd”?
Victor: I can remember those moments but they are not related.
Marina: Yeah, I’d say the same thing.
Victor: Unfortunately. The moment I realized that I really wanted to try to make people laugh for a living was in high school. I had a teacher who was nice enough to—well, he wasn’t nice, he was actually angry with me. I would always make jokes in class and then he was mad enough to be like, “If you had the courage to go on stage and actually do that for real, I would give you an A for the quarter.” And so I tried it for real and I bombed horribly—it was high school. But he gave me an A. and I really liked it even though I didn’t do that well, I really enjoyed it so that’s when I started it. And the moment that I realized I was a nerd was when—it was a regular thing for my mother to come to Radio Shack when I was in junior high school. She’d come to Radio Shack and find me in the back learning how to program on the computer there because I had befriended the staff and they would let me play on the their computers and learn how to do computer programming and when someone pointed out to me that that was strange, I was like, “Oh, I guess I am a bit of a nerd.”
Marina: Yeah, I guess, for me, it’s separate as well. The way I found out that I should do it for a living, I guess, is when I actually got laid off. I mean, I didn’t have a choice. I was already doing comedy and I wanted to do it full-time but it was not yet set in my mind which way I was going to go. But my job told me. They said, “We don’t want you here anymore.” So, I fully committed to doing stand-up. I didn’t take a day job anymore and I just started doing it and there was a moment of real, you know, being broke. But I started just hustling a lot more and I was getting the work and I was making people laugh, that I realized that that I could now do this for a living. The moment that I guess I realized I was a nerd? I don’t think I ever realized I was a nerd. I think Victor told me I was a nerd. To be honest with you, Victor told me years ago, he goes, “You know, you’re a nerd.” I was like, “No I’m not!” cause I would do little goofy things, like I dance just whenever I want to and I don’t mind singing to, like, songs like I’m in a musical every now and then. So, you know, people would point that out and a couple of boyfriends—
Victor: I can’t believe she would even dare to say that she was not a nerd when this week she was complaining about how she can’t play Fallout 3 on her computer the way she wants to play it and asking me about getting an Xbox herself—this is not for a boyfriend, this is just her [laughs] what she wants to do. She wants to play Fallout 3.
April: See, you just need to embrace it.
Marina: Yeah, I can’t fight it. I mean, I did have moments in, I guess, high school where I was really into math and I would compete with, like, the top kid in my class and we’d get the top grades and everyone else was just like, “Well—we don’t know what to do,” that was when I guess I knew—I thought I was just smart, I didn’t know that equaled nerd. And, yes, I am a gamer.
April: You were almost a Mathlete, you were saying?
Marina: Almost, almost [laughing]
April: Yeah, I definitely think I’m with Victor then on this. Marina, do you find that being a woman in the comedy world brings you more opportunities or more challenges?
Marina: Both. Being a woman in the comedy scene brings you opportunities as well as challenges—the opportunities [are] because you’re rare and so people are especially looking at you as being a female comedienne being so rare that, you know, you get these opportunities to be the woman on the show or, you know, you have a lot of casting directors that are like, “That’s rare, let me look at her.” So you have more people looking at you as opposed to, I guess, male comedians—there’s so many of them that it’s kind of like, you know, they may not be looked at as often as I am. The challenges are of course not being put into the female box. I’m always asked, what it’s like to be a female comedian as opposed to being a comedian, more so. And the challenge is to not be in that, sort of, box of female comedian. To just be considered funny. Oftentimes you come offstage and a guy will say to you, “I thought you’re really funny—for a female,” instead of just saying, “You were hilarious, you were funny,” you always get, “You were really funny—for a female.” So that’s the challenge that I didn’t even realize I had when I walked onstage that there was a guy in the audience looking at me going, “Oh boy, what is she gonna talk about?” and that I didn’t know I had that challenge. All I thought about when I walked onstage was being funny and entertaining the audience. I had no idea that that was something that I was also combating.
Victor: Marina can also attest to the fact that, for instance, if there was a comedy television show and they were casting comedians. Say they were casting 6 comedians and of all the people who auditioned, 10 female comediennes were great and 10 male comedians were great, they’d cast probably with 4 to 5 comedians and 1 or 2 female comediennes because it’s just the way they do it because if someone is female, they sometimes get excluded from casting. If the casting director and, like most of America, has in their head that, when we say the word comedian, they think of a white male, anybody who’s not that is cast less if its just open to anyone then they’re cast less than the person who’s that white male ideal.
Marina: Right. And I have found more now than ever, in the past month actually, I have found women coming from shows that I’ve done live and they say to me, “We love watching you because you represent us and you have our voice and you give us what we want to listen to as well and we know that your road is much tougher.” They say this to me, which I’ve never gotten before and then I also get “How come there aren’t more women on the show? You were the only one, how come there are not more women?” To that, I usually just go, “Well, because I beat all of them. [Laughter] And I really, I’m the only one that should be here”—no. But it’s interesting that women in the audience are becoming more vocal about what they want to see as well.
April: Well, speaking of white male comedians, to paraphrase a well-known one, “You might be awkward if…”
Victor: I would say, “You might be awkward if your conversations are 40% silence.” [Laughter] I had to go though that a lot because I tend to have ideas or ways of speaking that make people just look at me rather than respond.
April: What about you, Marina?
Marina: Well, you might be awkward if you get this from your friends, quite often: “Whaaattt?” Victor does that to me quite often, “Whaaaat?? What are you talking about? Oh my god!”
Victor: She does crazy stuff; you don’t know her like I do.
Marina: Even other awkwards would acknowledge it. “Whaaaat?” I get that often, “What are you talking about? Were you even listening?” [Laughter]
April: So, what projects are next for you?
Victor: Well, right now I just started pre-production for a new comedy concert film that I’m actually directing and producing—I’m not in this one, this one I’m working on as director/producer, which is going to feature a lot of the rising names in alternative comedy. I can’t talk about it because we’re still working on the casting yet, but that’s happening for me right now. We start shooting in June.
Marina: I’m just doing what I usually do—just performing around New York City. I perform all the clubs: Comedy Cellar, Comic Strip Live, Caroline’s on Broadway. This weekend I’ll be there with Mario Cantone. At the Laugh Lounge, Broadway Comedy—I’m trying to mention them all so they don’t get mad at me—Broadway Comedy Club, New York Comedy Club. I’m supposed to do the Tonight Show this year at some point. I had to, you know, audition and they approved my set so I don’t know yet when that is, they’ll let me know.
Victor: Yeah, it usually takes them several months to figure it out and then they’ll call you out of the blue like, “Okay, it’s tomorrow.”
Marina: And then I also upcoming possibly the Montreal Comedy Festival, they’re looking at me again.
April: Great! Well many thanks to Victor Varnado and Marina Franklin for joining us to discuss The Awkward Comedy Show—available on DVD and on the iTunes store from New Video.
Both: Thank you, April!
April: Thanks, guys!