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8 Great Movies About Stand-Up Comedy

For some reason, there was a period in comedy history where the pinnacle of a stand-up comedian’s career was getting his or her own sitcom. You had your Seinfelds and your Roseannes and your Raymonds and everybody loved them. The medium, at the time, seemed like the most appropriate translation of a comedy act into a television show, allowing for the observational humor of many of these performers to be played out in situational scenes before a live studio audience.

[h2]8) Sleepwalk With Me[/h2]

Sleepwalk With Me

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I think the reason the realm of stand-up comedy intrigues me so is because it’s fundamentally about a deeply individual quest to become good at something. There can be collaborative aspects to it but most often it’s one person on a stage with a singular purpose: to cause a group of people to laugh. There are times when that profoundly individual world results in closing oneself off to the world outside, alienating the people in a comedian’s life. Or at least, again, this is what Marc Maron has led me to believe.

Mike Birbiglia’s comedy has come into its own, and he seems to really find a voice that suits him in Sleepwalk With Me, which began as one-man show off-Broadway, then became a book, and then a movie. Though I’ve only seen the movie, this seems to be a story he’s crafted over time, just as his character crafts his act in the movie, and it’s this process that we get to see in a fresh way that makes the film one of the strongest and most endearing and funny to ever be made with a stand-up protagonist.

The trend among narrative movies about stand-up comedy, particularly when they have a comedian at their center like Mike Birbiglia, is that they have to find a balance between the collaborative aspect of moviemaking and the individual, stranded-on-an-island element of stand-up. But this clash between mediums seems to often result in remarkably inspired takes on a subculture that is coming more and more to the fore of artistic expression. Using different media to examine stand-up comedy may not result in as many laughs as the purity of a single act, but allows it to make sense in a way that’s impossible by simple explanation. Like on just about every other front, on this issue, stand-up stands defiant.