Photo by Felicia Michaels
Comedian and comic writer Ritch Shydner has years of research into the history of stand-up comedy under his belt. Turning that knowledge into a performance piece, he’ll take the stage at Firehouse Theatre on Wednesday, Nov. 10, for “America’s Reflection in the Funhouse Mirror: A History of Stand-up Comedy.” The blend of humor and history is packed with jokes from yesterday and today, and Shydner, 68, weaves in a few of his own bits from his time in the trenches. He toured as a stand-up comic in the ’80s, making appearances on “Late Night With David Letterman” and “The Tonight Show.” He was also a writer for ABC’s “Roseanne” and “The Jeff Foxworthy Show,” as well as HBO’s “The Mind of the Married Man.” We caught up with Shydner via phone from his home in Asheville, North Carolina, to get the rundown of his humorist history set.
Richmond magazine: What will people experience during your performance?
Ritch Shydner: So, I’ll show different eras, the Depression or World War II or Vietnam War, how comedy was changed by these events and how technology like the new stereos in the 1950s changed the marketing and changed comedy then and the podcasts today. I show these things, and I’ll do this with jokes. Probably the hardest thing I did was finding the jokes that were done 100 years ago, or in [comedian] Artemus Ward’s case, 160 years ago, that could still work today, and you could still get a laugh from a live audience today. That’s been a lot of trial and error. And I’ll do stories, funny stories, so it’s a lot of humor in it. I wouldn’t do a dry lecture about comedy. [Laughs]
RM: What comics do you look up to?
Shydner: A ton of them, even living ones. There’s so many great performers now. I mean, obviously, Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr and Maria Bamford and Sarah Silverman. There’s a lot of people who I think are really doing it at a high level, Mitch Mullany, they’re at a huge, high level, but when I was coming up myself, I loved Robert Klein and Albert Brooks, George Carlin and Richard Pryor. … Jackie Mason, who just died [July 24], he made me laugh so hard. I’m a professional comedian, so to make a professional comedian laugh, you’ve got to bring something new and hard.
RM: Has the history of stand-up been a lifelong interest for you?
Shydner: Yeah, I talk about this in the show — I’ve been doing stand-up comedy since 1977. I turned pro in 1979, so to speak, when I made it my work, my career, but I really got into [the history of stand-up] around '86, when I did “The Tonight Show” and Phyllis Diller called me up, and we started a relationship being friends, and she was really into it, and I got into it, and so we were talking about this comic or that comic, and she’d say, "Look this person up." … To be honest with you, I was going to write a book about the history of stand-up, and I couldn’t find a way to make it funny, and my wife said, “Why don’t you perform this history of stand-up comedy and see if that’s a way that you can make it funny and then do a book after that?”
Ritch Shydner's "America's Reflection in the Funhouse Mirror – A History of Stand-up Comedy,” comes to the Firehouse Theatre on Nov. 10 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $10 to $15. firehousetheatre.org
