Jason Zinoman: Critical, darling
The New York Times comedy critic on genres, gatekeeping and the comedic genius of Bob Dylan
VANCOUVER – If you think about it, there has likely never been a funnier time to be alive. Yes, things are not going great for humanity. The planet is warming, the computers are coming for our jobs, and, in Vancouver at least, the crows are once again dive bombing pedestrians at random on the sidewalk. And yet, society seems determined to get our little jokes off, to smile in the face of existential dread, to maybe even die laughing. Consider the sheer tonnage of our comedic output. The thousands of tweets, TikToks and YouTubes that will be uploaded today alone. It’s enough to make your pretty little head spin. And that’s not to mention actual stand up.
While it would be utterly ridiculous to think any one person could help shepard us through these endless comedic gold mines, Jason Zinoman has spent more than a decade doing his part, slinking to comedy clubs across New York City and abroad as the first ever comedy critic for the New York Times. But while the gig includes to no shortage of tight fives and surprise appearances at the Cellar, Jason’s twin passions are actually those of live performance, and criticism itself. In the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, he spoke at length about the need for critical discourse, and how artists can benefit from thoughtful criticism. A barrel of laughs, I know! When he isn’t preaching from the pulpit of of Pauline Kael, Jason spends time thinking about how Bob Dylan was a comedic genius, how he really needs to visit Vancouver, and, of course, his favourite Letterman bits. Add in a brief segue about The 1975 and we’re laughing all the way to the bank.
And so, without further ado, a big round of applause for my next guest…
ES: I have a love-hate relationship with asking people if they’ve been to Vancouver because it feels like a cliché, or like Canadian interviewers always bring it up. But I did want to ask you about your impressions of the Vancouver comedy scene.
JZ: I have to confess that I am ignorant about the Vancouver comedy scene, which says nothing about the scene and more about me. I have spent a lot of time in both Montreal and Toronto, both personally and professionally. I got the critic job at NYT after doing these two longer, reported pieces in Montreal on circus and clowning. Montreal also obviously has Just For Laughs, but I’d love to know more about Vancouver.
ES: Well, Vancouver is the hub for entertainment in western Canada but it’s still often in the shadow of Toronto. Toronto is way bigger and really is Canada’s entertainment capital, for better or worse. But there’s a decent comedy scene here. We have a lot of smaller shows happening, and we have some breakout stars like Charles Demers and Nathan Fielder.
JZ: I should get out there. One of my problems is that I’m slightly less familiar with the scenes on the West Coast, both in Canada and the U.S. New York has the greatest density of comedy shows in the world, so I’m out all the time seeing shows, but there’s stuff, for instance, in L.A. that I’m not as on top of. The random 23-year-old in L.A. who is hot shit I’m not as on top of as I am in New York. And the same would apply to Vancouver. If I was based out of L.A., I suspect, that wouldn’t be the case. My friends who live in L.A. go to Vancouver all the time.
ES: People will come up here and try out material and it’s a good touring route for them. They know there’s still a market for comedy here. I can think of about five independent comedy shows off the top of my head.
JZ: What’s the big establishment club?
ES: Oh… Probably Yuk Yuk’s?
JZ: Is there a center of the alternative comedy world?
ES: I would say I still get whiffs of the alt-scene around Main Street and Commercial Drive, both of which are on the east side. But I’m not entirely sure what alt-comedy even is anymore. It’s not alt in the way I would maybe think of it. It’s just alt because it’s Canadian and under the radar. Laughs.
JZ: The definition of alt-comedy has always been a fuzzy thing. And people who have been defined as such have always hated it.
ES: That’s true. I think, though, a guy like Pete Holmes is someone I would associate with the alt-scene around Largo in L.A. He always seemed to wear that badge proudly and it seemed comedians in that scene did as well.
JZ: I have a less ambivalent attitude toward labels than the comedians do. Labels are a simplification, but they’re useful. They don’t have to be limiting. I’ve written a lot about horror films in my career, and in the golden age of horror, artists hated having their work classified as horror. William Friedkin who directed The Exorcist refused to call it horror. He thought horror had a reputation for being disreputable, for not being able to win an Oscar, which he cared about. But things change. Now, horror has a much higher prestige. And on some level, it doesn’t matter what they think, right? We all think of The Exorcist as a horror film.
All this to say, alt-comedy, generally, started as a backlash against the comedy boom of the 1980s, and its subsequent collapse in the 90s. I think that generation, who are really the founding fathers and mothers of the scene, are the most negative about the term. Fast-forward to the next generation, people like Janeane Garofalo, Mr. Show with Bob and David. And then the next generation who worshipped those people didn’t see anything wrong with it. They thought it was better than the mainstream club guys who were doing airplane food jokes or whatever. And I would put Pete Holmes in that category. Like, “Of course, I’d rather be Janeane Garofalo than Tim Allen.”
ES: Music is always my first reference point for anything and, as we talk about genres, it’s interesting to think that emo has charted a similar path, with an initial pushback into an eventual embrace – going from this almost derogatory word to its own massive genre with people who are carrying the torch. There’s always going to be pushback because people don’t want their art to be defined in a certain way, but also these labels help audiences quickly identify what they want.
JZ: There’s a great book that came out a couple of years ago called Major Labels by Kelefa Sanneh. It presents a very pro-genre argument. One of its cases is that as flawed as a lot of these definitions are, it gives artists something to react against, and that is a valuable thing. When you don’t have that discourse, you lose something. At the same time, he points out that country artists, for example, have a lot more in common with hip-hop artists than you think, and so genres are deceptive in that they make everything seem so different when they’re not. But they can create stakes, which Sanneh says is a good thing.
ES: Who do you think is the funniest band of all time?
JZ: The funniest band of all time. Hm.
The first thing I should say is I’m the wrong person to ask. I’m not a music person, my musical taste froze in college. I was really into the Native Tongue hip-hop scene in the 90s. A lot of that stuff was hilarious. They had a lot of sketches. If you listen to Black Sheep, their big album, A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, had a song that was a parody of gangster rap… There’s satire and parody throughout the album. That to me is funnier than Weird Al, who I like too.
ES: When I first started listening to rap in the early 2000s, the rap skit was almost always painfully unfunny and really felt like filler, so it’s good to know there was a moment when it could make people laugh.
JZ: There was a moment. The Pharcyde was another band that was funny. Who’s the funniest in your mind?
ES: I’ve realized that a lot of the bands I cherish tend to be funny. I think The Smiths are eminently funny, at least lyrically. Oasis is funny personality-wise.
JZ: Since I was a kid, I’ve been a big Bob Dylan guy. When he turned 80 I wrote a column on the comedy of Bob Dylan. It was something I had thought about for years but when I set out to write it, it really solidified for me. Speaking of genre, Dylan got his start famously in the folk scene of the 60s. And if you look at exactly where he played – it’s a very small area, only a few blocks – and it’s basically where all the comedy clubs are now. The Comedy Cellar, Cafe Wha?, it’s the first place he ever played and it’s still there and it’s on the same block. Keep in mind, this is before comedy clubs even really existed. Comedians played at the same places as folk singers. So Dylan would open for these comedians and if you look at Dylan’s earliest reviews, even in the New York Times, they describe him like a comedian.
He has this one genre of song. They’re always called the Talkin’ Something Blues. “Talkin’ World War III Blues,” or “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” for example. It’s essentially a series of topical jokes with the same simple chord progression. You can hear recordings of it on YouTube. It got laughs in the same place that like, Dave Chappelle or Chris Rock would if they were performing. I just love that.
ES: I wanted to ask you about the death of comedy albums. Or am I making this up?
JZ: They haven’t completely gone away, but they’re less central and they’re less necessary than they used to be. The primary reason is the rise of comedy specials. One of the weird things about comedy is that there’s no major award show. Because of this, the Grammy is the most prestigious award. I think the rule is that you have to have released an album to win one. So comedians who want to be eligible for a Grammy will release their special on vinyl to like 15 people.
Anyways, the biggest story in comedy of the last decade is how the special has become part of the meat and potatoes of popular culture. It really wasn’t always so central, and there certainly weren’t always so many of them. It’s changing even this year. 10 years ago, a small number of comedians put out specials often, but some major comedians never did. Jerry Seinfeld didn’t, Rodney Dangerfield didn’t. Chris Rock would put out a special, but as he said, it would “Have to be special.” Now, it’s turned into something like the movies. If you’re a big movie director, you put something out every couple of years. That is your unit of art. And the special has become the unit of art for major comedians. Everything is building towards that. They’re touring specials, they’re working on them, building material. That certainly accelerated with the rise of Netflix and now it’s accelerated again with the normalization of releasing specials on YouTube. There have already been more specials released at this point in 2023 than all of 2022.
ES: Wow.
JZ: It’s exciting and interesting from a journalistic perspective, but it’s also overwhelming. Some comedians say “It’s great because it cuts out the gatekeepers.” But I think the reverse is true, Maybe this is self-serving because people would call me a gatekeeper, but there are so many things out there that people need help distinguishing. Your ability to point people in the right direction is more important than it used to be because of the massive amount of content. I’ve done a lot more round-ups of specials this year than in years past, and I make an effort to put in some people who have never been in the paper, who are less known, and who are often the funniest.
ES: Given you’re the first comedy critic in the paper’s history, I have to ask: why comedy?
JZ: I’m going to sound super self-important in this answer.
ES: That’s what this newsletter is for!
JZ: I see myself as a critic and journalist first, not a comedy person. I covered theatre for the first part of my career. I’ve always loved comedy, but the reason I’m on the comedy beat is because the Times asked me to. It seemed like a great opportunity. But the reason I dedicate so much time to it is that I think criticism is really important to a fertile art scene. That’s my religion. It’s more important now than ever because criticism is dying. The economic models have fallen apart, there are fewer critics than there have been in the past. The theatre used to have a huge bounty of critics who would disagree and have big arguments. There were local scenes that didn’t like the national scene and vice versa. And that was all healthy. Now, a lot of cities don’t have a single full-time theatre critic and their arts scenes are worse off… I get uncomfortable when artists and critics are too cozy. As [an author] who has been reviewed, I understand why artists hate critics. I get it, I hate them too. Laughs. But what they do is an incredibly valuable thing and it’s tremendously important to artists because the critic’s obligation is to the art form itself and that means there are measures of success that are not just financial. That success is not just whether you got a Netflix special, or that you had a great performance at the box office. Nobody thinks the best 10 movies of the week are the top 10 box office movies. It’s obvious! And the same thing is true for comedy… Strong critics help foster a better discourse and that helps the scene, whether it’s visual art, music, or comedy.
ES: I was going to ask who is on your comedy Mount Rushmore, but now I think I should ask who is on your criticism Mount Rushmore instead. To quote a certain podcaster: who are “Your guys”?
JZ: I’ve actually thought that if I ever did start a podcast, I would try to be the Marc Maron of criticism... The people who made me want to be a critic are people like Pauline Kael, who was the first person to make me fall in love with the idea of what criticism could do. I read her collection For Keeps in college and it was really inspiring. Number two would be Kenneth Tynan, the British theatre critic, who occupied a similar position as Kael but in the theatre world… But I would say my three right now are Kael for film, Tynan for theatre, and, because he just passed away, Martin Amis for books. He’s a critic who, on a sentence level, is incredibly influential. I’ll read his ledes and he’s attempting things I wouldn’t even have the guts to try. The way directors look to Martin Scorsese for inspiration (“Oh he’s doing this crazy shot”), Amis will try certain moves that are good for someone like me to read. Moves of a critic, not an artist.
ES: I think with social media, there’s the impression that everyone’s a comedian now, but also that everyone is a critic. What advice do you have for someone who wants to do meaningful criticism?
JZ: The first thing is to consume everything in the area you want to focus on. But then also have a catholic taste [Editor’s note: I had never heard this expression before, but it apparently means wide or universal taste. Amen!] I have found it really helpful to dabble around in other forms. Criticism is its own form, and you have to study it as much as you study the work. I can’t think of anything more valuable than studying Pauline Kael, or whoever your favourite critic is, and looking at the form of what they do. How do they deal with plot, with theme, how do they write ledes and kickers?
One of the fun things about being a critic is that the job requires you to have a strong voice, while at the same time engaging with the world. You want to be hyper-aware of your first impression of a work of art and you want to protect both your opinion and your writing voice, to block out the noise because if you’re saying what everyone else is saying, you have no use. At the same time, the critic’s job is to engage with the world. You need to be aware of what other people are saying, you need to engage with it, you need to argue with it, and maybe even learn from it. So it’s a very particular skill set to have the ego – to think that what you have to say is worth someone listening to – but to also have the humility to take what other people are saying seriously, and to be willing to change your mind. I think that seemingly paradoxical combination of incredible arrogance and incredible humility is what makes a great critic.
ES: The public doesn’t always understand how journalism works, and I think that’s especially true of a critic. For someone who maybe thinks your job is just going to performances, how much time are you spending by yourself in a room doing the very unsexy act of thinking?
JZ: Laughs. My day-to-day is changing as we speak. I try to go to shows three, four nights a week. I haven’t done as good a job of that lately for a few reasons, one of which is that more and more comedy is digital now. So more of what I’m asked to cover is not live. But because of my theatre background, I approach the job with the point of view that comedy is a distinctly live art form. Being in New York gives me a huge advantage in that I can see what is coming down the pipe before other people. I learn a tremendous amount by listening to podcasts. I also think you need to read everything that is written about your chosen art form. I have a fetish for reading terribly written, academic books about comedy.
But you mentioned spending time alone in a room thinking. That is tremendously important, and something you have to fight for. There is so much content, there is so much to cover and to see, that you can make the mistake of being purely reactive. I want my stories to react to the culture, but I also want to write things that are setting the table. I try to carve out a couple of hours every week where I sit down with a notebook and just write down ideas. It could be a sentence, a story, or a trend piece I want to investigate. But that is some of the most valuable time I spend. If you’re just in the herd, reacting, you start to lose your value as an independent voice.
ES: Bringing it back to comedy, who is someone that you’d like to give a little shine?
JZ: Of the recent specials that are less known, Nathan Macintosh has a special out on YouTube that is really interesting. I’m a huge fan of Rory Scovel. He’s always doing interesting work.
ES: Was Bo Burnham dating Phoebe Bridgers a big deal in your house?
JZ: Huge deal! Mainly because I saw Nicole Kidman’s TikTok and I was a big hero to my kids for filling them in. They got to tell their friends. It’s not every day that I’ve got the news first. But even Taylor Swift…
ES: I wasn’t going to ask for your thoughts on Matty Healy but since you mentioned Taylor – do you have any thoughts on Matty Healy? Is he funny?
JZ: It’s so funny, I didn’t know who this dude was a week ago and I’ve gotten into ten conversations about him this week… I just had lunch with a good younger journalist at the Times, Emma Goldberg, and she filled me in on a lot of his comedy. What do you recommend that I listen to get a sense of his comedy?
ES: Oh man. Their song “Love Me” has a lot of obviously funny lyrics. It’s dark but I’ve found their song “Love It If We Made It” funny, particularly at the sort of climax. They have a song about sex that’s called “Sex.”
JZ: I read Jia Tolentino’s piece on him in the New Yorker. It’s so rare that you see that sort of story, where you’re there with a rock star. I only knew him as the douchebag that’s dating Taylor Swift who is also a racist. And then you learn from Jia Tolentino and other people that “Oh he’s got this other side.”
ES: The aforementioned Pete Holmes often ends his podcast by asking what is the hardest time you’ve ever laughed, either personally or professionally. What would you say?
JZ: I’m a big believer that the things you found funny when you were a kid are powerful in a way that the things you find funny as an adult are not. When I was a kid, nobody was more formative than David Letterman. I remember he did this one remote bit called Just Bulbs. He went to a store in Manhattan that sold just lightbulbs. And he’d play dumb and ask “Hey do you have lampshades?” and the woman was like “Nope.” And it built from there.
The reason that kills me is that just last weekend, my older daughter who is 14, was looking at her old journals, and she found a transcription from when she was eight of the Just Bulbs bit. I must have made her do this. It’s got everything from Letterman introducing it at the desk, to the actual conversation. The whole thing was there in her eight-year-old journal. To me, being a good dad is making the kid appreciate Just Bulbs.
Jason Zinoman is the comedy critic for the New York Times. He lives in Brooklyn.