Move Over, Chris Rock: Solo Shows and Memoirs

by Audrey Erickson

Clowning, spoken-word poetry, standup, motivational speaking—solo shows are a staple in historic and contemporary performance, as the form requires little but a performer, a space, and a story. In theater, solo shows have been long-standing pillars of the industry, due to their high producibility (again, one performer) and often more intimate productions for a different audience experience. The highly producible nature of solo shows means they can be conceived and produced by independent artists more easily than a traditional play can; because of this, solo shows can be more experimental, blend styles and genres, and push the boundaries of theater that came before it.

How I Learned What I Learned is no exception.

This play about August Wilson’s life both boils theater down to its barest form—oral histories are a cornerstone of human civilization—and blends theatricality with other creative and artistic elements. One such blend? Stand-up comedy!

From early writing stages of How I Learned What I Learned, Wilson approached the piece’s source material—his life—with a tongue-andcheek attitude that may surprise those who didn’t know his playful personality. Even as his health was declining, Wilson wanted to infuse his coming-of-age memoir play with the humor that has been embedded in all of his work. As he wrote, he studied stand-up routines from some of the best comedians of his lifetime, watching The Original Kings of Comedy, a concert film featuring African American standup comedians. He broke down the jokes and studied the structure, form, and timing of them. He was determined that, whatever this play would end up being, it would make people laugh. Among the titles that ended up on the cutting room floor were Move Over, Chris Rock; I’m Not Spalding Gray; and Sambo Takes On the World. Those titles were left behind, but Wilson was right to look to stand-up comics for tips to engage an audience; the inspiration is clear in the final product.

Solo shows, stand-up, and memoir are not distinct forms, as they have overlapping qualities and storytelling tools. After all, one person on stage has a big job of keeping large groups of people entertained enough to hear an entire story, and humor and authenticity are two great tools to do it. While solo performances and memoirs may show a larger range of emotions or have a more narrative structure, both often draw from the performer’s real life and contain similar elements to stand-up comedy. What’s called “crowd work” in comedy is “direct address” in the theater; an actor giving you necessary information to follow the story is “exposition,” while a comedian doing the same is giving a “set-up.” Though our vocabulary may be altered when talking about one form over the other, these performance mediums have overlapping techniques that make for entertaining and compelling evenings. But as with any art form, artists learn these structures and rules so they can be broken.

So how do you know when you’re watching a solo show or a comedy show? How do you distinguish between the two? Well, this is where it gets muddled. With the renewed popularity of stand-up tapings due to the boom in streaming services, stand-up is becoming more than a person with a microphone and water bottle onstage. Production quality is increasing, and stand-up artists are pushing against the tradition of the form. Bo Burnham’s Inside, for example, is a comedy show with highly theatrical elements, from shifting lights, to costume changes, to a narrative throughline. The subject matter is more introspective and dark than a traditional stand-up routine’s may be. Similarly, Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette is a two-thirds typical stand-up routine that takes a sharp turn into darker themes and a more narrative performance style in the last third.

Comedians and theater artists pushing the bounds of performance and landing in something adjacent to each other’s form is deeply exciting. An artist in the liminal space between theater and stand-up has more agency and ownership over their stories, with more options of what to tell and how to present experiences to an audience. As both mediums evolve, they craft spaces for stories that don’t quite fit in either. This allowance for new kinds of stories also opens the space for new kinds of storytellers, diversifying communities of creatives and populating stages with new performances in dialogue with today.