Nate Jackson: Super Funny is a very good special by all the usual standards, but it’s fascinating in one specific, new-ish way. Bookended by perfectly funny and serviceable written material, its centerpiece is nonetheless an extended stretch of improvisational crowd work, introduced with a quick primer on the correct etiquette of audience interaction at a Nate Jackson show. And not only is it easily the best part of the special, it’s also the part that the audience is clearly most looking forward to and enjoying in real-time.
This is partially a consequence of Jackson being popular largely on the strength of searing crowd interactions that go viral on social media, especially TikTok. But it’s also symptomatic of a broader cultural trend. These days, comedians are often funnier off the cuff than they are in any other format, and audiences want the personal touch and freeform interactions more than they want the traditional, rigorously rehearsed material. You can feel it in Super Funny. Jackson has built his entire hour around that sense of build-up and release and embellishes the section with a big screen showing live feeds of the audience members being burned.
Crowd work isn’t a new phenomenon. It has always been widely understood that you avoid the front row of a comedy show if you don’t want to get picked on. But the standard modes of crowd interaction were generally ad hominem attacks on people the comic could see at the front, and takedowns of hecklers who were derailing the show. This new version of crowd work is different. The comic goes looking for it. The audience expects it. It’s an oddly collaborative process, with the best examples featuring not only comedians who know how to spot and work an angle but also audience members who know how to serve one up on a plate.
Andrew Schulz was relatively successful for a reasonably long time, but his sudden rise to comedy superstardom came on the back of short-form video virality. And most of his successful hits were crowd-work bits, which isn’t an accident. Crowd work is uniquely suited to reels and clips, to that instant dopamine hit of something being immediately and isolatedly funny. There’s no need for the context of a long setup. It just works on its own terms, unreliant on callbacks, and thus not requiring the investment a traditional hour does.
And it’s perfect for marketing, since crowd work is always unique and organic. You could watch a hundred crowd work clips from a particular comic without spoiling a single written joke. Audiences could get the benefit of being intimately familiar with a comic’s style and yet still get to experience the novelty of their actual material in a live performance. Schulz probably wasn’t the first comedian to realize this, but he was the one who most prominently leveraged it. A more traditional, structured hour like Life can only exist on the goodwill earned through a facility for working the crowd.
Matt Rife is another example, but primarily of how this can backfire. Rife was in the industry for a long time before he got incredibly good-looking overnight, which certainly helped his career trajectory, but he also benefited from a Schulzian gift for playing to his audience. Rife rode that same wave of social media virality to mainstream attention, and did perhaps an even better job of it, since some of his crowd work bits — like the infamous Christina interaction — are legendary. But when he dropped Natural Selection on Netflix after two self-funded YouTube specials, nobody liked it. It was too traditional, too unlike what people had gotten used to. His next release, Lucid, was a “crowd work special” that felt a bit desperate, like he was overreacting to the criticism by going too far in the other direction.
This is perhaps why Super Funny works so well. Nate Jackson’s crowd work is a part of the show, and arguably the part people who pay to see him enjoy the most, but it’s not the show. There’s more to the hour. And ultimately, more is necessary, because comedy is an art form, a craft, and the best examples of it are engineered with a watchmaker’s precision. Comedy isn’t just being funny; it’s understanding the human condition, knowing to look for humour in the spaces between the obvious and the surprising, the accepted and the taboo, the pleasurable and the painful. A great comedian can be bad at crowd work and still be funny, but a crowd work specialist can’t be bad at comedy. It just doesn’t work.
And yet the expectations are there. Times are changing, and now the best way to become prominent as a comedian is to leverage the one skill that doesn’t necessarily make a good comedian. Audiences will be disappointed if they don’t get picked on, but picking on the audience can’t be the entire act. It’s a catch-22. Some performers can do both, and continue to thrive, but others can’t. As the landscape of comedy continues to be terraformed by trends, only the most adaptable will survive.