Using act outs to get laughs

How Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, and Sebastian Maniscalco use act outs, physicality, and impressions to get laughs.

What makes Sebastian Maniscalco so funny? According to NY Times comedy critic Jason Zinoman, it’s his act outs and how he treats the stage like a dance floor: “Maniscalco’s act-outs are broad and over the top, but they are also refined, turning goofiness into its own kind of panache.”

So what’s an act out? Zinoman defines it this way:

Act-out: stand-up jargon describing a comic’s shift from narrating a joke to acting it. Dramatizing a conversation, for instance, or impersonating an animal, vegetable or anatomical part are examples of act-outs.

A good rule of thumb for comedians: If a joke’s not getting a laugh, act out the punchline somehow. Audiences love to see impressions. There’s something inherently comedic about a person pretending to be someone (or something else).

Worth noting: An act out isn’t always an impression. You can use the same voice you typically use if you want. Stephen Wright does deadpan act outs all the time, for example. It’s more about how you’re saying dialogue instead of just describing stuff. (And if you’re, say, a white dude, maybe don’t break out the Chinese accent when you’re doing an act out about going to the laundromat, y’know?)

Part of why act outs work so well is they force you to take an abstract concept and put it into lines of dialogue. Both comedy and truth are frequently found in the specific. Act outs mean you’re showing instead of telling which is always a better way to get “aha” moments.

Zinoman talks about two act out masters: Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams.

Most working stand-ups use act-outs to expand and embroider a joke. But a few make them the centerpiece. Robin Williams, whose punch lines were often hyperactive, motor-mouth act-outs, is probably the most famous example. In his classic specials in the 1980s, Eddie Murphy leaned almost as hard on them, doing jokes that came off like elaborate, hilarious and carefully devised sketches in which he played all the parts.

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The bigger the crowd, the more an act out helps you get over.

Act-outs can beef up the scale of a joke and make punch lines broader and more emphatic. They make behavior, rather than analysis, the focus; by comparison, the Seinfeldian observational style doesn’t use many act-outs. And the device can be essential to comedic storytelling, while blurring the lines between stand-up and one-person show. Good act-outs can be subtle and flesh out another side of a joke, taking the audience beyond the point of view of the comic.

Worth mentioning: You don’t actually have to be a great actor or do a perfect impression. In fact, you can just deliver a line in your own voice and still get solid laughs. And sometimes how you get it wrong can be part of the humor.

[Rachel] Feinstein has an ear for offbeat words, and her jokes are well-made, the spark of her act comes when, mid-joke, she shifts into one of her splendidly realized and quirky characters. In a joke about some idiot hitting on her by telling her what Las Vegas is really about, she responds in the voice of a naïve ingénue from the golden age of Hollywood. She sounds a little like Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz,” but more frazzled and tense. She’s a superb mimic, but what makes her act-outs better than most is that they are never quite on the nose. They are caricatures with a delightful eccentricity all their own. A bit about catcalling evokes an assembly line of New York ethnic types without ever sounding exactly like one you’ve heard before.