Jay Sankey Zen and The Art of Stand Up C

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Jay Sankey Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy London:

Routledge, 1998. £12.99. ISBN 0-87830-074-0.
Steve Nallon
New Theatre Quarterly / Volume 16 / Issue 03 / August 2000, pp 303 - 303

DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X00014007, Published online: 15 January 2009
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0266464X00014007
How to cite this article:

Steve Nallon (2000). New Theatre Quarterly, 16, pp 303-303 doi:10.1017/S0266464X00014007
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Fiction', for example, takes as its starting-point Jay Sankey
Etchells's reaction to his own mortality. The col- Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy
lection also contains four performance texts; a London: Routledge, 1998. £12.99.
selection of Etchells's own journalism; and Hugo ISBN 0-87830-074-0.
Glendinning's photographs of the company in
rehearsal and performance. It is perhaps too frag- Jay Sankey introduces a section entitled 'Great
mented for undergraduate study; but Certain Sets' with a little epigram from Shunryn Suzuki
Fragments does illuminate one of the more inter- which states, 'When you do something, you
esting aspects of contemporary British theatre. should burn yourself completely, like a good bon-
DAVID PATTIE fire, leaving no trace of yourself.' Most sections in
this excellent book have such words of wisdom to
preface the numerous and extensive array of
Jonathan Kalb subjects covered. These range from Stanislavsky
The Theater of Heiner Miiller on 'Pausing and Emphasizing' and Plato on 'Does
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Every Joke Have a Victim?' to Jerry Lewis on
ISBN 0-521-55004-1. 'Sweating' and Patrick Swayze on 'Heckling'.
It is when Sankey gets to grips with the 'Zen-
Following in the footsteps of Brecht, Heiner ness' of and in performing that his ideas really
Muller came to dominate twentieth-century Ger- show their unique contribution to an ever-grow-
man theatre to a remarkable extent, yet despite ing shelf of stand-up comedy books. Sankey's
his colossal stature he scarcely figures in anglo- friendly style allows the reader to understand
phone academic discourses and his plays have such terms as 'an investment of your life energy'
only recently been translated. Kalb's book is the without these becoming mumbo-jumbo. Giving
first comprehensive study of Muller in English first-hand accounts of why and how such invest-
and is the product of years of meditative fascin- ment of energy is important allows the reader, as
ation. As a piece of scholarship it is a breath- much as is possible, to be there with him in the
taking tour de force. experience. For example, all comics have to make
Muller was notoriously self-contradictory and an entrance, but the way Sankey describes the
evasive regarding his public personae and his need to be completely focused and assert his
writing. Arch-manipulator and provocateur, he presence offers an insight which few other writers
suffered years of marginalization in the GDR on stand-up comedy have matched.
before he was hailed as a leading playwright and If there is a criticism of the book, it is that not
installed as one of the guiding lights at the Ber- enough attention is given to Sankey's experience
liner Ensemble in 1991. His texts interrogate and of Zen outside his work as a comic - in such a per-
advance German intellectual, political theatre, while sonal work it is surprising not to have more
problematizing bourgeois theatre traditions in ways information about Sankey's life in general. If this
which we have come to label as postmodern. book is about what Zen has brought to stand-up,
Kalb's concept for the book is ingenious: perhaps Sankey could offer us a sequel on what
he explores Muller's relationship as a writer to stand-up has brought to Zen.
bodies of work by figures who influenced him STEVE NALLON
both directly and indirectly; but the exploration
itself posits Muller as a complex and impenet-
rable tangle of guises and disguises. Chapter titles Richard W. Schoch
are: 'Muller as Muller', 'Muller as Brecht', 'Miiller Shakespeare's Victorian Stage: Performing
as Kleist', 'Muller as Mayakovsky', 'Muller as History in the Theatre of Charles Kean
Shakespeare', 'Muller as Artaud', 'Muller as Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Genet', 'Miiller as Wagner', 'Miiller as Beckett', ISBN 0-521-62281-6.
and 'Muller as Proteus' (like Brecht, sometimes
his behaviour was morally repulsive). This is a persuasive, learned account of the his-
Kalb's quest to try and penetrate some of the torical sense that informed Charles Kean's pro-
surfaces of what he calls this 'glacially infuriating ductions at the Princess's Theatre in the 1850s -
writer' is engrossing, and he negotiates his own not only of Shakespeare's history plays, but also
ambivalences and reservations about Muller as of work in other genres and by other authors.
theatre-maker and man with both honesty and Indeed, it might be said that Kean's historicizing
adroitness. Though Kalb's journey, as he himself of The Winter's Tale and A Midsummer Night's
knows, is far from complete, it is one that takes Dream is more significant than his work on the
the reader into all those troubling questions about histories, where some degree of attention to
the condition and relevance of late-twentieth cen- 'archeology' had long been expected.
tury theatre which, as far as possible, we have Richard W. Schoch puts Kean's work in the
simply tried to avoid. context of Victorian historiography not only at the
MARY LUCKHURST level of the universities and higher journalism,
303
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New Theatre Quarterly

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Jay Sankey Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy London:

New Theatre Quarterly / Volume 16 / Issue 03 / August 2000, pp 303 - 303

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0266464X00014007

How to cite this article:

Request Permissions : Click here

Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/NTQ, IP address: 157.182.150.22 on 11 Apr 2015

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 11 Apr 2015 IP address: 157.182.150.22

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