Working a Crowd Is Part of the Act 

By Jason Zinoman from The New York Times

Published: September 5, 2012

Ten minutes after Mitt Romney finished his speech at the Republican National Convention last week Judah Friedlander walked onstage at the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan and got to work solving the world’s problems.  

Wearing baggy jeans and a baseball cap with a glittery American flag on the side, Mr. Friedlander announced matter-of-factly that he would solve any political challenge yelled out by the audience. Homelessness? Simple: Put everyone living on the street in tollbooths, a solution that he says makes sense because the homeless have experience asking for change. Drug crisis? Mr. Friedlander said he supports legalization, but he would start with heroin, because that would make legalizing marijuana easier.

Mr. Friedlander, whose chunky glasses and shaggy hair bring to mind the nerdiest pimp from the 1970s, is best known for playing the comedy writer Frank Rossitano on the NBC sitcom “30 Rock,” which begins its final season next month. But in his terrifically entertaining stand-up, which he has performed since 1989, he adopts a more flamboyant, overtly invented character whose brashness makes Donald Trump sound like Michael Cera.

It’s a marvelously committed performance. Unlike Stephen Colbert’s know-it-all blowhard on “The Colbert Report,” Mr. Friedlander doesn’t preen or ramp up the bombast. His slacker posture and shrugging demeanor suggest he’s a more deluded, even likable, fool than a hypocrite. These days he comes off as a bipartisan satire of egotistic leaders who never seem to have known doubt. And his stated ambition makes presidential candidates look modest. Witness the nickname of his stand-up persona, announced on his oversize yellow T-shirt: World Champion.

Some of the most boisterous comedy audiences I’ve witnessed in this city have been at Mr. Friedlander’s shows. In an age when much stand-up comedy can seem like a meticulous accounting of personal anxieties and observations, Mr. Friedlander delivers jokes in character. He doesn’t gaze at his navel so much as wax poetic about it. What also distinguishes him is how he integrates crowd work. This comedy jargon refers to the interplay comedians have with the audience. It might begin by asking a couple in the front row where they are from, or quizzing them on their relationship.

Good crowd work is typically a nimble, formulaic dance with the audience that segues into a prepared set. Mr. Friedlander, however, weaves it throughout his entire act and even organizes his carefully wrought jokes around interactive conceits. I’ve seen him onstage about half a dozen times (he performs constantly in New York), and while he dips into the same pool of jokes, the order and rhythm change at every performance. He pulls off the magic trick that every great stand-up must master: He fools an audience into thinking a joke he’s told countless times is new.

Early in an hourlong show at Caroline’s last month he asked a man in the front row where he was from. “New Paltz” came the reply. “I’m from Old Paltz,” he responded with alacrity. “You copied everything from me.” He moved on to ask the crowd about the Olympics, turning a table of game Dartmouth students into a recurring target. When an audience member responds with a giggling fit or blathers on, the act meanders. And occasionally Mr. Friedlander’s off-the-cuff jokes fizzle. But that’s the risk of crowd work, the flip side of the excitement and spontaneity of its unpredictability.

To mitigate this inevitability, Mr. Friedlander appears to pay careful attention to frequency of jokes. If the crowd work gets laughs, he keeps it going for as long as possible. If it wanders, he responds with more punch lines. Without breaking character he aims for a balance between prepared and improvised material that results in something loose and spontaneous without veering into indulgence.

Typically he leans on two kinds of jokes to anchor his set. There’s the spectacular boast delivered with the urgency of small talk. “I had a dream I was sleeping with 10 hot chicks, and then I woke up and was sleeping with 20 even hotter chicks,” he said somberly. “It was the one nightmare I ever had.” And then there’s the finely sculptured and skewed gem in the tradition of Mitch Hedberg: “I saw a one-handed man in a secondhand shop and I told him, ‘I don’t think you’re going to find what you’re looking for,’ ” he said.

But the heart of his act is that request for problems to solve. As the bit develops, the audience throws out more obscure issues, and the show turns into something of a contest between the performer and crowd. Mr. Friedlander never wavers, deftly dodging questions, steering a conversation in a direction that plays to his strength. His inevitable triumph is the kind of fixed game that only a seasoned comedian could engineer.

For a superior boaster Mr. Friedlander has a surprisingly warm side. He insults, but gently, and sometimes even offers praise. Part of his success, I suspect, is that he makes audience members feel as if they are part of the act.

Mr. Friedlander’s aesthetic is a reminder of something that is often misunderstood: Live stand-up is its own form, as distinct from televised stand-up as a play is from its film adaptation. Crowd work is only the most obvious difference. Live comedy has an energy, tension and charisma that simply cannot be reproduced.

It’s unfortunate that so many are introduced to the form by late-night talk shows, since there’s a deadness and polish to those sets that fails to capture the charge of the best live comedy. Some well-shot projects however do an excellent job simulating it. (Spike Lee’s lively direction of “The Original Kings of Comedy” is a prime example.)

Some stand-up comics translate better than others to different media. Mr. Friedlander, who has not released a comedy album (although he has written a book in character called “How to Beat Up Anybody”), could probably make a winning television special or record, but it would not capture the essence of his work. In a time when jokes are downloaded, tweeted and podcast, he performs an act best suited for an intimate, packed room in which the joyous sound of a cackling crowd being won over becomes an integral part of the music of comedy.

A version of this article appeared in print on September 6, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Working a Crowd Is Part of the Act.