Did I Tell You The One About...
How the greats use storytelling as a device.
by Beau Fitzpatrick
To label someone a storyteller as apart
from a comedian is a false dichotomy.
One can not say that because this comedian uses a device of long form story telling as, say, Patton Oswalt or Tig Notaro
has a tendency to makes them a bonefide story teller, where as Jimmy Carr or
Tim Vine, who tells short and to the point
one liners is a more traditional comedian.
Story telling is a tool in communicating
an idea and story tellers, in a comedy
context, are people who lean towards using this as a device more often than not.
It’s hard to pin-point where storytelling
became fashionable in comedy. Surely it has ebbed and flowed in different
scenes. Surely it worked for those who
huddled around the fire so many tens of
thousands of years ago, hearing stories
that made them huddle together in fear,
or explode in laughter; as if to mock their
own fear and echo their indifference to
the darkness.
Throughout this expansive timeline, we
can pretty much choose to pin drop anywhere along the way and X