The Joy Of Cringe: When Bad Comedy Makes Good Reality Television

Almost every professional stand-up comedian paid their dues on an open-mic circuit. It’s a rite of passage and a necessary baptism by fire. A lot of comics will record their open-mic sets for posterity. They’ll study the recordings in order to refine their sets. If they crushed it, there’s a good chance they’ll upload the footage to YouTube so they can show everyone what a great job they did. But if they bombed, that video (or audio file) will be consigned to a digital landfill, likely to never be consumed by anyone other than the bad-set-haver themselves. For most budding comics, a bad set is ephemeral … unless they happen to be a reality TV star like Michael Fractor from Twentysomethings: Austin (an Austin-based show about a group of zoomers who live and party together), in which case one of the most vulnerable and humiliating moments of your life is a matter of public record that was likely seen by an audience of millions.

“I’m just hoping for some kind of noise,” says the charmingly awkward Fractor during one of his testimonials on the fifth episode of the Netflix reality series. “I don’t wanna do comedy for sheer silence. I’ve had barely any moments where I’ve done well, but the times where I have done well — it’s awesome!” he adds longingly. Fractor’s endearing statement makes the comedy show scene that follows all the more unsettling, as does the fact that Fractor’s fellow castmate and love interest Isha Punja accompanies him to watch the set.

Fractor takes the stage full of excitement and expectation, but he bombs. Badly. With the audaciousness of a reality TV cast member in his early twenties, Fractor opens with a joke in which he implies that he’s a pedophile. His bold opener earns a couple of pity chuckles followed by near-deafening silence. It’s possible to recover from a bad opener, but it takes quick wit, a skill that Fractor is yet to develop, which explains why he follows up his pedo joke with a Hitler bit. Of course, it’s possible to craft a funny Hitler joke, but for someone as new to the game as Michael, it was never going to have a satisfying payoff.

Punja recoils at his attempts to induce laughter and her discomfort adds another layer of unpleasantness to the scene. After a bizarre closer involving a Jerry Seinfeld impression, Fractor ends his set and returns to his seat, bringing one of the show’s most memorable moments to a close. As bad as Fractor’s set was, he took a big swing and persevered in the face of absolute failure, and you have to respect that. After all, it takes a lot of courage to (fake) out yourself as a sex criminal on television.

Reality TV is often very funny, although it’s rarely funny when the people on screen are explicitly trying to make us laugh. But what about when the people on screen are being serious about being funny? In the episode “Beach, Please” from the fourth season of Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules, two cast members argue over which one of them is more dedicated to sketch comedy. Vanderpump Rules is a thoroughly entertaining show about a bunch of hot people who work at a West Hollywood restaurant called SUR (unbelievably this is an acronym for Sexy Unique Restaurant), which is owned by Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum Lisa Vanderpump. Most of its cast are part-time models or out-of-work actors, but the sudden revelation that Kristen Doute and Ariana Madix are both so passionate about comedy that they’re forced to engage in a heated argument during a beach picnic is so enjoyably jarring that it has to be mentioned.

Kristen brags about performing at a recent comedy show, which causes her former love rival Ariana to question Kristen’s comedy credentials. You see, Ariana does comedy too, so she thinks Kristen is stealing her thing (not that anyone watching at home knew it was her thing prior to the scene in question). With the same Judy Gemstone energy that carried her through her tenure on the show, Kristen claps back in an absolutely amazing moment in which two reality TV stars (who both dated the same guy while working at the same restaurant) have a very serious fight over which one of them is the true comedian of the group.

Later in the series, we see Kristen performing both sketch and stand-up comedy in a comedy club and, to be fair, her show appears to go very well. That being said, her jokes are hacky and the audience is mostly people who wanted to be on TV.

Reality TV producers are some of the most depraved creatures on the planet, and many of us are more than happy to reap the results of their unbridled sadism. New Jersey housewives pulling each other’s hair extensions out? Sign me up! Millennial models shagging each other’s partners? Hook it into my veins! But of all the twisted things reality TV throws at us, nothing is more unpleasant than its bizarre fetish with uncomfortably terrible stand-up, which can partially be explained by the pretty big overlap in the “person who thinks they’re funny enough to tell jokes on stage” and “person who thinks they’re interesting enough to be on a reality TV show” Venn diagram. While shooting the fifth and most recent season of the popular Japanese reality show Terrace House, aspiring stand-up Kai Kobayashi was most definitely in the center of that diagram. In one episode of Terrace House: Tokyo 2019-2020, Kai (who grew up in the US) performs in English at a Tokyo open-mic.

Kai might be multilingual, but when it comes to the language of charisma, he’s shockingly inept. Unlike the aforementioned Michael Fractor, who had just the one female co-star accompany him to his show, Kai invites three of his female housemates to witness the spectacle — and what a spectacle. Instead of trying to be himself on stage, Kai clearly attempts to mimic the mannerisms and cadences of several legendary stand-ups. He’s going for a dead-pan George Carlin thing, but he can’t pull it off and he comes across as someone trying way too hard to be profound and professorial, when he should just try being funny. Plus, his jokes simply aren’t funny. It’s a terrible set, and the Terrace House editors make the viewer endure every excruciating second. Like Fractor, Kai crashes and burns as his palpably disgusted co-stars look on in what is one of the most chillingly cringe scenes in the history of reality television.

Of all the art forms, few (if any) are as tough to stomach when done badly as stand-up comedy. Unless you regularly attend open-mics, the chances that you’ve seen an unquestionably awful set are likely pretty slim. By the time a comedy set reaches the ears of the casual stand-up fan or even a mainstream television audience, it has been refined to near-perfection. Generally, only the good stuff makes it on TV. That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of easy-to-view stand-up that you personally find bad, but objectively terrible stand-up sets are seldom seen by the average person. Bad movies can be so bad they’re good and bad songs can be fun to dance to at wedding receptions, but the only people willing to sit through bad stand-up are schadenfreude-addicted reality TV viewers.

Norman Quarrinton is a tall person from South London who now resides in Southern California with his American wife. Follow him on Twitter @NormanQ.