Jerry Seinfeld's comedy special 23 Hours to Kill. Photo / Netflix
Jerry Seinfeld's comedy special 23 Hours to Kill. Photo / Netflix
A solitary figure, microphone and stool. Those are the primary images of stand-up comedy, reliable and ubiquitous as a book's cover, spine and chapter titles. There is maybe one other element in the iconography, and it's the most revealing: The water bottle.
Once you start looking for drinks in stand-upspecials, they're everywhere, photobombing stars, perched in corners, upstaging, hiding, as upright and alone as the comic. Their purpose seems obvious — to quench thirst, duh — but then again, stage actors get dry mouths and no Hamlet puts down his sword to pick up an Evian. The water bottle is the prop that clues us in that a comic — not a character — is at work. The drink seems blandly functional, but it gets more interesting once you realise that it's also a choice.
You can tell a lot about a comedian from their water vessel. Take Jerry Seinfeld, a renowned perfectionist whose jokes display polish, control and refinement. In his recent special 23 Hours to Kill, he places an elegant glass next to a sleek label-less bottle of water with a flat top. If it looks like something James Bond might drink, the white goblet that Katt Williams uses in The Pimp Chronicles Pt. 1 (2006) belongs more to the Knights of the Round Table, emphasising his regal levels of eccentricity and flamboyance.
While actors can dash away for a drink at intermission, comedy doesn't hide the rest and recuperation. Why? Convenience? Tradition? It may be that stand-up traditionally leans so much on authenticity; the idea that the comic onstage is telling you what they think, not just playing a character and refining ideas into constructions designed to make you laugh. The glass of water telegraphs that you are watching a human at work, sweating. It adds to the realism.
Size (and quantity) matter. Ali Wong uses a stylish, extra tall bottle, and Hasan Minhaj puts two bottles of water on top of the stool, both working in a tradition but offering just enough variation to look distinct. No one was more prepared than Robin Williams, who had a battalion of bottles near him in Live on Broadway (2002), a preposterous if necessary amount of hydration that emphasised the amount of energy the frenetic comic expended in a typical show — while also being its own sight gag.
Robin Williams in Live on Broadway. Photo / Supplied
Going without water onstage makes a different statement. Chris Rock's specials have always aimed for a sense of event more than the ordinary club vibe, so it's no surprise that he usually doesn't include any bottle onstage, but you see him handing one off right before walking onstage in Bigger and Blacker, from 1999. The drink here functions as a dividing line between the preparation behind the scenes and the theatricality of the show.
Water isn't the only relief comics rely on in specials. There's a long tradition of harder stuff. Ron White built a beloved act on gravely voiced stories of hard living that he told while clutching a cigar and a tumbler, an image so signature that even now that he is sober, he still keeps a bottle of tequila onstage, even though he doesn't drink it.
In The Leather Special, from 2017, Amy Schumer strides onstage holding a bottle of wine, which she places on the stool, and, when her hour is finished, takes with her. In his Netflix specials, Ricky Gervais finishes a joke, pauses, walks behind a podium and sticks his pinkie slightly out when slurping from a beer can. One of these comics uses a drink to perform feminine swagger, the other bloke-at-the-bar thoughtfulness.
Amy Schumer in The Leather Special. Photo / Supplied
Drinks are great for bits, and not just spit takes. In his last two decades, when his comedy took a darker turn, George Carlin used the water break in his show to add tension to a nihilistic riff about industrial waste and our lax response to it. After asking about the water quality in the town he was in, he would say he didn't really care while grabbing a glass onstage, "because I'm an American and I expect a little cancer in my food and water." Drinking here raised the stakes of the joke, making something banal seem dangerous, even twisted.
Bo Burnham began his 2013 special, "what," by taking a gulp from a water bottle, dropping it on the ground and apologising to the audience before a musical recording with his own disembodied voice interrupted him in propulsive lyrics: "He meant to knock the water over yeah yeah yeah but you all thought it was an accident."
The song continued, building a ridiculous gravity out of this minor event, with Burnham doing a goofy dance while this refrain ended the tune: "Art is a lie. Nothing is real."
Such self-awareness has become a trademark of Burnham's comedy, a winking sign to the audience to be sceptical of all performance.
For the humble water bottle to be a symbol of artifice as well as authenticity says something about the flexibility of comedy — as well as, perhaps, its essence, since part of the pleasure of stand-up is how often it blurs the line between the two.
It also goes to show: Stand-up is like any living thing — add water and watch it grow.
