Is there a gap in the market for an ensemble TV show about comedians’ lives? At least since Seinfeld, there has been no shortage of telly shows about standup, tangentially or otherwise, from Louie to Hacks, and from I’m Dying Up Here to The Marvelous Mrs Maisel. And yet, Standing Up – on Netflix – feels fresh to me: its characters are engaging, its insights into the standup life are sometimes schematic but faithful to the unglamorous yet folk-heroic reality. The twist – and maybe the source of its freshness – is that Standing Up (AKA Drôle) is from France, whose standup scene is younger and more distinctively diverse than its UK and US equivalents.
I wrote about this last year, quoting a joke by the Franco-Ivorian act Shirley Souagnon: “Do you know the difference between theatre and standup? The colour.” Standing Up – created by the showrunner of the terrific Call My Agent!, Fanny Herrero – focuses on the ups-and-downs of four standups, centring around titular comedy club Le Drôle. There’s French-Algerian Nezir, living in the banlieues with his disabled dad, struggling to make ends meet. There’s Aïssatou, who is Black, and on the threshold of stardom after a video goes viral, even as her intimate standup throws her personal relationships into disarray. Add into the mix washed-up Bling, the son of Vietnamese immigrants, who runs the club but whose standup career is in freefall, and rookie Apolline, concealing comedy ambitions from her well-heeled family, and you have enough narrative plates spinning to easily sustain this enjoyable six-part show.
The point, of course, is to show how these characters’ standup interacts with their hectic lives. On one level, that’s about sweet Nezir and simpering Apolline seducing one another through comedy. On another, it’s about Bling’s midlife panic expressing itself through the misanthropy of his jokes. Standing Up also enacts the scorched-earth effects of comedy on a performer’s family – rather too starkly for my tastes, as Aïssatou’s husband gets the hump at being the butt (in more ways than one) of her most notorious joke.
What I can’t promise is that those standup routines will have you clutching your aching sides. I found the cast, who are actors, perfectly convincing as standups. (Actual standups – including Souagnon – feature in the writing team and in background roles.) But we only ever see snippets of their acts, which in any case are in French. We have to take it on trust when Aïssatou’s “sketch” about fingering her husband’s anus goes viral. Out of context and on our screens, it’s not hilarious.
But that’s not what the show’s trying to do. Its interest in standup – and this is instructive of how the artform is now considered, at least in dramatic terms – is in its relationship to the artists’ personal lives. “What I found interesting,” Herrero has said, “is that standups are able to reveal things about themselves in their acts that they wouldn’t in their everyday lives.” We see it in Mrs Maisel, and we see it here: the standup stage as a place where performers immediately refashion real-life incident into comedy. It’s a fantasy version of an artform in which the route from real-world experiences into effective comedy is seldom a straight line.
It’s also a trope that fetishises authenticity and elevates one particular brand of standup (personal, confessional), forgetting that comedy is as broad as the human imagination. No place here for prop comics, one-liner merchants, surrealists, anti-comics, character comics – or any of the myriad other ways that a solo performer can make audiences laugh.
But I get it: those kinds of comedy are harder to dramatise. They don’t let you see characters working out their emotional issues and developing their authentic voice in public, in-the-moment – which in storytelling terms is inherently satisfying. That’s certainly the case here, in a show that’s winningly fond of its characters, and makes something quietly heroic of their determination to get onstage at the end of every fraught day, to raise a smile and tell their truths. It is insightful too, into the trade-offs that standups (particularly those, perhaps, from marginalised backgrounds) can face as the mainstream beckons. Or into the taboo around joke thievery, which is especially sharp in a standup culture recently rocked by a plagiarism row. Four episodes in, it’s got me hooked, and has burnished my faith in the democratic romance of club comedy.
