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I’m a slapstick comedian. But ever since covid struck, I’ve done numerous sitting down. In an easy, my schedule shifted from dozens of live performances in a 12 months to almost none. Although some venues have reopened, a lot of my gigs have been moved to Zoom. Then, last month, my brother-in-law came over, bringing his VR headset and introducing me to open mics within the metaverse.
Stand-up comedy in virtual reality gave the look of it will be no more satisfying than stand-up comedy on Zoom: technical glitches, inaudible laughter — in some ways, the antithesis of fine comedy, which thrives on juiced-up audience members sandwiched between strangers in a stuffy black-walled theater.
But I used to be desperate. The lack of the old stand-up world was greater than a blow to my income. It represented a large psychological shift, the lack of a social and emotional outlet that, for greater than 20 years, had been a bedrock of my mental stasis. My first lame try to watch a VR open mic was equal parts intimidating and confusing. I donned Oculus Quest 2 goggles, held two plastic controllers that allowed my avatar’s hand motions to mimic my very own, and inhabited my brother-in-law’s avatar, a horned cartoon fox who wore antlers bedecked with strands of Christmas lights.
In real life, I stood alone in a quiet lounge, but what I saw through the goggles was a bustling three-dimensional cartoon bar. An excellent tall death-like figure stood on a low stage, quietly freestyle-rapping, while various forest critters and wiggly polygons — attendees whose avatars had not yet rendered intimately — darted between lounge chairs.
I removed the goggles, considering, yup, that is how I do know I’m middle-aged.
I didn’t try again until a couple of weeks later, after I learned about “Failed to Render,” a far more orderly stand-up comedy series hosted on AltspaceVR.
Founded in April 2020 — which concurrently makes it very recent and yet very old — Austin-based comic Kyle Render’s show has free nightly performances, apparently reaching greater than 200,000 households and counting. Comics are prescreened and booked, rowdy audience members are muted, sets are recorded and shared, and there’s even a VIP balcony. Render’s show succeeds, it seems, since it’s not treated like a VR hangout space that happens to have stand-up comedy, but more like a brick-and-mortar stand-up show that happens to have VR.
Guests pass metaverse security bouncer Kevin Hilt at “Failed to Render’s” hybrid virtual and in-person event in Las Vegas.
Comedian Tommy Sinbazo on stage on the event.
Sinbazo’s avatar concurrently is broadcast into metaverse comedy room.
TOP: Guests pass metaverse security bouncer Kevin Hilt at “Failed to Render’s” hybrid virtual and in-person event in Las Vegas. BOTTOM LEFT: Comedian Tommy Sinbazo on stage on the event. BOTTOM RIGHT: Sinbazo’s avatar concurrently is broadcast into metaverse comedy room.
Again, I placed on the borrowed goggles and entered the metaverse. This time, I used to be inside an animated lounge with a bar, a stage with a curtain and mic stand, and even a clever solution to navigate through a back hallway to get to the “green room,” where comics can gossip without the audience hearing.
I met Render immediately, which is to say, my cartoon glided down the hall until it was near Render’s cartoon. I do not know what Kyle looks like in real life. Here, though, he looked stylized and cozy, with a dark beard, upswept highlighted hair, and a white blazer with green lapels over a purple shirt. Or, not less than, that’s what his avatar looked like. We were all a bunch of floaty, blocky, un-textured, rudimentary three-dimensional caricatures, almost like characters from an old Nintendo Wii game.
After showing me around, Render cautioned that I’d need to take a couple of minutes to personalize my avatar, since apparently my character’s nondescript brown hair, featureless face and straightforward blue collared shirt made me appear to be a noob. I sheepishly confessed that I’d already spent half an hour customizing my avatar. I silently navigated to a menu and added a weird jacket.
Waiting backstage for my turn, I rehearsed my set in my head. Any bit that needed facial expressions was out — I now not had them (though some expensive VR rigs can track and replicate eye movements). So, for instance, I couldn’t tell my joke about Capri Sun Sport, which requires imitating a hardcore athlete rigorously inserting a straw and drinking from a sippy pouch — the punchline simply doesn’t work without functional lips.
Render introduced me, and I took the stage, searching on the gang of about 50 avatars. I began considered one of my standard introductory bits about being raised in Delaware. The joke often includes crowd work, a variation on “Where’s everyone from?” But in VR, if the audience was yelling in response, I couldn’t hear it. It was hard to listen to laughter from the stage. Audio on this particular metaverse is predicated on proximity, so you possibly can hear other people loudest in case your avatar is next to theirs.
At least the gang was respectful. For random people joining from everywhere in the world, in a virtual environment with few consequences for running rampant, sprinting directly through other people, or generally losing your mind, the show was unfailingly civil and orderly. The audience, for essentially the most part, hovered within the club and gave the impression to be genuinely considering watching the show. I’ve definitely had worse experiences at comedy shows in real life.
I kept waiting for the push of pleasure I often feel when performing, the joys that made me want to choose up a microphone 20 years ago, to take overnight buses within the early days only for stage time. But it didn’t come. I simply couldn’t trick my brain into considering I used to be anywhere apart from a basement.
Virtual audience members react to jokes using emoji.
Render performs from the green room bathroom.
Sinbazo, Cory Robinson and Drew Marks perform from the green room.
TOP: Virtual audience members react to jokes using emoji. BOTTOM LEFT: Render performs from the green room bathroom. BOTTOM RIGHT: Sinbazo, Cory Robinson and Drew Marks perform from the green room.
By the tip of my set, I felt less like I used to be performing a comedy show and more like I used to be writing and directing a three-dimensional cartoon character in real time. I even have no illusions that VR comedy will ever replace in-person comedy; neither does Render, who produces live shows and hybrid live/VR shows as well. The stakes are higher whenever you’re within the room together and anything could occur; the audience and the comic feel a way of community, a component of danger, and an experience that nobody outside the room has shared. At a VR show, the audience just isn’t in the identical room and never might be.
For me as a performer, VR still didn’t scratch the identical psychological itch as a packed club, brick wall, blinding spotlights and a two-drink minimum. That’s the world I miss, and no simulacrum could make me forget what’s lost.
And that, in accordance with “Big Al” Gonzales, a nationally touring comedian who consults for “Failed to Render,” is precisely the flawed takeaway. VR was never intended to exchange live comedy, he says, only to complement it — just as TV and flicks didn’t replace live theater, as some feared they might. The setup is different enough that any comedian who — like I did — simply tries to shoehorn live jokes onto the VR platform is setting themselves as much as fail.
“In the start, it was frustrating because we desired to do comedy the precise way we did on stage,” Gonzales admits. But he adapted, changing his timing, tightening wording, and using more of the dynamics of his voice, which he says eventually made him a greater live comic as well. “You adjust for the medium.”
I don’t need to disparage VR, especially on condition that I’m far enough in years beyond its typical demographic that I wrote my first jokes in WordPerfect 5.1. It’s a terrific recent area of interest that’s ripe for comedians to innovate, and “Failed to Render” is a well-run example of that.
And, though I could not have noticed within the moment, audience members definitely appeared to enjoy themselves — possibly not with the sound of laughter, but with yellow cartoon applause emoji, the VR equivalent of approval, billowing enthusiastically out of their cartoon heads.
Adam Ruben is a Washington author, comedian and molecular biologist.
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