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Manuel I. “Fox” Morone ’14 is showing me to the music practice room in the Mather House basement where he practices his stand-up comedy. It’s through a maze of passages off from the dining hall, and while we walk, Morone—an inactive Crimson news editor—tells me about an awkward moment at Café Algiers. He was on a date, he’d sat behind a pillar in the room’s strange architecture, and while his date was away from the table, he’d run into a girl he’d earlier told he was interested. It’s a funny story, and I’m asking him what happened next when he and I reach the practice room.

I wake up to an email from Fox the next morning. It’s a two-paragraph analysis of the Café Algiers anecdote as an example of the story-based humor that makes up his stand-up sets. “I kind of guided you through the space so you knew what I was seeing,” he writes. “If I don't do it so that you feel genuinely acquainted with my thought process, there won’t be laughs. ‘It’s funny because it's true,’ but mainly because I've made it true after bringing you into my world.”

“I'm gonna be honest, though,” he adds. “I feel like sort of a dick deconstructing all this, like ‘This is my art.’”

Morone uses the term with irony, but his and other Harvard comedians’ discussions of stand-up reveal the complexity of the craft. Their comedy involves a writing process where character and psychological direction are key, but it’s fine-tuned only through performance. It is as Morone describes it—“‘art’ or whatever.”

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THIRD THOUGHT

In the hallway of Morone’s Mather suite, there’s a black-and-white photo of him smiling sweetly at the camera. On it, one of his four roommates has written in colored Sharpie the Nietzsche quote “Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes” and attributed it to Peter Gabriel.

I sit with Morone and Anthony H. Zonfrelli ’14—on whose door the resident tutor-designed nameplate has also been changed to read the former Genesis singer’s name—in Zonfrelli’s room. They’ve been roommates since freshman year, when they both became interested in stand-up. Morone’s performed for his entire undergraduate career, while Zonfrelli started only during his senior fall. “Everything I wrote on my own I felt sucked,” Zonfrelli says. “It wasn’t until I started finding a style that worked for me that I started feeling more comfortable.”

They’ve both worked to develop their styles—the types of jokes they tell, such as one-liners or longer stories, and the tone or character of their delivery. Their styles are very different, they tell me. “I’m like, the really cool kind,” Fox says.

“I’m like, the really good-looking kind,” Zonfrelli replies.

The long stories Morone writes involve finding the irony or illogic in everyday situations. “If I see [a situation] like that, I’ll be like, ‘this is definitely funny, but why is it that?’” he says. “The number one thing, it’s to be able to see something in a situation and then be able to make your thought totally clear to the audience.” This effect, he explains, is produced through a kind of psychological duplication—he uses pacing, side stories, and demeanor to teach the audience his thought processes, so that they anticipate and understand his commentary. “That’s the hard part with these stories. It’s not just about the jokes,” he says. “It’s about, ‘I need to think the way you’re thinking,’ and that’s hard.”

Zonfrelli’s sets comprise standalone one-liners, verbal jokes with literalisms and double meanings or situational setups with surprise endings. (“Paraprosdokian. My jokes are paraprosdokians. That’s the word,” he texts me later, with a Wikipedia link to the rhetorical term derived from the Greek “against expectation.”) His inspiration is Anthony Jeselnik, who in an interview articulated the idea of “third thought”—that in one-liners, the setup should end with neither the logical conclusion nor the clearest twist, but the next, completely unexpected one.

His stand-up character, like Jeselnik’s, is dark—even disturbed—so the effect is “creating a distance” from the audience, Zonfrelli says. “After the end of each joke, I have to somehow pull them back and be like, ‘No, trust me!’ and then shatter it.”

The pursuit of a definitive style is restrictive to some comics. Andy Kindler, a professional comedian who performs regularly on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” thinks of comedy as deciding what parts of one’s personality to present to the audience. In 28 years of performing solo, he’s shifted his subject matter in tandem with changes in his life. He’s currently lauded for his critiques of other comics and the entertainment industry, which he began when he turned to comedy full-time and “that became [his] reality.” He also adjusts his approach according to how audiences react to various aspects of his personality. “I never really picked a style. I just tried to be funny,” he says.