Kip Addotta on Kip Addotta!

Kip Addotta by definition

Today almost every young stand-up comic wants to be thought of as both funny and hip-if only because he or she knows that he is speaking to people who have come to believe that if something is both funny and hip, the act of laughing at it will make them hip, too.

Kip Addotta doesn't play

But Kip Addotta doesn't play that game. Instead, like Lenny Bruce, Rodney Dangerfield, Steve Martin and several generations of musicians and siding salesmen, Addotta seems to be a genuine hipster-a man whose vision of life was always askew, not a guy who has cooked up a set of attitudes that he or she thinks might be cute.

Kip Addotta and why they laugh

"This is correct in many ways but there are many reasons people laugh. One might simply do something silly or outragous or daring. Being 'Hip" is what one is! You are either hip or your not hip and if you are not hip there is no way to teach it to you. It's about being on the edge of time."

Kip Addotta is younger than other hipsters

Actually Addotta is a couple of generations younger than any other hipster comics that come to mind. But he has all the traits-the most crucial, for my taste, being the sense that everything he says arises from some reservoir of experiences which he is willing to share with the audience but which he also is determined to husband and protect.

Kip Addotta speaks

"I also agree that I am delivering glimpses of my experience to people who do not know who I actually am. I am the product of many dynamic physiological traumas. And, because of these traumatic experiences I read and know many things having to do with the primal or private world that people think they exclusively live in. None of us are strangers to trauma. Being absolutely honest, in a humorous way, is startling and delightful to humans. I say what other people think and would never admit to thinking." As much as the media would like to make us think we are all different in most ways we are not!

Kip Addotta does not sell

That is, while Addotta knows that he is up there to sell jokes-just as those salesmen knows that their job is to sell siding, and the dance band tenor saxophonist knows that before the night is out he's going to have to play 'Misty'-he sells his jokes in such a way that he, and we know that he's selling them.

Kip Addotta uses his own thoughts

"Each joke is a thought of my own. And my job is to entertain people with them! At the same time I want people to know something about me. These observations, stories, silly tricks, and down right foolishness that I refer to as "The Act" are the bricks that I lay to build a the experience that the audience will have, while I'm on a stage. Surprise is the key in any production. But there are few hard rules because sometimes doing the obvious is exactly what the audience3 does not expect."

Kip Addotta is compared

Now there's a hip way to do that, which is popularized by Steven Wright and is practiced each weeknight by David Letterman-an ironically coy and cool distancing of ones self from the very idea of joke-telling, not to mention the whole climate of show business.

But the hipster style, that Addotta embodies, is quite different. Hot rather than cool, it wholeheartedly embraces the greasy contradictions of the entertainers role-insisting that there is no way to forget that show business is still a business, no matter how much one might want to dance away from that uncomfortable fact.

Kip Addotta tells his truth

"The one rule I guide my self by is that no matter what I am doing or saying, on stage, it is the absolute truth and I believe that what I am doing is not in the least bit funny. That's called character. I am a character in a one-man play. And I am always in the moment. I am aware of everything and everyone around me and so well prepared that whatever might happen I will deal with it within the context of "The Act".

Kip Addotta will even leave the stage

I have even had the occasion to leave the stage, walk through the audience all the way back to the bar, sit down and have a drink all the while verbally engaging the audience for several minutes while I enjoy my cocktail. Then I walk back to the stage and continue the show without missing a beat."

Kip Addotta has honest head start

So in the area of honesty Addotta has a running head start, and his graceful, rather deliberately paced and slightly sing song delivery adds to the air of conviction that helps him sell his stuff.

He is very funny and different. This is a funny man!