Funny how these days stand up is associated mostly with comedy. Maybe it’s natural in a sense that stand up comedy has made a major break trough in this new millennium. The word originally means performing for an audience standing up, in front of the audience. It could be a big or small group; the performance is done standing in front of them.
In this way, all performing arts that meet those qualifications are stand up performances. And this is what the word originally means.
I live in Finland and I’m a professional magician. I once got an email from a local comedian who said that I should remove the word “stand up” from web site, because I was a magician not a comedian.
I gave him a small lecture how things are and told him I had been doing stage magic professionally for 15 years and since I had a web site, I have been advertising stand up performances along with close up performances.
Later he apologized, but this phone call actually reflects the way people think these days.
Sometimes I get requests for gigs, where the client asks me to do little close up, then a performance for all and in the end little stand up…
When a word gets branded, it seems to establish a new meaning and people start to take some things for granted.
Of course I tell my customers how things really are, but I have changed some text on my website so that people can more easily understand the difference. I also advertise myself only as a magician; I have a link on my pages that says “stand up” which lead my customers to my stage performance page, but seems many don’t read this page at all, they just understand it the way they have learned it.
Actually for me this isn’t so bad.
I get requests for gigs where the client wants me to do stand up. Well, they understand it as stand up comedy only, but comedy is what I do also. I mix magic and comedy and my performances are actually very funny, so what do I say?
I say nothing; I say perfect, I do it exactly the way you want!
This has happened many times and my clients have never complained, because only thing they are concerned about is getting a performer that does a good job. I am a professional entertainer, so I do a good job – case closed and money in the bank 🙂
In this way comedy, being so popular as it is these days, helps me in a way also. Still I feel I am not doing anything wrong and I am not trying to deceive or mislead people in any way on my web site; I let them know exactly what they are getting in detail.
To me stand up is a very logical word to use, because I’m doing close up also. Close up for small groups at a time and stand up for larger audiences.
If we still think about the word, what it originally meant, as I explained before, to me it can mean a thousand different things. Anybody on stage in front of their audience is doing stand up, and I don’t want to complain, looks like it only means more job for anyone who is doing comedy in one form or another.