What makes a great stand-up comedian?
Rolling Stone magazine adeptly described its criteria when it named this year its Top 50 Stand-Up Comics of All Time:
“In coming up with our version of a comic canon, we weighed artistic merit, technical proficiency and sense of timing, quality of their written material, their delivery and degree of influence — and often, their sense of what makes something, anything, funny. No disrespect to the foundational figures who shaped the earliest incarnations, but this list tiptoes past some of the early craftsmen and focuses on the unique voices who have helped to push stand-up forward in more recent days. These 50 stand-ups best embody what we have come to expect of our modern-day comedians: Someone who can wake us up to the weird, wonderful possibilities of the world around us, impel us to think differently about our own lives – and most of all, make us howl like blithering idiots.”
Well, Jose Marie Viceral a.k.a. Vice Ganda is not in that list, maybe because his comedy appeals primarily to a singular but growing and fiercely loyal global audience: the Filipinos. But that doesn’t mean that he is no less the “comic canon” or comedy powerhouse that he is today. He does meet the criteria and more.
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