Making it funny. That’s what this is all about. This is the story of a woman that wants to make you laugh, wants to make you have a good time and in her words, “make you forget about your shitty life for a while”. A lot is said about the New York audience during the documentary, how special they are and why the city plays such a big part and influences the material, performance, and delivery of the stand-ups doing shows all around. Be careful of doing cutesy puns, or b-level observational humor, that shit won’t fly on an NYC stage and these women know it pretty well, their material is raw, real and very funny.
Most people see a famous comedian and have no idea how many years of hard work went into their success, the thousands of shows, some nights in front of 6 drunks not paying attention, others in crappy bars of middle America, or running around Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn doing 5 sets in one night, all for the sake of the material, getting it ready and examining what’s landing and what’s not, what needs work and what needs to be dropped. Wendi keeps generating material from her daily life non-stop, she will always have her “classics” but new stuff keeps on coming, it can be something about being broke, dating life, etc. she makes it hilarious and tries it out on stage in no time.
I can’s get over what comedians do on stage, you need to develop a level of confidence unknown to me and to most of us, I mean, standing there with a spotlight on your face and your job is to make me laugh about things that happened to you or stuff that’s happening around us. That’s crazy. You get up there and you have to address a bunch of strangers and connect with them in no time! You can be in front of 8 people or 2,000, you need to connect with each and every person, or at least try to, sometimes in less than 10 minutes. It’s a beautiful scary thing. My respect for them grows by the minute.
We are close to getting some additional footage, the animation is ready to go and I’m shitting my pants of excitement. I’m not a patient man, but this project has tried to teach me to become one, I try to say no to unnecessary rushing and I try really hard not to get anxious when things are not happening when I want them to, or better yet when I think you should have happened already.
To me, this is the hardest part as a filmmaker, seeing the finish line so close but not being quite there yet.