[Editor’s Note: This piece contains spoilers for “Josh Johnson: Symphony”]
There’s a lot of upside when you release an hour of standup on YouTube each week, as Josh Johnson has been doing for the past three years now. The comedian and his signature gray hoodie have built a robust online community by exploring hyper-topical sets on Drake’s ill-advised beef with Kendrick Lamar and Elon Musk’s ill-advised… everything. In the process, Johnson advanced to a role on the writing staff and in the hosting rotation for “The Daily Show.” Now he has a new HBO standup special, as well: “Josh Johnson: Symphony.”
But there is one downside to releasing dozens and dozens of hours of standup online each year, for free. What does a Josh Johnson hour on HBO do that the video he released this week (on Trump’s visit to China) does not? How do you tempt viewers behind the paywall when, at its core, the game of standup remains telling jokes on a stage that people either understand and enjoy, or they don’t? It’s not as though he can parlay HBO money into getting a commercial pilot’s license, or something.
For Johnson and his longtime collaborator and director Jacob Menache, the answer is music. Music and the intention to bring the comedy community they’ve built online into a new era of Johnson’s comedy.
It starts with “Symphony,” which — seriously, spoilers — incorporates brief musical interludes in between stories inside Johnson’s hour of standup at the Wiltern theater in Los Angeles and then brings them together (plus a full orchestra; there’s your HBO money right there) for a performance of a piece composed by Derrick Hodge at the end of the set. Johnson had pitched Menache the idea years ago, but it wasn’t the kind of thing they could easily mount themselves.
When HBO approached Johnson about a special, though, suddenly they had the support and, crucially, the time. It took Menache and his production team two months to build out the stagecraft that seamlessly handles the entrances and exits of the musicians onstage to loosely represent the stories Johnson tells — a saxophone player for an obnoxious uncle, a snare drummer for a 45-year-old man in a karate class of 11-year-olds, among others.
“We had to really figure out [what the musician space] looks like. Then, when we landed on the Wiltern as a location, that’s a lot of art deco, 1940s design, right? So I wanted a set piece that really fit, and that could live on that stage,” Menache told IndieWire. “I was looking at a lot of 1940s musicals. There’s ‘Jumpin’ Jive,’ that section from ‘Stormy Weather’ by the Nicholas Brothers. I took inspiration from that. There’s a little bit of the Busby Berkeley kind of vibe in how we incorporate a set piece that could move and be a character itself.”
The set piece is a beautiful art deco-esque, chandelier-looking portal that rises and falls on a stand with a geometric precision Busby Berkeley would approve of, revealing and swallowing musical performers in between the movements of Johnson’s comedy. Menache and his team — including production designer Tom Lenz, art director Mel Lovric, and lighting designer Marc Janowitz — find subtly interesting ways to change the lighting on it, too, to help ease the audience into different sections and hide the depth of the stage; depth that is only fully revealed at the very end, when all the various instruments combine into Johnson’s titular symphony.
“Normally, you tour for a year, then you put out the special, and the special is what you’ve been working on for that full year; that is like your button, the finished product, the best hour of your stuff from whatever your tour was. And I was trying, basically, to do the opposite,” Johnson told IndieWire. “The tour I have coming up next month, Comedy Band Camp, is going to have elements of music in it along with the comedy. [‘Symphony’] is a way to introduce people to a new era of intentions.”
It’s usually hard for comedians to demarcate different eras of intentions, or phases in their comedy, at least visually. The setup is so often the same — a standup on stage, under the lights, an audience in the seats. Their clothes might change, or their hair might change, and their jokes hopefully will change. But the comedy looks the same. Johnson wants to change that.
“We are creating a different palette and a different set of looks so that people know what they’re looking at whenever they’re looking at it, and there won’t be confusion over, ‘Well, what’s the difference between a YouTube set and this special? Always having that as the intention builds a much more interesting and hopefully memorable tapestry of works,” Johnson said.
Johnson also wants to create a distinct aesthetic for the comedy he’s embarking on through music. “Music has an immersive feature in emotion and in storytelling, where sometimes you will be telling a story with a song, and people get a whole different story out of it than what you intended. Comedy doesn’t have that as much,” Johnson said. “So one thing I’ve been trying to do for a while, and Jacob can attest to it as well, is tell stories that have some layering in them, so then that way it could have a double meaning, or it could be seen as an allegory for a different thing.”
“Symphony” makes good on that just through how the audience interprets the instrument choices Johnson and Menache made to represent each movement of the comedy — they were drawn to street busking b-sides like sax, violin, drums, and trumpet as a nod to their Louisiana roots, but it’s not required for audiences to follow their meaning alone. “There’s such a communal effect that music has that I think comedy also has, but is just less often attributed to comedy because of how we, as stand-ups, usually have to live and die by our own words,” Johnson said.
If Johnson and Menache are living and dying by anything, it’s that they want each project to feel like it’s the last one they’ll ever do, and leave it all out on the field. For “Symphony,” that translated to fighting for a longer prep period and a rare three days in the space before taping in front of a 2,000-person audience at the Wiltern, and then working with hip-hop producer Mike Relm to crisp up the sound and bring it forward into the pace of the special as much as possible.
“You know, so many people — literally anyone reading this article that has aspirations towards any type of media — you can get so beat down from the time you have your idea to the execution of the idea that you can be like, ‘Well, we’re almost across the finish line. Who cares about the extra 10 percent?’ It gets made, and maybe we’ll get to do our dream next time,” Johnson said. “Jacob has the idea that this is it. Every time, this is it. On all the things we work on, this is what you do it for right now.”
“You’re seeing, I think, the results of what’s happening in the industry, which is another reason why it’s so easy to have my mindset of ‘This has to be it. This is the last one,’” Menache added. “HBO could blow up, and there could be no more HBO. So everything has to be treated as the last project, because you never know when it is going to be the case.”
Johnson and Menache are bringing that mentality to their next project, Comedy Band Camp, as well, building on the musical integrations in “Symphony” to create immersive worldbuilding features that they will not spoil. But the musical elements in “Symphony” give them confidence to keep doing more and more ambitious things with Johnson’s comedy.
“Having a collaborator that you work on that vision with that is as held to it as you are is the real coup, I feel like, and why I’m excited about the things we’re going to do next, because every finished product is proof that you finish products,” Johnson said. “Knowing that we did [‘Symphony’], even if you’re only increasing the level of lift by five percent every project, it’s not long before you’re doing things that are twice as hard as the things you used to do, which only makes you better and only makes your work more interesting.”
“Josh Johnson: Symphony” is now streaming on HBO Max.
