One Small Step for Man-Kindler But Is It a Giant Step for Comedy? Howie Mandel Helps Make Andy Kindler The First Live Comedy Hologram in History

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One small step for Andy Kindler….one giant step for comedy?

This year at the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal, Andy Kindler made comedy history as the first comedian to perform live for an audience via hologram.

Nothing was announced ahead of time, not even to the people gathered in the room to hear Andy’s annual State of Comedy Speech. The audience arrived in the main ballroom at the Doubletree hotel in Canada to see a large vertical box on stage large enough to hold a human being. Turns out that human being would be Andy Kindler, even though he was in Van Nuys California.

Then Bob Odenkirk took the stage, introduced Andy Kindler to the crowd, and Andy appeared, inside the box, talked with Bob for a bit and then delivered his speech.  What was happening?

I wasn’t able to get to Montreal this year, and the thing that I was most sad about, was missing Andy Kindler’s speech- its a highlight of the festival every year,  so when I saw a clip on Twitter, I was excited to get a glimpse. “Hologram?” I thought? “WHAT?” This must be a joke. Andy is there, and he’s standing in a box and joking about being a hologram.” It looked too good to be a virtual image, and besides, I was watching him interact in real time with Bob Odenkirk. But I wasn’t sure. I wrote a quick email to the PR team at Just for Laughs who confirmed, Andy was not in Montreal, he was performing via hologram technology. Notorious germaphobe Howie Mandel had apparently purchased this hologram equipment, and Andy was the test pilot. I couldn’t wait to find out more.

The concept of a comedy performance via hologram is not one that the comedy community at large has been dying to embrace. Comedy audiences, performers and industry are tough critics– the toughest really– and we don’t accept change gracefully. We expect our performers to be (1) live, and (2) in the room. With a few notable exceptions, the best stand up is raw, bare bones, and definitely not high tech. A funny person with a microphone, and some lights is all you want and all you need. The use of any technology beyond a really good sound system tends to be received as gimmicky. So introducing a hologram-based performance to stand up was risky, and finding the right person to be the first- difficult. Everyone wants to be funny, no one wants to be a joke.

Holograms have almost no history in comedy. The National Comedy Center has a theater with Jim Gaffigan appearing as a hologram on stage, telling stories, but its recorded, not live. And as far as I know- that’s it. Before Just for Laughs this year, no one has even attempted to perform stand up in front of a live audience via hologram. I didn’t even know the tech existed for a live performance.

But Howie Mandel found this tech from a company named Proto, Inc. He loved it, and immediately wanted to introduce it at this year’s festival. In Andy Kindler he found the perfect ambassador for this trial run, and the State of Comedy speech- not exactly stand up, but not, not stand up either– the perfect vehicle. If you’ve never watched it before, Andy’s annual speech at Just for Laughs is a roast of the industry, pointing out whats rotten in comedy, particularly if a hugely successful person or company deserves to be knocked down a peg. That’s about half of the speech. The other half is Andy’s own brand of self deprecation, roasting not only himself, but every element of the speech, the venue and the audience, often roasting the last thing he said, and the way the crowd reacted to it. This was going to be hilarious no matter what went wrong, or how the audience reacted. If nothing else, Andy would be able to comment about how badly things were going, and how bad of an idea it was to do this.

So as the audience filed into the ballroom, waiting to hear Andy’s schtick skewering Dave Chappelle, Joe Rogan, Ricky Gervais, John Mulaney, Kevin Hart, Netflix, and more, Kindler is in a Van Nuys California studio with a tech team, a white seamless backdrop, and Howie Mandel. Andy isn’t performing in a vaccuum, though. This is not a video relay or a zoom. Andy can can see and hear the audience in real time. In the video embedded below, you can see both sides of the process.

The tech comes via Proto Inc, a company which teamed up with Howie Mandel after Howie saw what they were capable of on Instagram. Proto is the first device that lets people beam themselves to a location thousands of miles away and interact with people there. Founded just 3 years ago in 2019, Proto is already shipping its human-sized machines worldwide. Their devices had already appeared at Comic-Con, the Saturn Awards, the televised iHeartMusic Festival, and the 2020 Emmys Red Carpet, and now Just for Laughs. I spoke with Founder and CEO, David Nussbaum, about bringing this live hologram tech to comedy.

“This is something that was ready to go awhile ago, but not a lot of people want to be the first, and they want something that they know is going to work. They want something that’s tested,” David told me via Zoom call. David credits Howie Mandel with pushing to make this happen so fast. “I owe a hundred percent, well outside of the physical building of the devices and running of the show, this was Howie’s entire thing. Howie made this thing happen. And then of course, Bruce Hills on the Just for Laughs side was great to work with, too.” David first met Howie eight years ago when he brought an older version of his technology to audition for America’s Got Talent. “We auditioned for AGT and was buzzed right off the stage. So it was great to walk out to a sea of 3000 people booing you. And the technology just was not ready for prime time, obviously,” he laughed.

“Eight years later, Howie sees this technology, Proto, what you saw Andy use. He somehow found his way to my Instagram and I was on my Instagram and I just saw Howie Mandel messaging me a dozen times, on every post. Call me, call me, call me, call me. This is crazy. I go to my DMS, my direct messages, and there’s his phone number I call him. And it was him, Howie Mandel. I grew up in the eighties and he was an arena comic. I mean, he was as big as they get. And I idolized this guy and I can’t believe I’m talking to him on the phone. He says, “Where are you?” I said, “I’m in Echo Park.” He says, “I’m in Van Nuys. Why don’t we get together?” So after work, I came over and I loved the space. And within a month we made a deal on me moving in. We live together now. Our entire showroom production studio and engineering department, we’ve taken over about 15,000 square feet of his production studios in Van Nuys. And he has become a friend, he came on as an advisor and he’s recently become an investor.”

This was about six months ago.

Once they decided to bring the tech up to Just for Laughs, the next question was who would perform first. “Andy Kindler, doesn’t go a lot of places these days because of COVID and he was the most natural choice to do his state of the business presentation live on stage from 3000 miles away. So it became clear that that was the right decision,” David told me. “Andy is the perfect guy to be our Neil Armstrong. Somebody on Twitter called him the Neil Armstrong of shtick. So I love that he’s the guy that gets to be the first to do this.”

I spoke to Andy a few days after the speech, and he described what it was like from his perspective.

“So what I’m looking at is– I’m looking straight into a camera, or around the camera that’s aimed at me. And then right behind that camera is a modular with me in the box,” he said. “And so I could see me on the monitor, but then I could see everybody in the room. I could see everyone in the room up to the first few…whatever. But I could see better than when I usually do the speech,” he said.  Josh Weinstein who wrote the speech with Andy, and Howie Mandel were in the room acting as Andy’s proxy audience, laughing and reacting and making it fun. “It felt like a comedy club there. So that was really, really fun,” Andy recalled.

How did it feel performing as the first live hologram? Except for a minor tech issue of hearing his own voice back in his ear like an echo, he said it felt great. “It felt easier and it felt better in a way,” Andy said. “But also there were times when, okay, you’re not in the room. So if you were in the room, you would be able to feel the presence of people. It feel like you’re in a comedy tank. You’re rolling in with your comedy. You could see them, but you’re not really connected to them.”

And yet, Andy did connect directly with people in the room, roasting the front row, talking to his agent, immediately knowing if a joke bombed, and actually interacting with Bob Odenkirk who introduced him. That was a spectacular demonstration of the technology, with Bob actually in the ballroom in Montreal on stage, talking with Andy who is teleporting in through this fantastic box. They’re nodding to each other, pointing at each other, physically reacting, and it looks pretty great.

Andy said that took a little rehearsing to make sure he moved his body correctly. “We practiced that the day before. We worked it so that it looks like I’m looking at him. Also, Bob is so funny to me because he is a curmudgeon in a way. So it worked out. Not really, but he’s a curmudgeon in a sense that he just is. He was like, “No, no, I have to go, Andy.” I thought that made it so much fun. That he didn’t want to banter with me. He wanted to get the hell out of there. And some people– Howie was telling me this– some people at first thought we had prerecorded that segment.”

Kindler said when he agreed to it, he didn’t necessarily expect it to go smoothly, but he was prepared for anything. “I have an advantage in that because I’ve always been dealing with … It’s a tough crowd almost built in situation, that speech.” But everything did go pretty perfectly, and the team couldn’t have been happier. “I’m not saying it would never work for anything else, but we couldn’t have known that the marriage would be so perfect, because we kept thinking it’s not going to work. It will break down.”

But it didn’t, and it looked pretty amazing.

 

David Nussbaum explained how Andy was able to interact from thousands of miles away. “Every device that we have is built with all forms of interactivity. So [Andy’s] got cameras and microphones and speakers, everything. So he saw Bob [Odenkirk], he heard him, he was able to interact with him. And then when Bob left the stage, he was able to see the entire audience. At the beginning to prove this was real time and not just a projection of prerecorded content, he started talking to somebody in the front row, a little bit.”

Nussbaum explained that the tech can be repeated, meaning that the performer can be projected into multiple venues at the exact same time, performing live in multiple cities simultaneously. “So it could be a tour all at the exact same time,” he said.

Proto is already being used in multiple applications outside of comedy, fairly regularly. They have over a hundred units in over 20 countries around the world. “We’ve got music and we’ve got museums and we’ve got world leaders and religious inspirational speeches and stuff.” But comedy is somewhat special for Proto, because of the connection with Howie Mandel. “My office, I share a wall with Howie. He does his podcast from here. So we’re always talking about what’s next. And there are things. We actually put one of our devices in Howie’s podcast studio. So he’ll be beaming guests in from time to time as well. So we think that this is a true communication device and there are some pretty big things to come there.” Panels, speeches and podcasts are a natural fit for the tech even if it doesn’t become an acceptable way to perform standup.

The real challenge is changing outdated perceptions about holographic performance. “People used to think of holograms as bringing Michael Jackson back or Elvis or even these transparent ghostlike effects. So it’s really the point of maybe we shouldn’t even use the word holograms anymore because of the novelty perception that it gives, but it really, it’s more of a digital volumetric clone of a person. We call Proto presence, but Proto isn’t a well known brand yet, so I can say Proto presence and everybody will go home. So I say hologram and everybody’s okay, okay, hologram.”

And now looking Back, Kindler can say he was a part of history. “Proto says it’s the first stand-up show that’s ever been recorded in a hologram … It’s a historical thing.  I mean, it’s exciting. I mean, I’m not saying I’m like a … Who would be a good pioneer? I’m not stepping on the moon like what’s-his-name. One small video performance for me, one giant entertainment leap for mankind. Entertainment leap!”

You can watch Andy’s full speech in the YouTube video below, which shows the event both from the perspective of the audience, and from Andy’s perspective.

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Debra Kessler
Debra Kessler