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Jun 06, 2011 By Samuel Herring Future Islands

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(Under the Radar’s Spring 2011 Issue is a special Music vs. Comedy that features musicians and comedians in conversation with each other and generally examines the intersection between indie music and comedy. We’re also posting web-exclusive essays that were not printed in the issue, including this one by Future Islands’ Samuel Herring.)

I was introduced to standup comedy when I was about seven or eight. I found a stack of Bill Cosby records at my grandmother’s house, and begged her to let me take them home with me, which she was happy to oblige. Revenge, Why is There Air?, I Started Out as a Child, etc. These would become my first and favorite records, and the early beginnings of my minor delinquencies.

As a kid, I always thought my dad was like a cross between Bill Cosby and Bill Murray. The way he talked, the way he danced, the faces he made. When I discovered these treasures I started to play hooky from school, faking a bellyache or a bad headache and complaining until my parents would leave for work. When they’d leave, I’d go into the living room and put on record after record, eating orange sherbet (for my stomach ache) and laughing. For me, I did find traces of my father. It was the storytelling that caught me, how to tell a good story, how to control an audience, how to make people laugh. I loved all those things, they always made me feel good, and they still make me laugh (I still have those records.).

Nowadays, while I still go back to the classics, comedians like Louis C. K. and Patton Oswalt are the guys I turn to. The humor is different, the language is different, but they still manage to tell the stories that make people laugh. They tell those stories that make people think, that make people look to their own lives, find their own faults and the humor in them. To me, that’s what great standup is all about.

(Future Islands’ latest, and second, full-length album, In Evening Air, was released by Thrill Jockey in 2010.)

www.future-islands.com