There’s more to comedy than making people laugh.
Trust me. I’m an expert in failing to make people laugh.
I have this brilliant idea.
When I say that, I mean it’s a shit idea. But I like it. So, go on then.
Here’s the idea: I want to do a long stand up comedy routine, like an hour or an hour and a half or so, without anyone laughing.
Yeah, see, a bad idea, right?
It gets worse.
Not only without anyone laughing, but in the places where at another comedy show you might normally laugh, I want to hear groans.
Not just sort of, “I’m tired. Can we get to the booze, please,” sort of, “I want to be somewhere else,” sort of groans. No. That’s not enough for me.
What I’d like to hear is real, deeply felt groans. Soul groans. Groans that only people with something to prove can summon. Groans from the source of what makes us human. Groans of, “I know that’s funny, I know why it’s funny, but I don’t want to laugh because that would encourage him.”
That kind of groans. Real, deep groans.
My plan is to keep them at the edge of their seats, asking for more, because they’re now sure that even though the last one was a groaner, the next one will be a real belly-acher. They can tell.
But then I keep them in a constant state of suspense for the whole evening.
I won’t stop there, though. I’d go one step further.
After I’ve finished the show and I tell my final bit — enjoy my final groans — then I wave and say, “Thank you and good night.” Then, in the complete silence of the auditorium — nobody’s clapping at this point, who am I kidding? (No one. I’m kidding no one. That’s the point.) — in the complete silence of the auditorium, I wave, and I leave.
Then everyone there sits for a bit, listening to each other breathing, wondering what happened.
They think it’s over.
Oh, no. It most definitely is not.
Here’s the kicker.
So what happens then is, see, I was so clever in laying my comedy traps that, after a few minutes of silence, one person just sort of goes…
“Oh…”
Then they go…
“Ha!”
Now they’ve seen the joke. The ultimate joke that I laid out over the course of the evening. The fundamental joke built by many layers of deep-seated skepticism and shrewdness.
Then somebody else gets it, and they start laughing.
Then another person does.
Before too long, the whole auditorium is laughing their heads off, because now they’ve seen the genius.
The real punchline is that this whole routine derives from a school of humor that takes as its fundamental principle a profound respect for the nobility of the human psyche and the strength of the intellect and reason inherent to all of our race.
The audience will come alive with the satisfaction that Aristotle’s definition of a human, the reasoning animal, tonight applies to them.
…
Now I think it through, there may be a flaw or two in the scheme.
