Edgy Audiences?
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Transcript:
To go to a stand-up comedy show is to volunteer to allow someone to tickle you with words.
It’s intimate, to be tickled. Even with words. Especially with words. It’s borderline creepy. Tickling is weird.
Why do we tickle? Why do we allow tickling?
But we do. Some people are into tickling. Both giving and receiving. We pretend we don’t like it. When it’s happening, we tell people to stop.
Sometimes you laugh so hard it hurts and you’re telling someone to stop, but the whole time you kinna like it anyway. It’s nice to be tickled.
That’s weird. You’re weird.
You can walk into a comedy show, sit down with your arms crossed, and refuse to be tickled. “You can’t tickle me!” You can’t be tickled without giving someone tacit permission to tickle you.
So that’s part of the job as a comedian; you gotta set people at ease. You gotta help people relax so that you can tickle ‘em a little bit without them freaking out and thinking you’re trying to molest them with your words.
This is word tickling. Not word molestation.
Also, I’m using the old-school definition of molesting there. Molest means “to pester aggressively.” Kinda risky to just throw around the word “molest,” but I figured I’d do something to try to liven up this podcast.
Is everyone feeling more at ease? Are we more tickled than molested? I hope so.
You gotta help people relax if they’re going to enjoy a comedy show.
That’s why lots of people struggle to enjoy comedy these days. Everybody’s on edge. We’ve all got depression and anxiety about how the world’s going to hell in a handbasket. People are chugging coffee, washing it down with Adderall. Vaping marijuana to balance out after they snort half a Percocet. It’s a wild world out there. People are havin’ babies, tryin’ to hold down jobs. The methamphetamines and alcohol start to get expensive when you’re payin’ for diapers. People don’t have time to laugh - they got multiple wars their children are going to have to fight over student loans and oil prices. There’s a lot on people’s minds.
Funny thing is, despite all of that, if you do laugh, laughing always feels good. No one ever laughs and immediately thinks to themselves: “Curse me for enjoying life for a moment! Shame on me for being spontaneously filled with a brief spurt of mirth!”
You may not feel like laughing. But laughter never feels bad.
Sometimes you do see a grump who laughs and then quickly tries to stop himself from laughing. “Not me! I won’t be tricked into happiness!” Tries to hide it before anyone can see he liked a thing. That is funny. It’s funny to see grumpy people try to resist laughing. I’ve been that person.
There’s a way to embrace the uncomfortable parts of your life that can be fun and enjoyable. It’s almost a form of meditation to just recognize, “Ok, shit’s a little messed up. But I don’t have to panic about it 24/7. I don’t have to be 100% sad and upset all of the time.”
You’re allowed a little escape from the drudgery of the world every now and then. Ya need it. Life’s brutal enough.
But some people have a hard time creating that separation. They think everything has to be serious all of the time. They can’t relax. Again, I’ve been this person.
So, if you wanna help people enjoy comedy, step one is helping them recognize that what they are experiencing is comedy. It’s not scary. It’s not harmful. It’s not real. It’s gonna be ok. Suspend your disbelief and let’s go on a trip together. Life’s not gonna fall apart due to the goof goofs you’re about to witness.
That’s something I’ve tried to be more and more mindful of the longer I’ve done stand-up. When I’m pushing the line talking about stuff not everyone might be immediately comfortable with, it always has to be with the perspective that I’m trying to make it easier for everyone to have a better time and to understand and appreciate life a little bit more. Have a laugh together at the expense of the shared human condition.
I’m not taking, I’m giving. You never wanna be selfish on stage. The idea behind jokes is to ultimately get people to relax, to chill a little bit. To appreciate stuff that has gone underappreciated. The lumps and bumps of life aren’t pure terror. You can get something positive out of them.
It’s weird to go to a comedy show and try to get upset, but people do it. But then it’s my job to meet that person where they are, figure out why they’re uncomfortable, and then show them that I mean no harm and that it’s ok for us to laugh together. I don’t like taking an adversarial posture with audience members. On some level, I don’t think that’s real. It’s fake conflict. And I don’t think it’s productive.
A lot of it comes down to mutual trust. Comedy is a partnership between the comedian and the audience. It’s a consensual tickling relationship.
If people are tensing up in their chairs and never getting that laugh release, it means on some level, they don’t trust you. They don’t trust that you have their best interest at heart. They don’t trust that you’re trying to help them have an ultimately positive experience.
I’m gonna bring up a book I can’t stop talking about on this podcast, Wonderworks by Angus Fletcher.
There are two chapters in the book that highlight the relationship between comedy and horror in our brains. It’s pretty interesting stuff. Comedy and horror share a common origin, but then there’s a fork in the road that either makes us either freak out or break into fits of helpless giggles.
In Chapter 6 of Wonderworks, Fletcher discusses how paranoia arises in our brains. Our brains are constantly subconsciously assessing our environment for threats. Sensory information is coming in and our amygdala, in concert with other areas of our brain, is checking to see if any of that incoming information could warn us of danger.
Paranoia occurs when we pick up on something that seems out of place in a familiar environment. When you notice something strange or odd in an otherwise familiar setting, you start to ask questions about it. You get curious. You might be a little paranoid about why that strange thing is happening if you can’t figure it out.
That’s the groundwork for both horror and comedy - a sense of paranoia and curiosity about something odd and out of place.
In Chapter 12, Fletcher goes on to point out that funny has a double meaning: “We can have a funny feeling that makes us chuckle or we can have a funny feeling that raises the hairs on the back of our neck - making us tingle with a nervous energy.”
So our amygdala subconsciously realized something odd was going on around us and that woke up the conscious part of our brain - the frontal cortex. Our frontal cortex then investigates further and tries to answer the question “Is this potentially dangerous, definitely dangerous, or not dangerous at all?”
The more uncertain we are, the longer nervous tension builds inside us. We feel ever-escalating suspense and unease - something spooky is just around the corner, but we’re not sure when it’s coming.
If the danger is clear and obvious, well, in the movies we call that a jump scare.
If our brain decides that it isn’t dangerous at all - we laugh.
Laughter helps us relax. It reverses the ramp-up process of the fight or flight response that was building when we thought something dangerous might be after us.
When our amygdala is concerned, it sets in motion events to trigger the release of the stress hormone cortisol as well as epinephrine to prepare us for quick action in response to the possible threat.
Laughing then helps drop cortisol levels back down to normal. It releases endorphins - feel-good chemicals in our brain. It calms you back down after you got yourself all worked up about something that turned out to not be scary.
This all may sound very familiar to you if you have heard of Benign Violation Theory. This is a theory about what makes things funny. The idea is that if you see something that violates your existing worldview, your perception of how things should be, AND that violation is simultaneously recognized as not threatening to you, then you’ll laugh. It both appears as a threat and is recognized as ultimately not a threat at pretty much the same time.
It’s a threat immediately rendered impotent.
I think that’s a great starting point for understanding laughter. It helps you to understand why it is so important as a comedian to be able to set the audience at ease. You have to help the audience relax enough that they trust you. Because in order to get laughs, you’re also going to have to make the audience a little uncomfortable, a little paranoid, and a little uneasy from time to time. That’s step one of the process.
They have to trust that when you make them uneasy and build tension, you’re going to flip the switch and let them laugh and relax. That’s the punchline.
This might all have something to do with why some people find clowns creepy. They don’t trust that weirdo that he’s just acting like a goofy doofus for funsies. They look at him and see a total freak of a man who actually wants to dress and behave that way for real - that’s the essence of who he is and that’s freaky! Don’t go near the clown man kids!
That’s the ultimate question when you agree to go to a comedy show - do you trust the clown? If not, you’re going to take what he or she is saying too seriously and it’s not going to sound like jokes to you.
Instead of benign violations, you’re going to experience what feels like real violations of your worldview. You’re going to perceive that clown to be an actual threat to your belief systems and personality. That comedy show is going to feel like a terrifying horror movie.
So laughter is about managing a delicate balance between tension and release. And it is delicate because you’re working with crowds of people who all have differently calibrated levels of anxiety and distrust when it comes to all sorts of different issues.
A benign violation for one person can feel like a world-ending catastrophe to someone else.
However, I don’t think this is the whole story when it comes to the art form of comedy. It can get more complex than that. Comedy isn’t ONLY about the laughs. The laughs have to be there, but it can be a more intricate dance.
Likewise, I would argue horror isn’t just about the tension-building sequences or just about the jump scares. Those have to be there to be in that genre, but there is more to the experience than just that aspect of it.
Comedy can hint at something beyond just the laughs. It can explore other emotions and ideas as part of the process.
I think truly great comedy is more than a totally benign violation. I think great comedy can help you grow. I’ve experienced this myself.
Sometimes great jokes can feel like violations at first. The tension sticks around for a minute. You might not laugh the hardest, but the twist in the joke still shakes up your existing perspective. It gets you thinking about something in a new way. It opens you up. You might spend a day or two thinking about it, and then it makes you laugh.
Don’t get me wrong, laughter is still always the goal. You have to get there for it to be funny, for it to be considered comedy. But that tension and release is a dynamic process. You might go through emotions of anger, sadness, and fear on the road to eventually laughing it all off. That whole experience is part of the art form. It’s not just about the laugh at the end of the joke.
To me, the goal of good comedy is to rip things apart the exact amount they need to be ripped apart without destroying them, so that they can still be put together into something different.
Everything is organized a certain way, then with comedy you throw it back into disorganized chaos just enough to rearrange it into something new and unexpected and informative.
It’s creative destruction. It’s not a benign violation; you are making alterations to people’s perceptions of the world.
But the violation comes from a place of good intentions. You walk right up to the line and flirt with danger. Occasionally, you playfully step over the line. All of that experimentation isn’t meant to hurt anyone. It’s meant to help keep our wits about us. Keep our perspective fresh and alive.
And you hope that when you playfully step over the line here and there, the audience is willing to go along for that ride because they realize it’s just a ride. It’s just a game. It’s not real life. It’s not life or death. It’s just mental tickling.
Personally, when I’m doing stand-up, I often alternate between cutesy silly jokes and relatively dark jokes. I almost never go straight into a really dark joke. Sometimes I do. But most of the time I just demonstrate that I know how jokes work and goof around with dumb puns and silly characters first. Then, when I do a dark joke, the audience is not only caught off guard, but they’re also not threatened because they realize I’m the same guy who was just doing the cutesy harmless puns a minute ago.
If you build trust with the audience first, they’ll give you a little more rope to get creative with. Then you try to do some double dutch up there without accidentally hanging yourself.
And look, I like doing the cutesy, silly, goofy, stupid jokes too. I like dark humor. But it’s not the only thing I like.
You hear a lot of conversations around the idea of safe spaces. But that concept is so confusing to me because the definition of a safe space seems to be a space where we don’t talk about certain things. We don’t explore certain topics. Things are censored if you enter a safe space.
That doesn’t seem like a safe space to me. To me, a safe space is a space where you feel comfortable talking about anything and everything.
You trust the people in that space to talk with you about things in depth and in detail. All the nitty-gritty stuff. That’s all game in the safe space because everyone in the safe space has the best of intentions to treat each other with respect and dignity. That’s the perfect environment to tackle difficult topics. A safe space.
I see stand-up comedy as an artistic safe space. That’s what I love about it.
You can handle heavy topics with a light touch. That might actually be the best way to handle them. Just because a topic is dead serious doesn’t mean you have to be deadly serious in your approach to it. You can still productively deal with something serious while maintaining a sense of humor about your predicament.
And that’s not to say that everyone has to enter the safe space of a stand-up comedy show. Maybe that doesn’t feel like a safe space to you. That’s cool.
I don’t like horror movies. I never watch them. I don’t enjoy them at all.
But I also don’t get mad at people for making them.
“You made a subjectively scary thing! How dare you!”
No. I just don’t go to horror movies. And I don’t accuse the writer or the director or the actors involved in making the horror movie of trying to make art that is intentionally harmful toward people like me.
I recognize that I’m not going to connect with everyone’s artistic creations, and that’s ok. That doesn’t mean that they are entering into the artistic endeavor in bad faith. That doesn’t mean they can’t have a meaningful positive impact on someone else.
Some people won’t get the tension release from comedy and so they’ll experience it as horror. They’ll see a scary clown on stage with a microphone and consider them an ominous threat.
As an artist, you don’t have total control over how people perceive your art. They might take it in ways you never intended it. That’s part of the weird relationship between artists and audiences.
We all have to continue to live in that messy world.
Maybe think of it this way: if comedy shows feel like tension-raising events that never make you laugh, just watch it the way you would watch a horror movie. Go in thinking, “This is probably going to make me cringe. Some of these jokes are going to make me jump in my seat as if the boogie man just grabbed my leg from underneath my bed.” Bring some popcorn. Only go to comedy shows around Halloween. If you don’t want to laugh, feel free to gasp in horror. That’s also a valid reaction.
If a comedian notices that no one is laughing and most people are cringing and jumping in their seats, then hopefully they’ll rebrand as a one-man traveling horror show.
People have different senses of humor. We have different and sometimes irreconcilable life experiences. That’s all ok. We shouldn’t all want to be the same. We are all allowed to have diverse perspectives. How could we have anything else?
Hopefully that makes sense. Maybe it’ll make some people appreciate what’s happening at a stand-up comedy show more. Go check out a show.
Laugh. Giggle. Gasp. Scream. One way or another, it’ll work itself out. We’ll all be ok. It’s just art.