In almost every TV comedy special, there’s a telling cutaway that the director felt obliged to insert. It shows spectators in the theatre rented for the occasion—usually a half row, halfa dozen people—erupting in laughter at something outrageous that the comedian has just said while turning with quick, happy complicity to exchange a guilty glance for having done so. As often as not, someone in the row covers her face or offers an abashed look, before rocking back and forth with renewed delight. It is a heightened emotion and clearly meant to allow us, watching, to join in. Can we laugh at thaf? they ask one another, giving us permission to laugh as they laugh.
It is, in a way, a version of the canned laughter that once enwrapped every situation comedy, and which, when now encountered on ancient shows on TV Land, sounds downright eerie in its mechanical, obviously overlaid quality. The two practices arise from a common idea: that laughter is a shared, not a solitary, experience, and needs a little kindling of collectivity to catch fire.
Mere physical, unmediated laughter might be a good place to begin exploring the higher morality of comedy—for comedy, like pornography, is the rare form that has a physical end, either achieved or not. The flutter in our heart we say we feel upon viewing a great painting is largely metaphoric; the laughter in our chests which comedy elicits is not. We can easily imagine an actor who is deeply moving” but never makes us cry; it’s a different kind of moving, we say. Daniel Day-Lewis is like that.) But a clown who makes no one laugh is not a clown, or else is stuck in a Beckett play.
Denne historien er fra December 18, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra December 18, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
PRESIDENT FOR SALE
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.