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N’yuck N’yuck

A Wank on the Nature of Laughter

 

For years Reader's Digest has described it as "the best medicine". A curious medicine that, like a disease, can also be "infectious", and which in large enough doses will prompt victims to claim they "died laughing" and comedians to boast that they “murdered them”.

 

Laughter is a release. So is death. We’ve all watched horror films where a moment of suspense is relieved by a cat jumping out of a cupboard instead of a psychopath. We all get a short sharp shock, but then laugh when we realize what has happened. We’re laughing at ourselves being fooled as much as in relief that no-one got slashed to ribbons. Horror films play on our primal fears and at it’s heart comedy is no different. We expect one thing, we get another. Not all jokes are about getting a cat instead of a psychopath, but they’re all about contriving a surprise.

 

So is laughter is a near death experience? Henri Bergson once described laughter as causing "a momentary anaesthesia of the heart". And if that’s too posh for you 9and it is for me) Eric Idle has pointed out it’s only an "s" away from "slaughter".

 

If, for an audience, laughter is a bit like dying - then for a comedian, so is not getting any. Any comedian will tell you that if you deliver a joke that doesn't work then it's the joke that dies, but deliver a whole evening's worth and it's you. And it's the worst of all possible deaths because it means that at that moment of non-laughter you simply cease to be. A comedian is someone who is funny on stage, and funniness = laughter. No laughter means no funniness, and if you’re not funny, you’re not a comedian. Hey presto, you cease to exist. Get off.

 

Groucho Marx once told Woody Allen that when he was a young man walking past a small theatre in Winnipeg he heard "the most tremendous roars of laughter" coming from inside. Curious, he paid his ten cents and went in to find an equally young Charlie Chaplin performing. Groucho described it as the “greatest thing I’d ever seen”. Woody asked Groucho why it was the greatest thing he'd ever seen and Groucho said simply "He was so funny". Woody asked Groucho what it was Chaplin was doing to elicit such laughter. Groucho replied "Crazy things. He was walking around kind of funny. Like this." And with that the 83 year old Groucho got up and demonstrated.

 

Therein lies the problem with laughter. Things strike us as funny and we laugh. It’s often very hard to work out just what it was that actually made us laugh. If it was a verbal joke, we might remember the words, maybe even the inflection, but we can’t recreate the moment for someone who didn’t experience it. And if it’s anything other than a verbal joke, forget it. After recounting something we found hilarious, particularly something from life, we usually communicate nothing but our enthusiasm. Sometimes this might be entertaining enough, but often the person we’re talking to just nods politely and smiles. I guess you had to be there.

 

I'm the first to admit that I'm no expert on laughter. I've died in front of an audience more times than I care to remember and while I’ve often sat down afterwards and worked out why an audience didn't laugh, I'm at a loss sometimes to work out just what it was that did  make an audience laugh. Yes, there are certain rules to writing comedy and certain ways of telling a joke or performing a bit of business, but they don't necessarily have anything to do with the quality of being funny. And even being funny doesn't necessarily have everything to do with getting laughs. (But that’s a whole different article - and a pretty tiresome one at that.)

 

I feel slightly more qualified to talk about laughter from the point of view of the laugher than the laughee for I once inadvertently conducted an experiment in laughter. It had a control and a variable (although they were twenty-five years apart). The control was me at the age of 12 staying up until 2.00 in the morning to watch A Night At The Opera. I hadn’t seen the film before and about halfway through the film comes a routine that I’d have to say is the funniest thing I have ever seen. I won’t try and describe it because it’s a you-had-to-be-there moment if ever there was one. Suffice it to say that involves a lot of bed shifting and ends with Chico pretending to be a rocking chair, Harpo sitting on him knitting with some cutlery, and Groucho in a false beard looking vaguely like Rasputin.

 

I laughed at that scene like I have never laughed at anything else before or since. Out loud, banging my knee, and rolling back and forth on my bed. If there was an aisle in my room I would have been in it.

 

Of course I've seen the film many times since and while I’ve always enjoyed it, I’ve never laughed as much as I did that first time. But last year I read that the film was playing at the Astor. I’d never seen it in a cinema so I dragged my wife along together with a couple of friends (none of whom had seen it at all). It was a full house and the film got it's deserved share of big laughs, but the stand out scene was the bed shifting scene. A thousand people howling with laughter. Row upon row rocking back and forth, banging their knees. The weird thing was I was laughing as loud and as hard at 37 as I had when I was 12.

 

I'm not sure what this experiment proves; that the Marx Brothers are funny? Most people know this anyway. That my sense of humour hasn't developed sense I was 12? Perhaps. I think it definitely suggests something about the shared nature of laughter. The fact that people I knew around me were laughing, and even people I didn't know, made the experience as new for me as it was for many of them.

 

The great thing about laughter is its honesty. You can't intellectualize a laugh. It's an involuntary thing. It bursts out of your mouth or snorts out your nose when you least expect it (all the big laughs work that way). You can't put on airs when you're really laughing. It's like sneezing. Or being shot. You can’t be cool. If it's a true laugh, then your guard is down and for that moment you're completely vulnerable and anyone watching you will see the real you. Maybe that's why people feel more comfortable watching comedy in the anonymity of a darkened theatre or cinema. I certainly handle it better than being told a joke face to face.

 

The other thing about laughter is that in a live situation you are sharing the laughter not only with the people around you but with the performer. The immediate effect is that the performer will ride the laugh and try to top himself (there’s that death imagery again). The long term effect on the perfromer is, not surprisingly, more permanent and ingrained.

 

The Marx Brothers were twenty years on the road before they made their first film. Developing their characters, working out schtick, imbuing the act with that unspoken sense the word rapport comes just within the orbit of describing. Their act and characters were entirely the result of the give and take of the audience over many years. If it got a laugh, they kept it in. Even when they became movie stars they would take key scenes from their films and try them out in front of live audiences before shooting. Lines were changed, scenes rewritten, and laughs timed with a stopwatch. The results of these tours were invaluable when films like A Night At The Opera were eventually made. The Marx Brothers would not have been The Marx Brothers without live audiences nor would their best films have been as funny. They could have never have been born and raised in TV.

 

A joke on a TV show can get a laugh. I bark out many laughs while watching Just Shoot Me or Frasier. These, to me, are very funny shows but I don't rock back and forth and slap my knees. I laugh at the lines rather than the performances. Fawlty Towers is the exception, but generally I don't think the turn-around schedule of a sit-com is conducive to the getting of huge amounts of laughter. Nor do I think the lounge room is the best place from which to give it. You need to go to a theatre for these things, sit in the dark with others, and watch some funny flesh and blood give 110%. Laughter is communal. Like the toilets in Ally McBeal.

 

Published in The Age March 2000