LAUGH LINES

The funny thing about comedy.

- ADAM GOPNIK

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.