What is this noise they make? I'm scared!

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on June 16th, 2008

From BlogCritics.org, comes this passage, from a belated review of the Best of Comic Relief DVD boxed set:

So why did I volunteer to review a collection of stand-up comedy? Hope springs eternal; I naively thought I’d find a “best of” collection to be funny.

I’m afraid I didn’t. While I found co-host Robin Williams’ irrepressible improv hilarious at times…

Why indeed would someone like this volunteer to review this collection? As demonstrated by her fondness for Robin Williams’ “improv,” she knows nothing about standup comedy.

And, in the paragraph just prior to the above graf:

I confess, I am not much for watching stand-up comedy on television. When I see comics on Comedy Central, for instance, I rarely think they’re very funny. The people in the audience always seem to be having a much better time than I am. I believe there are two explanations for this. One, laughter is contagious, so the jokes seem funnier when you are watching a show live and the people around you are laughing. Two, alcohol. Things are so much funnier when you’ve have had a few.

To review: A roomful of people enjoying standup comedy isn’t because of an appreciation for the skill and talent of the comedians. No, it’s a psycho-social reflex, a magical herd mentality that takes over and causes them to laugh in spite of themselves. Oh, that and alcohol.

It’s not a finely honed act, not a carefully calibrated mixture of wordplay and sensibilities and physicality and concepts carefully skewed and reconstituted that provokes the sweet reaction that is laughter. It’s an accidental, lizard-brain response from a roomful of lushes.

It is fascinating that we so often witness a person who doesn’t get standup (sometimes admittedly so) who thinks that the problem lies not in them, but in everyone else. And further, they often try to make it seem as though the folks who actually get standup are the ones with the problem!

Fascinating.

We are going to go with this theory: The author simply lacks the capacity to enjoy and appreciate standup comedy. There are such people. Odd, isn’t it, that she didn’t at least for a moment entertain this third possiblity. Perhaps doing so would require a sense of humor about herself.

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