Thanks for Having Me: Winding Down to the Last Laugh

Graphic by Gabriella Collin

By Gabriella Collin

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. 

You know when you’re at a stand up show, a good one, mind you, and you’re watching the comedian crush another plastic water bottle while making the audience belly-laugh for the umpteenth time? You’re laughing, there are tears pricking your eyes, you can’t keep your feet from stamping on the ground, you’re practically hitting your friend out of sheer excitement. 

Suddenly, the show ends. 

Often without warning, no preamble, nothing. The last joke lands, you laugh, and the comedian quickly blurts out, “You’ve been great, goodnight, thanks for having me.” They leave, there’s no encore in comedy, and the realization begins to sink in when you understand that you’re never going to see this person again. It happened to me in high school, when my mom surprised me with tickets to see John Mulaney perform my junior year. I was gobsmacked the entire time, watching my (at the time) hero do his new stand-up special before it was filmed for Netflix a month later. I had watched all of his performances in preparation, I knew at least half of his material inside and out, if he called on me I would have been ready. During the car ride home, I was buzzing with excitement, over the moon that I had just seen the person I idolized, live. It was late, and the dark, winding roads of Mashantucket invited a melancholy feeling. “I’m never going to see him again,” I thought. 

Stop me if you’ve heard this other one. 

Comedy and tragedy are studied in tandem. Depending on how you spin it, anything can be funny. The most problematic “comedians” tote the age-old formula, that time + tragedy= comedy. Too much math for you? While there is still heavy debate around the ethics of self-deprecating humor (in regards to whether or not it’s “worth it”), if you have a tragic life, or at least have had a bad day, you can take your trauma and turn the discomfort into something palatable. Bullied all your life? Maybe you tell people that your bullies had a point, while showing them embarrassing photos from middle school. Growing up in poverty, experiencing racism, being subjected to any and all forms of bigotry, all of this can be funny. As David Morris claims in his book, The Culture of Pain, “Pain certainly offers an odd, even perverse, entry into the comic world. In a terrain crisscrossed by disagreements, it seems almost everyone should agree with the proposition that pain, whatever else it is, is not funny.” If all else fails, throw in the classic suicide joke, and you’re the edgy, “real” friend, who wows crowds with their unfiltered humor and blunt delivery. 

If you don’t act like this yourself, you probably know someone who does. They’re probably in a specific major, studying a very specific art form.

You probably hate them too. 

It can be hard for mainstream audiences to believe that stand-up comedy is a fine art, because of the self-inflicted reputation it has developed for being low-brow, offensive, and male dominated. When a comedian like Ricky Gervais or Dave Chappelle gets on stage, it’s easy to immediately write off all stand-up as bad, since some of the biggest mouthpieces for the medium are coincidentally, egregiously terrible people. At a school like Emerson, one of the only schools in the country to have the “Comedic Arts” major, you’re more likely to write off comedy after a bad, personal experience with a dreaded “Comedy” major. At a party, an org meeting, even in class, comedy majors are everywhere. They’re not all bad, but the ones that are seem to be figureheads for the rest of the major. 

I’ve been pursuing comedy since I was 16, and after transferring to Emerson, I finally had the chance to consume “real comedy”. It was spring, 2022, and I just discovered Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1978), for the first time. That must have been when I realized that stand-up shows could contain more than just set-up and punchlines, that “stand-up” is just a label. If you’ve mastered your craft, you can disassemble its very meaning, piece-by-piece, and reassemble it in a completely new way. 

Richard Pryor’s stand-up special was filmed at the end of a particularly tumultuous year for Pryor. Reeling from multiple scandals and arrests, Pyror states, “I am really personally happy to see anybody come out and see me, right, especially as much as I done fucked up this year.” (Transcript) He then refers to being arrested for “killing” his car, where he recalls the police brutality he experienced, interacting with officers who carried massive guns and possessed a sort of thirst for violence. Pryor talks about a lot in this special, from hiking, to Doberman Pinschers (“So I got a Doberman, right. One of them bad mother fuckers, right. Somebody stole him. That’s how bad he was.”) to childhood abuse and death. It’s no secret that comedy can be used to talk about upsetting subjects, and that laughter is often present in grim, serious contexts as a way for us to relieve tension or express discomfort. A nervous laugh at a funeral, during an argument, laughter is a momentary defense mechanism we use, in place of the comedy that is not present in that moment. From Morris’s book, “Comedy of course is not identical with laughter, and laughter is no more exclusively characteristic of the body than are tears.” In Richard Pryor’s special, he takes a series of unfortunate events and turns it into something reassuring, as if to say, “I too, have experienced these bad things, just like you, and I made it out the other side,” Pryor can disclose his insecurities surrounding sex, express how badly he wants to break the cycle of abuse that spans generations, all while making us laugh. 

My favorite part of his set is towards the end, where he talks about his relationship with sex. Pryor touches on multiple topics at once, the over-sexualization of black men, the politics of reciprocation etc., without scaring the audience away. He claims that men, as macho as they try to present themselves, actually care a lot about whether or not that can pleasure a woman. “You gotta be cool when you’re Macho Man, right, cause you can’t be sensitive and care about if someone has a good time in bed, shit. That’s too scary, right.” Before we know it, the performance is over. Pryor continues on his point about sex and sensitivity for a little longer, dropping deep insight before randomly saying, “Thank you”. His final joke is only related to the last ten minutes of material, existing in a void within a routine. The big idea, the “point” of the special is harder to identify, but the takeaway is that endings are sudden. 

Anybody in the crowd ever watched something called Fleabag?  

I figured as much. 

Almost everyone has seen the Amazon Prime adaptation, frothed at the mouth over Andrew Scott, and later entered hysterics over two simple words. In the stage play version, however, the tone is different. The original, one-woman show, also called Fleabag, was first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2013. Then, after the release of the second series of Fleabag in 2019, creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge returned to the stage with her heart-wrenching play. Fleabag is a drama disguised as a comedy, and the one-woman nature of the stage play is not only a testament to Waller-Bridge’s acting, but her writing as well. Between the TV adaptation and the play, not much is changed, it’s almost beat for beat the exact same. The line delivery is the same, her cadence, the secondary characters, however, the stage play emphasizes the isolation that Fleabag suffers from. There is some voiceover featured in the play, both Waller-Bridge’s own, distorted voice responding to herself, as well as random male voices filling in at key moments. Fleabag is marketed as “boldly funny”, “raunchy”, and, as Ben Brantley puts it, “‘Fleabag’ throbs with a concentrated, combustible vitality that a camera is incapable of capturing, even with pore-probing close-ups”. Because it is a play, viewers know that none of what Fleabag is saying is real. That doesn’t stop it from being riddled with truth. The fourth-wall breaks don’t resonate the same, because when presented to us in television format, we feel as though Waller-Bridge is breaking some kind of “rule,” just to disclose this information to us. In the article, No Pain: No Gain - the provocation of laughter in slapstick comedy, Louise Peacock states, “The onscreen witness models a reaction and reinforces the performative nature of what we are seeing.” Acting is reacting, and comedy is witnessing. During a stand up show, we are all included in the joke, the joke is on us, whether or not we understand the punchline. 

Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, Allegory of Pleasure and Pain (c.1483-1485) depicts the body, split between two ways of feeling. From the feet to the sternum, the model’s body is whole, until it diverges at the trunk of the torso, forming two separate identities. Individual chests, sets of arms, brains, etc, one face is wrought with pain and worry, wethered with stress and disguised with a wiry beard. The face of pain is similar to the mask of Tragedy from the Greek muse, Melpomene, commander of the art of tragedy. While the body experiences both emotions at once, they are alone within themselves. As Phoebe Waller-Bridge says in Fleabag, “Or I am completely fucking alone…which isn’t fucking funny”. We are convinced that laughter and comedy will always make us feel better, that punchlines are guaranteed to land 100% of the time. If we don’t understand the joke, it’s our fault, if we’re offended by a joke, it’s our fault, if we feel anything other than side-splitting glee, it is always our fault. By Robert Provine in Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond:

“The popular media is full of frothy stories about ‘laughing your way to health’ or ‘a laugh a day’ produced by reporters who have been ordered by their editors to collect information for a story that their audience is presumed to want. Reporters comply. Praise of laughter, humor, and unbridled optimism is not balanced by stories of the costs of carelessness [...].”

Good comedy is often overshadowed by bad “comedy.” It’s easy to overlook the real emotional impact that a comedy special, sketch show, zine, etc, can have on us, especially if we only associate stand-up and similar forms with bad people saying terrible things. 

Which really, really, sucks. 

As the energy in the room winds down, we know that our time is running out, that our already temporary relationship with the performer will soon be over. The space we all shared, as an audience, and one-on-one with the talent, will end in a matter of minutes at the final punchline. You can see it in the performer’s eyes; they’re tired, sweaty, generally out of breath, but they have a knowing, subtle, yet triumphant look on their faces as they begin the final joke. Whether it’s one last story to tie the beginning of the special to the end, or a random tangent coming from seemingly out of nowhere, nothing is sadder than the last laugh. We take these endings with a grain of salt, because even though we are experiencing something bittersweet, we know that these comics are going to do the same thing, night after night, in cities across the country. Theaters full of audience members will go through the same motions that we do, cheering, laughing, and suddenly feeling like someone we care about has been taken from us. 

By the way, it won’t pass.