Tough Crowd

But what if one day, a man with a gun walked into my house and said to me, “you have to make me laugh or I will kill your partner sitting quietly there in the other room.” (Or what if a woman with a gun walked into the house? And what if that woman was also a doctor?) What then? When need winds its clammy self around laughter, things become sinister.

Why would anyone need to make another person laugh? To relieve a tense situation, perhaps. Or to get a job as a comedian. (An earlier version of this piece involved me desperately trying to round up a bunch of Up And Coming Comedians to get them to answer a terrifying question: Who is the one person they can never make laugh? In other words, who are you most afraid of?)

The world is divided into good laughers and non-laughers. The latter group is that demonic presence in your text thread who refuses to acknowledge a bit, who hoards their hahahs and their LOLs like a precious resource, like water or Klonopin. Once, at a park with a group of friends, I watched a grown man fall and split his pants, right down the back. Everyone laughed. The cartoon man with busted pants laughed. The huge family celebrating their toddler’s birthday party several feet away were weeping. Everyone was in hysterics except for this one woman. She just sat there, stone-faced and unperturbed. Absolutely chilling. I will think of her on my deathbed.

These non-laughers are among the most mysterious and intimidating creatures on God’s earth. The more they refuse to laugh, the more desperate we become. Suddenly, we’re locked in a cruel and powerful dynamic as old as time itself. When withholders withhold, especially people we find particularly talented or intimidating, we want them to like us even more. So we strap on our tap shoes and begin dancing, dancing as quickly as our little legs will move. Now we’re desperate for approval and will settle for the tiniest of smirks. We’re sweaty from all the tap dancing. Nothing smells worse than desperation so now we stink.

The Up And Coming Comedians— or, more to the point, their publicists, the inboxes of whom I had spent weeks tappa-tappa-tap dancing into, turned out to be the toughest crowd of all. For whatever reason, the Up And Coming Comedians were unable to answer my question. Some didn’t respond, some were busy, possibly some did not enjoy being tormented by my energy.

I don’t really know what a person should do when they need to make someone laugh. You could learn how to tell a joke, or steal one from Twitter or a movie you like. When I consider my own answer to this question, the question of who is the one person I can’t make laugh, it isn’t a man (or woman, thanks) with a gun. Despite their brutal rejection of the premise of the piece and, arguably, of me, you’d think the answer might be the Up And Coming Comedians. But nah. The woman at the park who didn’t laugh at the funniest thing that’s ever occurred is a strong candidate, but I’m not convinced she’s a human being and is therefore disqualified. I wish I could say that the answer doesn’t really matter. That ungenerous people on a text thread are dicks and not worth texting anyway. That the only people in life worth receiving your sparkle are generous with their love, and certainly, with their laughter. That not being able to make someone laugh is simply a state of mind. That in life, there are the laughs you get for yourself and then there are the laughs you do for other people.

That would be quite nice, but is, as you and I both know, not how it works. Oh! My answer is a hot server at an impossibly hip restaurant. So I guess what I’m saying is, when you really need to, you could always just pull down your pants and show your butt. But I don’t know. I’m not a comedian.

Leah Beckmann is a writer living in LA.