You think they would be. There’s that old adage: The only way to know if something is funny is if people laugh.
But that’s not always accurate.
I learned that doing multi-camera sitcoms for thirty years that were shot before a live studio audience.
There were some weeks when the audience was super hot and everything got guffaws. We’d feel pretty good about ourselves until we saw the first rough cut of the show and would say to ourselves: “What the hell are they laughing at? This sucks!”
And the reverse was also true. An episode would get a tepid audience response and we’d see the rough cut and the episode came alive. Performances and facial expressions played great for the camera but were missed by the audience.
I did the warm-up the first year of CHEERS and would have the same five-minute monologue each week. Based on the reaction to that I knew whether we had a hot or cold crowd.
And like I mentioned yesterday, if you have an adoring audience that moved mountains just to get precious tickets, they’ll laugh uproariously at anything. You don’t have to earn laughs.
As a playwright I’ve experienced another phenomenon. Different audiences laugh at different jokes. For the life of me I don’t understand that dynamic. Why would 200 strangers collectively find one line funny enough to laugh out loud one night and 200 other strangers the next night react in silence? And the following night a joke met by silence by the first group gets a huge laugh by the second.
Comics know this all too well. They kill on Friday and bomb on Saturday with the exact same routine.
The point is there are lots of variables that stand between a joke and a laugh. You need to trust your own judgment . Again, don’t use the audience as your crutch.
So how do you really know if something is funny? You just do. Unless you’re wrong.
from By Ken Levine
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