On Humor

I saw two plays today. One was Judith Thompson's "Palace of the End," the other was Rebecca Cohen's "Penalties and Interest." Both (bless them) were affordable. The first was a trio of successive monologues on Iraq. We met the woman who was in the infamous torture/prison photos, David Kelly (wmd inspector), and the ghost of an Iraqi woman describing her family and her torture. The second was about people in an office and...um...people in an office.

Both were well done. The first was a full production, the second a workshop. The first had a definite axe to grind. The second...was hilarious.

But see, it's that problem that keeps surfacing. The first was so HEAVY. The issues it addressed, the characters, the stories the characters had to tell...it felt like the audience was being stoned. Not with marajuana, with stones. And these were excellent performances, and this was a script by a playwright who knows how to craft a story, to sculpt words, all that. An award-winning play, an important play. The second was so ENTERTAINING...it was hilarious, it was well-choreographed, the staging was smart and specific, the actors, in their own way, equally strong as the other piece. I was grinning through the piece as they hit moment after moment in the script.

But. It didn't add up to much.

I spent the first half of my day at a play with so many important things to say, but delivered in such a way that I could feel the audience sinking back AWAY from the play and its message. The second half of my day, the whole audience was leaning forward, but toward WHAT?

Which brings me to humor. This is maybe a point that is belabored, god knows it's been said elsewhere, but...

Humor, in theater, isn't just a tool. It's a weapon. It gets you past the guard of your audience, it keeps them sitting up, leaning forward, disarmed...to the point where you can get to the core of your point, to the burning, loving, angry, enlightened whatever-it-may-be that had you putting pen to paper in the first place. If you want them to listen, you wanna be funny. If you've already got them laughing, KNOW the opportunity you have and USE it.

At tonight's play, because the play itself wasn't giving me much to think about, I started to ponder "what's true about funny stuff on stage." Here are a few things I observed.

1) Humor has repetition. It establishes a pattern, makes it TOTALLY clear to the audience...hence the rule of three.
2) Humor messes with repetition. Once a pattern is firmly established, you screw with it. So it's set-up, set-up, twist.
3) Funny plays are PRECISE. Because timing is everything. There's an inherent musicality, a rhythm, to stage humor.
4) Funny plays grow out of relationships.
5) In funny plays, there is often a dissonance between how high the CHARACTERS perceive the stakes to be, and how high the AUDIENCE perceives the stakes to be. Characters stakes = incredibly high, AUDIENCE stakes = not so high.
uh...I'm sure I'll think of more.