Last weekend, my friend and I went to a free comedy show near the Angel tube station. The emcee went around the audience asking people what they do; by default, people answered what they did for money. The first guy was a pilot named Kevin. The girl he was with was a consultant. The next guy was a ‘Bonds Trading Strategist’. Someone else, further down the row, piped up: ‘I’m a Bonds Trading Strategist named Kevin!’
‘Wow,’ my friend said matter-of-factly. ‘Two Kevins in a row.’
I could not stop laughing about this.
The emcee went on. Two more consultants.
‘We’re in capitalist hell,’ I told my friend.
‘We’re in Angel,’ she deadpanned.
We were seated towards the side of the room, by the door, in chairs that looked like they were meant for security guards. This insulated us from being called on, and also gave us enough remove to watch the performers as well as the audience, a show within a show. It’s like balcony seating at the Royal Opera, we joked, as we shared a bottle of sparkling water and judged the shit out of everyone.
The emcee moved on to a group of twenty-something girls seated in a row near the stage. Not at a table, but along the wall next to the stage, perpendicular to us. The first one: Epidemiologist. The second one: Consultant. The third one called herself ‘a former opera singer’.
‘Why former?’ The emcee asked, as someone in the distant audience shouted ‘sing!’. The former opera singer said something about the pandemic and moving to a new country. ‘I wish I could be an opera singer,’ the emcee said.
‘You can be!’ The girl said.
‘What? No I can’t?’
‘Try!!’ She said. ‘You totally can!’
The emcee and some more people asked her to sing, and she demurred. She demurred some more, then sang a gorgeous aria as the room applauded.
‘She did that on purpose,’ I grumbled to my friend. ‘Former opera singer. Please. She was just waiting for the opportunity to show off. Literal diva.’
The emcee points out a group further away from us and asks them what they are talking about so enthusiastically.
‘We’re just talking about what a great singer she is,’ someone in that group said.
‘Liar,’ I whispered. ‘They’re talking shit about her, just like we are.’
The next comedy act went on, and I was hoping they would call this girl out, but they did not. I thought this reflected badly on the comedian, who stuck with the bit he’d planned instead of working with the energy in the room. Then the next comedian took the stage. She was either American or Canadian, and more physical in her gestures, with a booming voice that did not need the mic. She did a bit about how British people hate directness and avoid it all costs, which makes it very easy for her to skip the coffee queue. People may grumble and whisper passive-aggressive remarks to one another behind her back, but joke’s on them – she gets coffee first and walks away victorious. It was very funny; her delivery was exceptional.
‘And what about this former opera singer, eh?’ She booms. ‘I like how she pretends to be all shy and tee-hee, then pulls a fucking Mariah Carey. What a cunt. Such fucking theatre kid energy. Ugh. What a cunt!’ She looks at the girl and shouts ‘YOU’RE A CUNT!’ before moving on to her next bit.
Listen, I won’t say I didn’t laugh. I was, after all, hoping somebody would call the former opera singer out. But this was a bit much. I’m sure others felt the same, based on the awkward laughter I heard mingled with the general laughter. I was too afraid to look over at the former opera singer; I don’t think I could have handled seeing the look of humiliation that had to be there. I would not have been able to handle it well, if it happened to me.
Before the show ended, I noticed a hooded figure scurry past us towards the door, head down. Definitely the comedian who called the former opera singer a cunt; I wondered if that shiftiness was because she felt she went too far. It was very different from the bravado she showed on stage. Last newsletter I mentioned ‘emotional flashing’, and this was a version of that: revealing something private and vulnerable in an abrupt manner that destabilises the conversation or vibe. This comedian revealed an extreme distaste for show-offs maybe didn’t need to be so extreme. After all, this comedian is also a performer, and quite a theatrical one.
Maybe what’s so intoxicating about comedy is how close it can slip into cruelty, or unbearable sadness. The title story of Stephen Millhauser’s book Dangerous Laughter captures this sentiment perfectly. It’s about a group of bored teenagers in the suburbs who start a club where they got together in somebody’s house and just laugh raucously for hours about nothing in particular. One girl, an outcast before this club, gets too into it; when the rest of the club moves on to ‘crying clubs’ (where they get together and cry for no particular reason for hours at a time), she is completely distraught. She keeps trying to bring laughter club back, but in the process of doing so, she becomes an even bigger outcast than she was before, laughing maniacally as everyone turns away from her, closing their eyes because she is being indecent, terrifying. Whether we like it or not, laughter is a kind of social contract; if you don’t laugh at something intended to make you laugh, it can be seen as a snub or a type of power and superiority. Laugh too much at something somebody else says to you, and it’s seen as a lack of control that is pitiable and pretty fucking scary. That is, I believe, the concept behind Batman’s biggest rival, and the common fear of clowns.
‘Good’ comedy, then, is a judgment of how close somebody is to the edge of being inappropriate. A lot of people who mourn cancel culture are mourning the freedom to go past that edge of being inappropriate (making fun of women, fat people, Asians, etc); but comedy has always had a boundary; the outer limits just looked different because society looked different.
I wonder if this is why the sign of Capricorn – ruled by Saturn – is known for its sense of humour. In traditional astrology (no planet past Saturn, because that’s the last planet one can see with the naked eye), Saturn is the only planet with a ring; it is the literal vision of boundaries and limits. Saturn / Capricorn is also known for being serious and grave; for most of history it was perceived as the very end of the solar system, and thus associated with death. The fact Saturn / Capricorn is known for both humour and grave seriousness is very telling; humour exists in that outer ring, a kind of armour or boundary that protects the more serious inner sanctum.
One way I am slowly studying astrology is looking up the charts of celebrities and seeing if these planetary associations match up with their reputations. Sure enough, Larry David has his moon in Capricorn. I could not stop laughing at an episode of Curbed Your Enthusiasm I watched recently where Larry David realises he and his friends are being seated at the ugly section of a popular LA restaurant. He doggedly keeps returning to that restaurant to prove his theory right, and keeps accusing different people he dines with of being the reason they are seated in the ugly section, to avoid the fact it could be him. In one instance, he notices his ex-wife and the friend she left him for seated in the beautiful section. What I loved about this episode is how it doesn’t necessary poke fun of a particular type of person who is purportedly different than us – i.e. ‘theatre kid energy’ – but skirts around an uncomfortable truth we all experience to some degree: that we become less desirable (AKA ugly) as we get older, and that our friends might be better looking than us.
Links:
Stephen Fry (❤️❤️❤️) reading a Nick Cave response to a letter where a reader frets about ChatGPT. Sidenote: It is my dream in life to become an agony aunt. If you have any ledes, let me know.
Curbed fans, my friend Emma spoke to Susie and the interview is great. I especially loved the parts about how much fun she has playing a character very unlike herself, with ‘complete confidence in everything she does and zero self-awareness’. Read it here.
I love Chris Jesu Lee’s Salieri Redemption Substack. The latest piece is about phone-based childhood and how it instills a different type of peer pressure to ‘grow up too fast, either sterilizing their personalities like an assembly-line politician to not risk upsetting anyone, or becoming colorful yet conformist so they can be loud and interesting, just like everyone else around them’. Read it here.
Until next time,
Nikkitha