dramatic pause....

....wait for it....




.....WAIT for it.....



comedy? vs comedy - after a performance of "romance" by david mamet.

at what point do insults cease to be offensive and become pointless and hilarious drivel?
another question: when some pithy playwright starts whipping around insults, why is it naturally understood that he is kidding (because we have been told the play is a 'farce')? in short, how do irony and satire work to make us laugh? Of course we can look it up in a book, but someone please explain it to me - how do we compute comedy? i've heard of an Institute of Laughter (in Switzerland, is it?) - maybe they know.

let's say i knew nothing about the play (save the title) before i went in. david Who? sounds like a lactating badger! how did everyone in the audience know instinctively when to laugh? even the little pause before each round of guffaws was all planned out for us by the competent writers and actors - masters of timing. it amazes me how an audience just follows along like a crowd of simultaneously-walked dogs. Mr Mamet! Mr Mamet! tell us how you have us all laughing uproariously simultaneously: THIS is real audience participation. nobody had to embarrass everyone by creeping down off the stage apron to sit in your aunt madge's lap and don the old bag's spectacles. it makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable to have lost that subconscious control, giggling along with everyone like a communal trip to the ha-ha hotel.

can you have insult without injury? let's say yes, for the purpose of demonstrating current trends of Un-politcal correctness. smash humour, like that puppet who hits everyth- Punch, that's his name, yes punch&judy. punch humour.

so when the defendant (jewish) and his lawyer (episcopalian) build themselves up into a frenzy of "listen here, you koy Jesus-freak" and "you f'ing kites can't order a ham sandwich without mentioning the holocaust" (i'm so very PC!!), we are so aghast at hearing it that we laugh in shock but feel that none of it matters in the least. "he's just being funny", i hear people thinking. he's making fun of prejudice, not being prejudiced. the same sort of subtle humour occurs in south park with the whole canadian thing. most people (ahem, americans) don't get that the writers aren't making fun of canada, rather they are making fun of people who make fun of it.

do written words+subtext+action= communication? is life any different from the theatre, then (assuming you don't work from a script in real life)? is that the whole point - to have "make-believe" stage pieces resonate within our lives by illiciting emotions with which we empathize?

what about the opposite - do these dramatics draw you completely OUT of yourself and your experience - entertaining you as an observer? Jeanette Winterson in Art Objects challenges that we (as readers) have lost the ability/willingness to just enjoy art (books, in her case) objectively. we want to extract bits of ourselves out of characters so we can identify with them. when has it all become so egocentric? why can't we understand and appreciate those who are different from us? is that not just as viable as entertainment - a sort of intellectual pursuit?

one last mention of the almeida theatre, london, and of the star of the show, john mahoney - aka martin crane of frasier fame. but he also plays that wet-faced codger prof who is no match for heavy-lidded (not in that bette davis way, but in the "spare me, you putz" one) olympia dukakis in Moonstruck.