Let’s Analyze My Comedy (And Hopefully Not Destroy It)
Generally, the worst thing you can do to a piece of comedy is to analyze it. But, maybe that’s because so much comedy just isn’t worth analyzing—it’s made of such paper-thin construction that to deconstruct it is to immediately destroy it (‘the observer effect’ in full force). I do believe that some comedy can withstand intellectual scrutiny though, or even be enhanced by such—and not to toot my own horn, but I do think some of my comedy fits that particular bill.
Whereas so much comedy consists of tricks in order to induce a ‘laugh’ or ‘don’t laugh’ binary call-and-response, there is some comedy that gets to something deeper about the human condition—it is then, in effect, not pure comedy necessarily, but philosophy that just happens to be funny. The classic 9th century Lin Chi banger “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him” is a perfect premise, a perfect first line for a routine. You can almost hear the invisible ‘—I’ll explain’ that should properly immediately follow it. That’s what I’m talking about here.
You don’t have to be a particular genius in order to construct comedy in this specific way—mostly because it does’t need to be ‘constructed’. Wisdom comes through you, not from you. It’s the result of something that you understand so well, so intuitively, deep down within you, maybe even unbeknownst to you, that it can rise to the surface as a kernel of truth effortlessly, showing wiseness not just beyond one’s years, but beyond one’s normal, typical ability to communicate. On the other hand, wisdom that is faked—that is, wisdom that is deliberately formed using mental energy—rings hollow immediately. You cannot convincingly simulate being a vessel—we instantly know when you are not in communion with something higher than yourself, whether it be The Muse, or God.
With that in mind, it’s important to know that ‘The Laugh Zone’, a comedic creation I am quite proud of, is something that arose from me pre-thought. It was all feeling—it was essentially just splashes of color and sound and emotion that I hit record on. What I started doing back in 2008, I knew I was onto something with, but it has taken me until quite recently to even start to know what that thing is, and why it ‘means something’.
What is just a clearly fake vinyl backdrop of a brick wall, and a comedian in front of the backdrop doing jokes that get no laughs (some deservedly so, some not), and stock iMovie disinterested chatter audio laid underneath this footage, is in fact something greater than the sum of its parts, and is in fact a liminal space for us to explore the human condition in. Not unlike David Lynch’s ‘Red Room’ in Twin Peaks, this is a surrealist area which exists outside of time for realizing truths that are impossible to learn in the waking, conscious, literal world.
‘The Laugh Zone’ doesn’t work in life, on any level—stifled actual laughter would ruin it, genuine actual laughter would ruin it, actual boos would ruin it, and an actual truly disinterested ‘audience’ (if you can call it that) would ruin it as well (in fact, an actual disinterested audience is never that fully, committedly, disinterested). The disinterest on display within The Laugh Zone is disinterest to the point where a comedian should wonder whether they are even alive, whether they are simply a ghost, and cannot be seen or heard. In addition to that, there are of course the moments in The Laugh Zone where, through theater of the mind, we see the comedian interacting with the audience which we do not see—an audience that we can never hear interacting back, the din of disinterest around it either overtaking it sonically to the point that it is inaudible to us, or those participants in the audience being damn near ‘ghosts’ too, momentary fellow travelers in this limbo, this not-meat space, this astral plane of sorts.
‘That’s fine and well, but what’s it all have to do with the price of tea in china?’ you might be asking. Well, I think that The Laugh Zone gets to a deeper feeling of what it is to not be heard than can be gotten to otherwise. We’re mining for humor, and for entertainment, and for discomfort, a near cosmic, near cellular level of disconnection with one’s fellow man. If butterflies in one’s stomach, and curious feelings on the back of one’s neck were a microscopic surreal tapestry that we could zoom into, and spend time in as art, that would be it.
On said plane, things become funny and unfunny for reasons beyond what we are typically used to. We are not normally here, and we are not sure if ‘we’ are even ‘we’ here. Someone who hates ‘off-color’ jokes (whatever their personal barometer for that may be) might find themselves thoroughly entertained by one in The Laugh Zone, just at the simple air that it provides the lungs: when we are suffocating, we are not choosy about the particular brand of oxygen which comes our way to save us, we just want oxygen, we just want to survive. On the other hand, a corny joke might feel like an insufficient concoction handed to us: ‘how dare you provide us merely with nitrogen and hydrogen—we need oxygen, dammit!’ Overall, we just want to get through this event alive.
‘Surreal comedy’ is rarely as truly surreal as what I have created here, where everything, including yourself, has been morphed in some way. I don’t think The Laugh Zone is particularly brilliant, but I think that it’s an original way to come at something that is typically only come at in certain specific ways, well trod lanes. Even ‘alternative comedy’, or ‘anti-humor’ isn’t doing what we’re doing here—we’re playing with comedy like I play with cinema: ‘what else can be done?’ We are not trying to make a living, we are not trying to put asses in seats, we are not trying to sell alcoholic drinks, we are just trying to deconstruct, and create that which can be deconstructed without losing it.
I hope that you will imbibe my latest film, ‘Cody Clarke Presents: A Standup Showcase at The Laugh Zone’, either in the spirit it is intended, or whatever other spirit you would like to bring to it. As you like or dislike, hate or love, the goings-on within it, please remember that it is all part of one organism, one cellular structure, and the cell would die without any one of the parts of it. Some viewers will grasp this intuitively, but this Substack piece is I guess a handrail for those who it is a bit too out there to make sense of without intellectual help. Overall, what I wanted to pay homage to with this piece is the peaks and valleys of a random comedy show at a place you’ve never heard of in NYC. Every ethereal performer here represents some archetype which has a sister in the actual reality with which we live in. What can be insufferable to sit through in life, in real time, can be quite enjoyable when made cartoon here. The Laugh Zone allows you to experience a living hell for all its beautiful, splendorous flames. Art is great in that way. Let’s all make the most of it that we can, and let’s let it be actual births, much as The Laugh Zone came out of me a soul.
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