Clive James on Dick Cavett. An awful trap: those who desperately want to be funny alight when they’re soon to share what they hope will amuse us, their faces spreading into smiles before the words even form in their mouths. This is the moment they wait for: to drop the joke and get the laugh.
But that smile is poison: very little is funny once someone wants it to be funny, and the more they want us to laugh the less likely our laughter is to be spontaneous. In most cases, their anticipatory grin is met with our forced grimace, the phony simulated smile we all loathe for making us liars. This is true of televised comedy, too.
When we are expected to laugh, anxiety over whether we will laugh contaminates our otherwise receptive minds; we think only of hurting our friend, not of any humor that might emerge. Also, people who want to be funny are often just not: again, a sad trick of the universe likely related to the fact that for them, humor is not something naturally occurring but a fabricated social resource they want to posses; thus, they don’t get humor at all.
We cannot will emotional reactions, so these sorts of interactions can be extremely painful. It would be best if none of us wanted to be funny (or smart, or handsome, or talented, or whatever), but in lieu of that we might just all work on perfecting our compassionately deceitful faces: “That is hilarious!”
I try to find meta-humor in the whole farce: the escalating dread as I realize that a David Brent-type wants me to guffaw, the tension rising as the awful punchline awkwardly approaches, the gaping stare as he examines my eyes to see if I’m truly amused, the cavern of insecurity in him in which my fake laughter echoes, etc. And one can always laugh at the fact that one has surely made others feel this way.
Incidentally, this dread of failing to have the appropriate emotional or instinctual reaction is why I no longer have sex. Just kidding! Are you laughing? I’m watching very closely: look out of your window. (One reason I never even try to be funny online: too often I want to overtly indicate that I’m joking, a killer failing; I lack the fearlessness of, say, Cameron or Bag Coffee).
