The Business of Happiness
In the age of economic rationalism, happiness is a business. There are courses in which people pay to be taught how to laugh. They sit in large groups while an instructor teaches them to jiggle their diaphragms and induce laughter, which makes them feel happy. Comedy is the primary industry of happiness. A comedian’s job is making people laugh, which makes them feel happy. The comedian gets paid and is happy not to work in a ‘real job’, but it is a job that has increasing importance in our stressful modern society.
There is blue humour, black humour, parody and satire; there are a million different ways to make people laugh, but what makes each person laugh is highly individual. Making an audience laugh is not just broad humour, jokes that everyone understands. Sometimes it’s a deeply personal observation; something that the writer may think is only relevant to themselves, that makes a connection with a lot of people, who laugh because they feel the same way. In the words of Homer Simpson, ‘it’s funny because it’s true’.
There is truth in the old cliché ‘laughter is the best medicine’. There are ‘joke doctors’ who perform for critically ill kids to aid in their recovery, because laughter makes us feel better. It is possible for a person to feel momentarily happy, even in the midst of tragedy, because someone telling jokes has made them forget the complications of the real world.
This can backfire. Greg Fleet was doing his routine about having your leg bitten off by a shark when he noticed someone in the audience crying. Greg inquired why this person wasn’t enjoying his funny jokes about shark attacks. They replied that they had come out to forget about the recent tragedy that one of their family members had been taken by a shark. Awkward embarrassment does not make people laugh or feel happy. In fact, people will not laugh if they notice the comedian is nervous, which makes them uncomfortable and incapable of laughing. Ironically, telling other audiences about this awkward moment became part of Greg’s routine.
It is an old formula in comedy that tragedy + time = comedy. The Australian public’s love of the foreign comedian with their Irish, English or American accent led myself and a few other Australian comedians to develop a different formula for Australian comedy (read aloud):
accent + comedy
C = Australian comedy success
Comedy is a paradox. A comedian ‘kills’ if the audience laughed a lot, so is that gagocide? Indeed, the comedian does a gag, strangling the audience with laughter. The biggest compliment I’ve had was a fellow approaching me on the street and saying that he had actually wet himself when he had watched one of my sketches on television. That’s right; I literally made him piss himself laughing.
Even remembering a time when we had a good laugh can make us feel happy again. The biggest paradox is that money can buy you happiness, if it pays for a comedian to make you laugh.
This piece originally appeared in ‘The Big Issue’.
Matt Quartermaine is a Melbourne-based writer and comedian. With Matt Parkinson, Tim Smith and Andrew Goodone, he produces ‘The Chat’, a weekly podcast in which ‘four grown men in comfortable chairs spill their guts’. Click here to download it for free at iTunes.
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