Recently, while editing a performance to create a clip for social, I noticed something I loved: a lady laughing so hard she was holding her gut and bowing over, nearly falling out of her chair. It was great to see because, during the show, I didn’t notice it at all but wish I had. As a comedian, when a joke lands, like really truly lands, it’s special. And, if you’re fortunate enough to make eye contact with the person who just laughed, you instantly feel a connection. It kinda feels like you’re soldiers who met in the trenches and went through something.
Philosopher Ted Cohen suggests that such a phenomenon isn’t merely theory. In fact, he says that jokes, when they work, create a kind of intimacy. For Cohen, a good joke isn’t just about laughter; it’s about recognition. Put differently: a) Someone laughed because I said something; which, b) assumes they know what I know; and, c) this also suggests, at some point, that we shared the same map and took the same weird turn. As a comedian, I think this is basically what sits behind every single laugh.
I know the theories about laughter that revolve around tension, surprise, and the like. But this “implicit acknowledgment of a shared background,” as Cohen describes it, is just incredible to me. To use an analogy, for a joke to work, we both have to be drawing water from the same well. If I make a reference to slow drivers in the left lane or that one youth pastor who really wanted to be in a band, and someone laughs, it’s because we’ve both lived through it. And THAT!, that is the secret sauce.
People aren’t laughing because I said something random. They’re laughing because, somehow, I said the thing they’ve always thought but never said out loud. After a show last month, in fact, I literally had someone come up to me and say pretty much that, “I don’t know how you made those jokes work, but you were saying exactly what we’ve all thought but never said.” That’s intimacy. It’s also philosophy.
It’s also rhetoric. The great rhetorician, Kenneth Burke, referred to this with the rather simple term “identification.” He believed persuasion only happens when an orator/rhetor speaks the audience’s language. This, of course, doesn’t just mean words, but also has to do with gestures, tone, pacing, ideas, and posture. A good joke is a kind of mini-persuasion.
As a comedian, I am, of course, trying to convince people to laugh. But I only succeed if those people identify with the setup, recognize the turn, and enjoy where it lands. In that sense, jokes are like Trojan horses where the intimacy and identification is smuggled in through the persuasive use of words, gestures, and so on.
It’s no secret either that, on paper, you can diagram a joke. You can chart the rhythm, the misdirection, the structure. But what you can’t really capture is the invisible lightning bolt of connection that shoots between a comic and the crowd when the right joke hits the right person at the right time. You can’t quite diagram the intimacy or identification.
That’s also the reason people say, “You had to be there!” after they tell a joke. It isn’t just a defense mechanism for a bomb. No, it’s because a joke is a social event. It’s communal. It’s dependent on timing and place and people who all brought their shared experience to the room. If you weren’t there, you can’t know what was in the air. But if you were there, you felt it. You were part of it. You weren’t just in the room. You were in on it. This, by the way, is also the same reason why, when people find out I’m a comedian and say, “Tell me a joke,” I often say straightaway, “It doesn’t really work like that.”
This is also precisely why bombing feels so personal. When a joke flops, it’s not just that no one laughed, it’s that no one joined. You tossed out an invitation to connect and the crowd said, “No thanks, we’re good.” It feels like rejection because, philosophically speaking, well, it is. But when a joke works, especially one with a little edge, or vulnerability, or truth, it’s saying, “You’ve been there too, right?” And hearing back, “Absolutely!” This, I think, is a huge reason my wife and I have been together for 23 years. Much of our “intimacy” is connection in the form of sharing laughs.
When it comes down to it, I still think stand-up comedy is one of the last true forms of honest connection in our society. And I say that as someone who has preached for 20+ years. I think stand-up is where you find a group people who still want to feel connected with others, too. They want to feel seen, heard, and known. That’s why the comedian is required to talk about their trauma, screw-ups, family issues, or tendencies to overshare. They do this to make sure the audience recognizes themselves in the story.
The point isn’t just to make people laugh. It’s to make them recognize themselves and/or some truth. The bottom line is: laughter is really just the sound people make when they feel seen. And if thinkers like Ted Cohen and Kenneth Burke are right,1 a good joke doesn’t just get a laugh, it creates a bond. But for that to happen, just like the lady bowing over in her chair at my show, well, you had to be there.
See Thomas Conley’s, “Argumentation: What Jokes Can Tell Us About Arguments,” A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, eds. W. Jost & W. Olmsted (London: Wiley & Blackwell, 2006): 266-77.