Last night we went to an English stand-up comedy show in Vienna. In a small, packed, overly-air-conditioned and unevenly-lit room at the back of a bar at the Gürtel, we were sitting fairly close to stage, which might be the only advantage of such a so-called intimate setting. The light in the center back of the stage aimed directly and glaringly at the center of the audience, which was approximately where I was sitting. I was lit and the woman on the right side of me remained in the darkness, safe and protected from an embarrassing joke that might find its way to one of us. Under this unexpected spotlight, I tried to maintain a respectful and self-assured facial expression throughout the show while smiling politely even if what was being said was not particularly amusing.
The comedians took turns to make fun of the lack of humor of Austrians, even the comedians who themselves were actually Austrian. Some of the non-white Americans inevitably told some race-related jokes; all of them inevitably told sexual jokes. Ever since Netflix decided to push stand-up comedy shows into my life, I’ve watched quite a lot of them. I don’t find the excessive use of curse words or extensively detailed and graphic account of sex stories very funny. Sometimes they verge on being unnecessarily vulgar and yet as a comedy spectator you are expected to have an accommodating sense of humor and laugh when it’s meant to be funny. At some point one American comedian said something about meeting her wife on Tinder ten years ago and having an open relationship or something. I was trying to process this piece of information so for a second I forgot to smile. The guy looked at me and said, this ma’am seems to be shocked. I was confused for a second whether he was talking to me or some ma’am equally conspicuously lit by the stage light behind me. The comedian reacted quickly and said, and she doesn’t even understand English. A few people laughed, for reasons they didn’t quite know. I felt bad for the comedian for having a non-interactive spectator like me. Maybe I really didn’t understand English. I used to think the funny must be the unexpected. But then I listen to the Trevor Noah show on Spotify every day and the joke about Trump’s hair never gets old. Maybe it’s not so much about the joke itself but the person that tells it. Some are funny, and the others try to be funny. It’s the trying that takes the fun out of it.
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