The audience roars with laughter during Kirsten O'Brien's show at the Edinburgh Fringe. Photograph: Dan Chung
My mind wandered in the middle of a stand-up show in Edinburgh the other night. Hardly surprising in some ways: the comic was a polished performer, the kind that laughs smoothly at his own jokes, but his material wasn't worth buffing up. It wasn't boredom, though, that made me stop listening; I started to find it impossible to pay attention to anything other than the couple directly behind us.
They were laughing so much, and so loudly, and so much longer than anyone else, at absolutely everything this guy said, I began to think they must have been plants. Turned out one of them knew the comic. But it wasn't charity -- they genuinely found it so amusing they were nearly coughing up their organs. In fact, the pair were so convinced they even stopped requiring him to be funny, convulsing well before anything resembling a punchline arrived on the scene. "Hey, he's obviously going to be funny, right? So let's get a head start on the chuckling." The cart was overtaking the horse.
For some reason, because of them, it became impossible for me to find this guy funny -- I mean, I wasn't, anyway, to be fair, but I knew from that point on if he did crack a stunning gag, I wouldn't laugh. I'm a humourless douchebag -- that's the obvious explanation. But it is also something to do with how other people's laughter interacts with your own. Part of our contact with the person on stage is direct, but part of it is via the audience -- just as when you rave about a film to friends and then watch it with them, you half see it through their eyes.
There's also a trust that develops in an audience, a group rhythm to the waves of mirth that can be scuppered by someone always jumping the gun, like the clapper who always wants to be the first to applaud at the end of a symphony. They become a live equivalent of canned laughter, which always has the opposite of the desired comic effect. Other people's laughter can be infectious, but only if you trust it.
