Meerkat Prompts: Comedy
We live in troubled times. The world is full of uncertainty and strife. There’s a lot of division, conflict and tension out there. Perhaps what we need to do, now more than ever, is to laugh.
Comedy is a form of entertainment as old as time itself. Human beings love to laugh. It is a natural, and rather wonderful sound. It can be deliciously infectious. Listening to my daughter laugh as a baby counts as a core memory. It’s brilliant and uplifting, and there are many occasions where we sorely need those moments.
Of course, we all find different things funny. There’s observational humour, and situational jokes. There’s absurdity, there’s slapstick, and good old-fashioned puns. Me? I love a dad joke. Fun fact: if you’re not a father and you tell a dad joke… tsk tsk, that’s a faux pa.
It’s easy to dismiss comedy as somehow lacking compared to drama, horror etc, but to make people laugh, to make them unwind and relax enough to sit there and giggle from their gut, that takes talent. It takes good timing, it takes good delivery, and it takes practice. The good standup comedians understand all of this, and so can bring on joke after joke, and they will construct intelligent routines that often link back to earlier moments. The best standups can also think on their feet, reacting to hecklers (even going as far as to invite heckles) in order to bounce off them.
There are so many different styles of comedy, but they all want us to do the same thing: they want us to relax. They want us to enjoy ourselves. They want us to stop thinking about the doom and gloom of modern life, if only for an hour or two, and they want to leave us with a smile on our face and sore cheeks from so much laughing. Comedy is a beautiful gift, something that we can all make use of to enhance and help our well-being. Try to find something to laugh about, even just one small thing, every day!
‘Kat Comments