How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
I'm worried my kid is obsessed with making people laugh
I first met my husband at 26 years old. At the time, I was a huge stand-up fan and he told me he didn't like stand-up. Not gonna lie, this was a beige flag. How could you not like stand-up? It is literally comedy. Do you not enjoy laughing? I’d never heard of anyone not enjoying comedy. What’s not to like?
“It’s all so contrived”, he said. “Sitting in a room, waiting for this person on stage to be funny and they know that we’re there because we think they're going to be funny and they tell all these practised stories in the most unnatural fashion and we’re all expected to laugh at the right parts and the whole time I’m stressed that they won’t actually be funny at all and I’ll have to fake laugh.” This was perhaps an amber flag come to think of it. He had clearly given it a lot of thought. Way too much thought for a situation where you are simply being entertained.
But I've had my own on-again/off-again relationship with stand-up over the years. I had a friend trying to break into it and I went to a good few of her open mic nights. She was very funny, but the thing about open mic nights is you have to sit through a lot of God awful stuff. Really bad. I used to fake laugh out of sympathy, just so that something other than extreme awkwardness would fill the room. But then I'd wonder if maybe I was doing them a disservice. Was my fake laughter offering encouragement to someone who should not have been encouraged? Someone who was hopelessly and incurably unfunny?
I've been to big shows where I thought the comedian was simply better in the recorded set I’d watched online. What was the point of going to the live performance where there was a chance it might not click on the night? Not for the intimate atmosphere of a fifteen hundred seat theatre, anyway. Other times, I’ve seen comedians I got to know from Twitter, stand on stage in smaller venues and simply read out their own tweets. Frankly, reading their tweets was what I had been doing by myself all along! So it didn’t add anything for me to be there other than the inconvenience of having to be out of my bed.
I really did grow to see how contrived the whole situation is (Goddammit, why did you have to point it out to me, Husband!!) Even when the comedian is excellent, I always wonder: what sad thing happened to you that you feel the need to stand on stage and tell jokes so that people will like you? Maybe I'm the one overthinking it now but I was seriously wondering if I had already failed my 4 year old when it became clear that she is absolutely obsessed with jokes and making people laugh.
She was, without doubt, the class clown of her Pre-Kindergarten class and now is taking on the same role in Kindergarten. Being able to make people laugh is a skill however and it does have its advantages. I've witnessed her defuse situations with humour and try to cheer her pals up when they’re sad by being silly.
She always wants to be in on the joke and will laugh along whenever we are laughing, but immediately afterwards, will ask “Why was that funny? Why did Daddy laugh at what you said?” - trying to break down the joke so that she can later replicate it.
I looked up age appropriate jokes so that I could gift them to her to build her armory. The best one I saw was “What do you say to a bunny on its birthday? Hoppy birthday”. She laughed her head off. Told everyone. And then she put a twist on it by asking what do you say to a duck on its birthday? Quacky birthday. Which I was impressed with because it was wordplay of its own but then I remembered the key bit was the happy/hoppy thing and quacky didn't work at all. OK, I’m a critical mother. I'm starting to see why she already feels the need to find love and approval elsewhere.
The other joke I taught her was “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice” which she loved telling but absolutely did not get. She didn't even know what Carnegie Hall was . I heard her stuff the punchline on one occasion, changing it to “Take the elevator!” but the person she was telling (her Auntie Ruth) thought it was so funny how badly she got it wrong that the 4 year old was delighted that she had achieved her goal (uproarious laughter). I later learned however that she knew she was being laughed at, rather than laughed with, when I took her to a family concert at Carnegie Hall. After our tickets were checked at the door, the usher said “Take the elevator to two”. The 4 year old turned to me and said “There is an elevator to Carnegie Hall! I’m going to tell Auntie Ruth”.