This is not a post about jokes.

At least, not intentional ones.

A friend of mine is a graduate student in a theater production program at a Prestigious Ivy League University, and as such she gets access to many free theater tickets that her program has made it very clear she must use or she will be reprimanded/shunned/thrown in a fiery volcano. So she invites her friends to a lot of shows. I had an opportunity to see the amazing-sounding Brief Encounter with her, didn't hear what show it was when she told me on the phone, and ended up doing my laundry that night instead. I'm still pissed about that.

But I digress.

The show I did go to see with her, under no small amount of coercion, was Love, Loss, and What I Wore. For those unfamiliar with this title, it is an off-Broadway show with a rotating cast of five women. In Vagina Monologue-style, they tell stories about Important Life Events and the clothes that defined them at those times. It's not a bad concept - everyone has a piece of clothing that they associate with a particular person ("He broke my heart, so I stole his Def Leppard t-shirt.") or event ("I was wearing this jacket when I saw Def Leppard in concert for the first time.") or time in your life ("Those jeans had the perfect pocket to hold my Walkman so I could listen to my Def Leppard tapes."). I sort of* love clothes, so I might have somewhat more of these than a normal person.

But the execution of said concept was less than ideal. A lot of the humor was based around "ladies, AMIRITE?" type "jokes" - good jeans are difficult to find! My purse is disorganized! My mom hated the way I dressed as a teen! Ha ha, we all have these things in common because we are LADIES!! It was as though the characters were all actually the women Cosmo thinks exist, the ones who rub ice cubes on their nipples and flirt with dudes in the produce aisle by asking them which banana looks riper. Also, my mom never cared what I wore, thus the inclusion of a pink spandex unitard in my sixth-grade wardrobe rotation.

There were some successful parts - the parts that were actual stories that sounded like real people were cute, mostly. But sometimes even that didn't work. One of the cast members in the cast I saw was Jamie-Lynn Sigler, most famous for her role as Meadow Soprano in That HBO Show I Never Watched. Based on her performance in this show, I am going to go ahead and say she is not very good at acting. She is very pretty, certainly, and I'm sure she is good at something, but acting is not really it.

So she is doing this monologue about boots: I. Love. Boots. I remember my first pair - they were army green and I wore them every day. They made me feel powerful. Now, in Jamie-Lynn's defense, this monologue was not exactly Tom Stoppard, but I think in the right hands it could have been good. But then this happened:

I went off to art school in Berkeley, and I had two pairs of boots: one was caramel brown and one was dark brown. I wore them with very short skirts. I felt so powerful in my brown boots and my short skirts.
[incredibly long pause]
But then one night, a guy broke into my apartment...and raped me.

Obviously, this is not supposed to be a joke: "haha! You got raped! BURN!" Not cool. But my friend and I were both COMPLETELY OVERCOME in paroxysms of laughter, shaking uncontrollably in an effort to stifle the giggles that wanted to bubble up and disrupt what was otherwise a completely silent moment in the theater. I have no memory of the rest of the monologue, because we were doing that thing where we would regain control of ourselves, but then just feel the other person shaking next to us, and we were back in it again. I believe this is called in the medical profession a "giggle fit."

I was thinking about why this happened. Certainly, a girl getting raped is not funny. And it's not like we were being affected by the crowd - they were all stone-silent. And I figured it out, before I read Erin's post, and then I read it, and she mentions the phenomenon as well:

An unexpected moment interrupts the narrative and subverts your expectations and you’re laughing

It's not comedy rule #1 (I think that is "farts are funny"), but it's up there, certainly: set up expectations, then flip them. We can talk more about that, and the reverse-double-flip used by a lot of newer comedies, in another post, but for now, just trust me. It's a thing.

What I expected Jamie-Lynn to say, based on the fact that she had been going on and on and fucking ON about her goddamn boots, was "one night, a guy broke into my apartment...and stole my boots." So the fact that she said something SO COMPLETELY MORE TERRIBLE than her boots being stolen was somehow hilarious. Again, I think that in more capable hands, this transition could have worked - maybe. But the setup, still, did not lead us to a place where we expected, and that made it funny to us.

Perhaps this is part of the reason that sometimes a "dramatic" scene written or acted poorly is sometimes funnier than a comedic scene. What do you guys think?

*understatement. COMEDY GOLD