suggested<\/a> that a science-fiction play set on the bridge of the Enterprise would \u201cremove some of the difficulties\u201d of a spec-fic play. Since that time there have been a lot of very good spec-fic plays that have either found other ways out of the difficulties or reveled in the difficulties. Still, I think that the audience will come in, see the set, and know pretty much exactly what the genre conventions will be. So that\u2019s all right.\r\nWe\u2019re opening in a week and a half, so now is the appropriate time to be panicking about whether it is actually funny or not. And it is! So that\u2019s all right.\r\n
One of the things I\u2019m concerned (which, I want to say, will be all right on the night) about is a problem I\u2019ve come across before in comedy: the difficulty of remembering what the audience doesn\u2019t know. It\u2019s a problem in all of theater, of course, but in most dramas, I think, it\u2019s easier to keep in mind that the audience is (presumably) seeing it for the first time and needs to have everything properly set forth for them. In comedy, there\u2019s a tendency to think this bit is funny<\/i> and forget that the audience doesn\u2019t know<\/i> that it\u2019s a funny bit.\r\n
Or, what is worse, there\u2019s a temptation to top the funny bit, not just with a button but with another, bigger funnier bit. Which is obviously a Good Thing, what with funnier being, in general, better\u2026 so long as you don\u2019t then rush the funny bit to get to the funnier bit, which is only funnier because of the earlier bit. So if the audience didn\u2019t get the earlier bit, they don\u2019t know why the funnier bit is funny. Which means it isn\u2019t funny.\r\n
This particular production is even more susceptible to that problem, because most of the cast were not only in an early reading of the play some three years ago, but started rehearsals for this production at the beginning of the pandemic. In fact, I auditioned on March 15, 2020; my workplace closed the next day. We rehearsed over the internet, on and off, over the next few months before it became clear that a production would have to wait. When the theater group re-started, it was (sensibly) with small-cast shows, and this larger-scale production was postponed until, well, now.\r\n
We\u2019ve been living with the show for two or three years, then. And as the writers are involved in the production (one of them is directing) they have been living with it for another year before that. And that means that new things are funnier to us than old things\u2014even though to the audience, they are all new things.\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger reflects that comedy is a damned serious business.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theeyater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20701"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20702,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20701\/revisions\/20702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}