Power, Proximity, and Standup Comedy
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Highlights
- Positive intimacy means, when you look at the other person and see yourself in them, it makes you feel good. Youâre unified, and youâre at ease.Negative intimacy is the opposite: your intense proximity and similarity makes you feel bad; youâre acutely aware of tiny differences and what they reveal about you; you feel defensive.
- When you earnestly laugh, thatâs a genuine expression of who you are and what you find funny.
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Thatâs why getting someone to laugh in a group situation is much harder than getting them to laugh one-on-one. Unless, that is, youâre already all friends. If youâre all friends, youâre already intimate. So itâs very easy to laugh, and be yourself. But among a group of strangers, where thereâs close proximity but negative intimacy, you all have your guards up at all times. If you laugh and no one else does, you feel naked and embarrassed. So no one laughs.
- Crammed physical environments, by the way, are important way beyond standup comedy. Iâve always laughed at the idea of people showing off open-concept houses with all the walls removed as âgreat for entertainingâ, because thatâs the opposite of true: the best parties happen in houses with several tiny rooms.
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Comedy is really two things: itâs revealing the absurd inside the logical, and revealing the logical inside the absurd.
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If you can bring a crowd together and keep them together, you can accomplish almost anything you want; the trick is holding them together, not just getting lucky once. But if you can do that, then it hardly matters what youâre talking about; the power of the crowd itself is whatâs important, and what people are drawn towards.