Its interesting that some generalizations or stereotypes made by comedians land on the audience well even though personal experiences couldn’t have given them more than two or three instances of that particular subject that they make the joke out of. Of course the quality of delivery is important and I am paying attention to only the good comedians so there could be incorrect generalizations made by a shitty comic that fall flat on the audience but there is still something fascinating about minor observations that good comics make and hope that people will relate to it.

What is implicit in making people laugh on not so common stereotypes or behaviors, is an advice for the world. Its this - You are all noticing funny stuff around you all the time but you don’t know that its funny until I tell you so. You all are so busy taking life seriously (and hence boringly) , that you have become blind to the constant hilarity on this planet.

Now I am obviously aware that this is hard to do for non-comics because people don’t expect normal people to find humor in normal everyday life but we don’t really know what societal consequences would be if most people started doing in real life what some of these comics do on stage. The only way to find out is to teach this skill to a large number of kids and do a longitudinal study to observe the effects that these subjects have on people around them. Do they become irresponsible and less productive? Do they have less conflicts because people know whats coming and are always in “ready to laugh” mode like how they are with stand up comics? Very hard to do this with proper controls but it will be interesting nonetheless.