Laugh? I nearly cried: why comedy causes the most critical divisions

Is there anything quite so divisive as comedy? It is possible to see Oedipus or Romeo and Juliet and either be deeply moved or just a little bit moved. But with a comedy, it is either funny or it’s not. Laughter is a reflex response; you either find something hilarious or you don’t. You can’t pretend to laugh in the way you can pretend that King Lear left you wrung out. It can create a great divide. I experienced it the other week at The Unfriend, now in the West End. All around, pockets of people were having a great night out (and that is lovely to see, particularly in these grim times), but I simply couldn’t get the joke.

I once took a friend to Noises Off, to my mind one of the funniest plays ever written. He spent the first act looking as if he was suffering from a bad case of dyspepsia and departed at the interval expressing incredulity that it was supposed to be funny. It actually caused a wee hiccup in the friendship, as if somehow, through different responses to a comedy, we had discovered neither of us was quite the person the other one had thought. Fortunately for the production, I was reviewing and he wasn’t.

All criticism is subjective, but if laughter is a reflex response that can’t be faked, it does raise the question whether, perhaps more than in any other form, a review of a comedy will be deeply affected by whether the critic laughed or didn’t. A review reflects a personal response to what is seen; the critic is not reviewing the audience or the audience’s response, although that response can affect their experience. After all, other people’s laughter can be hard to resist.

I have never quite understood reviews that describe a comedy as being “mildly amusing”. Clearly, it’s a phrase intended to damn with faint praise, but you never hear critics talking about being mildly moved, when actually there are far more obvious gradations in response to tragedy. But gradations are much harder once a play has been designated a comedy and its primary purpose is clearly to make people laugh. Of course, a great comedy can do a great deal more too. Think of Complicité’s extra­ordinary A Minute Too Late, a hilarious spectacle of death. Or Chekhov. Always good, I reckon, to think of Chekhov.

Undoubtedly, comedy changes in context, culture and through different eras. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, audiences went to see the same performers in music halls again and again because they wanted to hear the same songs and jokes over and over. Today, if a comic came back with the same set in Edinburgh each year, they would be given short shrift. We live in a time when new content is king.

If you don’t succumb to riotous audience laughter, it can be a lonelier place than a lifetime in a dead marriage

There is good reason why the comedies of Plautus and Aristophanes are less familiar to us now than the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. Comedy doesn’t travel well, across borders or across the centuries. The farces of Ben Travers and Feydeau are staged far less frequently than they were 30 or 40 years ago. Writing in Time Out about the West End revival of Noises Off, Andrzej Lukowski expressed the fear that perhaps it has dated. Maybe comedy simply doesn’t last for ever.

Of course, laughter can be infectious, particularly in a live performance. I am not a big slapstick fan, but on numerous occasions I have had my expectations confounded in a pantomime slop scene. There is a singular joy in being part of an audience that is having a riotous time. But if you don’t succumb, it can be a lonelier place to spend a few hours than a lifetime in a dead marriage. Why are all these people laughing? Is your own sense-of-humour failure a sign of personal inadequacy or an inability to engage?

Or is it just that what tickles each of our individual funny bones – whether people slipping on banana skins or satire – is as particular to each of us as our taste (or not) for coriander or the colour yellow? I also wonder whether there are gender differences in what we do or do not find funny.

Perhaps, too, laughter can make you forgive a multitude of sins in terms of craft and construction, and sometimes if the craft and construction are top notch the laughter just gurgles like water gushing after a blocked pipe is unstopped. I’d put The Unfriend in the former category and Noises Off in the latter. Others would differ.

What both shows will undoubtedly do is bring great pleasure to many, and that’s great. But if what makes us laugh is singular to us all, the critic who doesn’t laugh at either of these shows and writes as such is simply reflecting their own experience. Like all criticism, it’s not right and not wrong: just an honest account of their personal encounter with the play.