Why Are You Laughing Right Now?

There is no shortage of thinkpieces—online or in print—responding to Todd Phillips’ 2019 film Joker. At the time, it was hailed as a singular vindication for an invisible lower class, a searing evisceration of unchecked capitalism’s poisoning of social morality, and a pitiful and self-righteous (dangerous, even) masturbation for straight, white incels. What fascinated me upon first watch, however, was the subterranean tension between the dreams of protagonist Arthur Fleck and the system which would validate those dreams. Joker is the story of a clown trying to entertain in a world of stand-up comedians, and—working from this premise alone—it will always end in tragedy as these two “factions” will never find reconciliation. As an MFA Directing Candidate and Co-Director of the University of Montana’s upcoming production of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, I (and the undergraduate students of the School of Theatre & Dance) have a unique opportunity to explore this tension between different modalities of performance-based comedy as a form of ongoing, embodied research. As of the time of writing this abstract, Earnest is still in rehearsal, but will have concluded its two-week production run by the time of GradCon 2025. Why Are You Laughing Right Now? is an exploration of three realms of comedic performance: comedic personage (the clown), comedic irony (the stand-up), and comedic satire (the bouffon). These performance terms have substantive differences from their literary analogues, and to fully appreciate the distinctions between literary comedy and theatrical comedy is to better understand theatre as an art form. To aid in the analysis of these distinctions will be the study of Jerry Seinfeld, Bob Nelson, and the University of Montana’s The Importance of Being Earnest, supplemented by my own research adapting a career in physical comedy to an academic theatre department.