The Atlantic

What Happens When a Joke Is Followed by Silence

Usually, that’s bad. The pandemic makes it normal.
Source: Calum Heath

Imagine sitting down at a grand piano to play, I don’t know, a Chopin ballade—something that requires technical skill and emotional engagement, an understanding of rhythm, stress, and volume. Now imagine that when you press the keys, you hear absolutely nothing.

That’s what performing comedy without an audience is like.

Over the past month, comedians have been relearning how to generate laughs when no one is there to laugh back. Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, they are recording remotely, over the internet, usually sitting safely in their own homes. On The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon began the social-distancing era trying to make his crew and house band crack up; now he’s filming from home, and his two young daughters are redefining the phrase tough crowd.

Britain doesn’t have the same tradition of late-night chat shows with opening monologues. Instead, it has “panel shows,” on which guests answer questions from a host about a given topic; politics and sports are the favorites. Lols, hopefully, ensue. For—a BBC Radio comedy show that is older than I am. And in November, I got my first stab at its BBC Television equivalent, (a relative youngster, having broadcast its first program two days before my seventh birthday).

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic3 min read
Blood and Cheap Thrills in ’80s Los Angeles
When I saw Ti West’s X in 2022, I felt refreshed. Yes, his lurid slasher—set in 1979 on a rural farm where an adult-film shoot goes very, very wrong—was hardly the most original movie ever made. West is a technician who specializes in paying tribute
The Atlantic8 min read
How Congress Could Protect Free Speech on Campus
Last year at Harvard, three Israeli Jews took a course at the Kennedy School of Government. They say that because of their ethnicity, ancestry, and national origin, their professor subjected them to unequal treatment, trying to suppress their speech
The Atlantic8 min read
Don’t Give Up on Tourism. Just Do It Better.
In 1956, the poet Elizabeth Bishop worried about the imprudence and absurdity of going abroad. “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” she writes in her poem “Questions of Travel.” “Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / in thi

Related Books & Audiobooks