"The best way to make your audience laugh is to start laughing yourself"
About this Quote
Comedy, for Goldsmith, isn`t a trick you perform on people; it`s a contagion you catch in public. "Start laughing yourself" sounds almost too simple, but it smuggles in a whole aesthetic: the performer isn`t a detached wit lobbing jokes from a safe distance. He is implicated. If you can`t be moved by your own amusement, why should anyone else trust it?
Goldsmith wrote in an 18th-century culture where social life was theater: coffeehouses, salons, the playhouse, the essay circulating like conversation. Laughter was a social signal, a kind of instant polling about what a room is allowed to find ridiculous. By placing the comedian`s laughter first, Goldsmith points to who sets the terms. You don`t just deliver punchlines; you model permission. Your own laughter becomes a cue that lowers defenses and coordinates the crowd into a shared rhythm. It`s the soft power of timing and confidence, not the hard power of argument.
The subtext is also a warning against the brittle kind of satire that prides itself on superiority. Goldsmith, who often skewered affectation and moral posturing, suggests that the surest way to land a joke is to risk looking foolish yourself. Self-laughter is humility disguised as technique: it tells the audience you`re in the joke, not merely above it.
Read now, it anticipates everything from late-night hosts who break to TikTokers who crack up mid-bit. The laugh track was always there; Goldsmith just insists the first track should be human.
Goldsmith wrote in an 18th-century culture where social life was theater: coffeehouses, salons, the playhouse, the essay circulating like conversation. Laughter was a social signal, a kind of instant polling about what a room is allowed to find ridiculous. By placing the comedian`s laughter first, Goldsmith points to who sets the terms. You don`t just deliver punchlines; you model permission. Your own laughter becomes a cue that lowers defenses and coordinates the crowd into a shared rhythm. It`s the soft power of timing and confidence, not the hard power of argument.
The subtext is also a warning against the brittle kind of satire that prides itself on superiority. Goldsmith, who often skewered affectation and moral posturing, suggests that the surest way to land a joke is to risk looking foolish yourself. Self-laughter is humility disguised as technique: it tells the audience you`re in the joke, not merely above it.
Read now, it anticipates everything from late-night hosts who break to TikTokers who crack up mid-bit. The laugh track was always there; Goldsmith just insists the first track should be human.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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