Maeve Higgins once set herself a task. The Irish-born comedian wanted to see what life would be like if she stopped laughing at things that weren’t funny. Turns out it wasn’t as easy as she thought. “It was so effing hard,” she says. “Laughter is a lubricant and is expected, and it’s really hard not to do it.”
It’s coming up for 11pm on a bone-chillingly cold Tuesday night in New York. Higgins and her friend Jon Ronson are huddled backstage behind a thick black curtain, mulling over how the latest gig in their monthly stand-up series, I’m New Here – Can You Show Me Around?, went. They’re pleased. Tonight’s assorted comics went down well with the punters, a youngish, hip crowd who’d braved the bitter weather to sit in a packed, dimly lit venue under a pub – all in search of some laughs.
The show is loosely predicated on the theme of being bewildered recent arrivals in a new town, as Higgins and Ronson were not so long ago in Brooklyn. Higgins (a virtuoso comic, author and TV personality in her native Ireland) and Ronson (better known as the bestselling author of The Psychopath Test and The Men Who Stare at Goats) suggest there’s something particularly special about being part of the shared experience that is live comedy – that curious alchemy that occurs when people come together specifically to laugh (or not, depending on the quality of the acts).
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