The Perfect Audience

The room was dark, the smoke clouds wafting up to obscure the overheads that made the man's shiny face all the more noticeable. He was sweating heavily, stammering out the last few minutes of his set, as he told the crowd about an incident with his mother when he was twelve. The audience, stoners and hipsters who had been drinking since noon, watched him like a bug under a microscope. They wanted to be interested in what they saw, but really they were just hoping he would burn up under the harsh overhead lights.

At the end of the day, there's nothing better than watching a comedian crash spectacularly.

I took a swig of my lukewarm beer and made notes in my notebook. I had been doing comedy for about a year, and doing comedy is like being in Alcoholics Anonymous. The guys who have been doing it longer than you are always super smug about it, and they have a thousand different sayings. They just tell you to keep working the program, no matter how much you hate it. In this case, the program was a fifteen-minute set. Randy, a five-year "Vet" of the stage, had found me doing stand-up at my college. He said I had some talent but suggested that I work on a fifteen-minute set until I knew it backward and forwards.

"Once you know that set better than your own hand, then you can start adding new stuff."

Six months later, I had been doing the same set for nearly six months without fail.

I felt that I knew it well, I could have quoted it in my sleep, and I had tried to add some new material time and time again. The bits were snappy, the one-liners were delivered perfectly, and Randy had even said that some of my new stuff was good, though off-script. I felt like my bits were topical without being inflammatory and that my stories landed without being too long-winded. I wasn't ready for Comedy Central, but I was more than prepared for the little dive bars that seem to be where I was still cutting my teeth.

So why was I only receiving middling laughs?

The guy on stage, I hadn't bothered to remember his name, stumbled off the stage to some polite, if not strained, applause. He flopped onto the couch next to me, wiping the sweat off his forehead. Randy took the mic and started attempting to get the crowd excited for the next comedian. Randy was usually the MC at these events. His reputation had been made over half a decade of funny, and the crowd was always glad to see him.

He was building me up, getting the crowd hyped for my set, and as he introduced me, I stood up to scattered applause and made my way to the stage. I mounted the stage, a beer in one hand and my notebook under my arm, and set up as the crowd murmured and coughed. I adjusted the mic, dropping it a little from Randy's seven-foot-tall height, and the audience seemed to find some amusement in this.

I could see many familiar faces sitting amongst the smoke and smelled the cheap beer aroma of whatever was on tap. The audience was almost always the same, the same barflies and regulars who came to hear the same jokes repeatedly. I was always happy to see them and their tip money at the end of the night, but I remember wishing for some new blood amongst the spattering of drunks and stoners.

Oh, how the gods mocked me with their answer.

"So I'm pro-guns, hold your boo's."

A few half-hearted boos came from the crowd as though in answer.

"Someone online asked me the other day if that meant I would shoot a home invader, which it does, but as a comedian who works for tips, I don't usually have anything worth stealing, so it's not usually a problem."

Some scattered laughs.

"Well, they always follow it up by asking me, "What? Don't you value human life more than things?" "Well," I tell them, "clearly he valued my things more than his life, so I must have nicer things than I thought."

Some half-hearted laughs greeted the end of my joke, but they were perfunctory at best.

The crowd came in as I set up my next joke.

"Have you heard about this new paper made of elephant dung? Ya, I shit you not. They take the dung, clean it, press it, clean it again, I hope. Through a process known only to the papermaker, they create an eco-friendly paper that's safe for the environment."

The crowd shuffled in as I set up my punch line, and though I couldn't tell exactly how many there were, it looked like at least twenty people as they filed into the back of the room. I couldn't tell if they sat down or not; the room seemed to get darker as they filled the space. They didn't fill in the empty spaces left by the sparse crowd we had upfront. They just hovered near the back of the room in a cloud of strange silence.

I paused a minute too long, realizing I was stretching my punch line out too long before continuing.

"It's like they say, isn't it? One elephant's shit is another man's Fifty Shades of Gray."

The crowd actually laughed at that one. This joke was so ridiculous that it never failed to get laughs. The group in the back, however, burst into sudden and immediate laughter. The laughter was welcome but a little unexpected. It was hearty, almost manufactured, and it rolled out in a jolly wave that took some people by surprise. I saw people in the front jump a little as the twenty or so people burst into spontaneous laughter very suddenly. I smiled a little, nodding and asking if they liked that joke or something, before continuing on with the next joke. The crowd of newcomers were definitely what we needed around here, and I rode the wave of their laughter into my next bit.

"You ever wonder why you never see any Hipster Necrophiliacs?"

The front row shook their heads, but the back continued to laugh mechanically.

"Because they'd have to fuck'um before they got cool!"

The laughs from the front were more akin to groans as they accepted the corny joke, but the back of the house burst into the same mechanical laughter.

I was energized. I was receiving what I thought was my due at long last.

These people were eating up what I was putting down, and it tempted me to do something I had been working on but hadn't brought out yet.

"So my mom called the other day and,"

The crowd in the back hadn't stopped laughing, though. They buzzed with this sort of constant, canned laughter as the others died down and waited for the next joke. Some had turned to look at the crowd behind them, and I could see some of the other comedians looking at them with misgivings. Their laughter never changed, never rose or fell in volume, but kept chuckling out in that fake, sitcom laughter you always hear on Friends or How I met Your Mother.

"She lives in a small town, two stoplights, and a Walmart, and the town has a dog that's become sort of a..sort of a…"

I was starting to lose my focus as the crowd kept laughing. They never tired, never stopped, and I could see one of the Comedians getting up to say something. The audience wasn't watching me anymore. They were all craned around in their seats, looking at the crowd that chuckled on and on. The comedian, Mark for sure, walked towards the back. As he did, he was suddenly obscured by the smokey darkness that seemed unaffected by the murky overheads that flanked the stage. He stopped on the fringe, saying something to them as they laughed in response. He suddenly clapped his knees and began to bray the donkey laughter I had heard from the couch on many occasions. He laughed long and hard, joining the throng as his brays were lost amongst their grating mirth.

After a few seconds, his unique sound was lost amongst their glee.

"Town Mascot." I continued as I tried to power through it, "It sleeps in the middle of the road, people feed it and leave it water, they drive around it and bring it inside at night and..., and everyone knows who he is and why he's there."

I was losing focus. I could see Randy approaching the stage, plugging in a mic so he could remind the crowd to keep it down and respect the comedians, and I hoped that this was just some kind of a prank. The laughter had been going for nearly two minutes now, and it was becoming abrasive. I was no longer flattered. I was no longer heartened by the laughter. I was becoming creeped out, and if this was someone's idea of a joke, then it wasn't very funny.

I heard the static when Randy's mic clipped in.

"Okay, people, let's remember to respect the comedians and keep our laughter to a respectable level, okay?"

The laughter continued uninterrupted.

I stood on the raised stage, looking out into the inky darkness, and watching that chuckling tide. They rumbled out their artificial laughter in the face of my confusion. Randy stood by the stage, eyes glaring at them. When he sat the mic down, I could hear the reverb as it made an angry sound. He set off for the back of the house then, not a long walk, but he didn't seem to want to make it. When he got to the throng of people, he started shouting at them to be quiet. Randy had come to the same conclusion I had. He thought this was a big joke, a flash mob, maybe even one set up by Mark, and he was not amused.

I watched from the stage as his shouts became a confused chuckle. His chuckle became a guffaw, and then it was all over for poor Randy. He stumbled into the mob, grinning and laughing, and his laughs were soon consumed by the tide of laughter.

That was when they started moving forward.

The crowd was up now, scenting danger, but the strange group blocked the exit. They could do little but watch as the shuffling mass crept forward. They seemed to float as they came, sweeping slowly towards the crowd that had congregated close to the stage. Some drunk let fly with a pitcher of PBR, the pitcher spilling as it flew end over end, but if the crowd was slowed by the beer or the heavy glass vessel, they didn't show it. Another man charged them, meaty fists raised, but fell to his knees, laughing before connected with anything. The group rolled over him, and when they passed, he was no longer on the ground.

The closer they got, the less I felt like I saw any of them. As the barflies began to chuckle, their knees shaking and their fists pounding their chests, the more my feet began driving me towards the back of the stage. The group was made of human-shaped creatures. Their features were dark and undulating, their mouths laughing, white teeth smiling, as their eyeless faces bobbed with mirthless laughter. Those who were absorbed by them were never seen again. Those who were absorbed by them never stopped laughing.

When my back smacked against the wall, I knew I was out of places to retreat. The fabric curtain that covered the wall felt soft under my sweaty hands, and it was only then that I realized I was still holding the mic. I let it drop, the feedback yarking angrily, but I hardly noticed amidst the din of emotionless laughter. The tone never rose, never fell, just remained at the same level of soulless noise as it drove icepicks into my skull. I closed my eyes, sinking to my backside, and covered my ears with my hands as the mass came up to the edge of the stage.

When the overhead lights hit it, the mass recoiled, and the laughter sounded like tortured screams with a thin veneer of hilarity.

It sounded like the laughter that comes creeping from the windows of an asylum.

It sounded like the laughter one hears in hell.

I closed my eyes and prepared to be consumed. I knew that I, too, would begin to laugh any minute. I would be helpless to resist. I would simply start to chuckle, start to guffaw, and before I knew it, I would be running to them. I would gladly join the throng of laughing fools if it meant an end to this hell. I was standing alone outside the joke, and even now, in my terror, I longed to be a part of it.

I don't know how long I sat there with my hands over my ears.

One minute the world was a sea of robotic laughter, and the next, it was simply gone.

I lifted my head to find the bar's backroom completely empty. The other three comedians, Mark, Randy, and the audience, were all gone. I was the only one left, the only one not laughing, and when I left the bar, the owner watching me go with some confusion. I never came back again. I knew I couldn't stand on that stage again, not after what I had seen, and I certainly couldn't tell jokes again as I thought about that grinning audience of living darkness.

Turns out, that was the first of many retreats that night.

Over the next few weeks, I saw the audience again and again.

They were in the grocery store as I checked out.

They were outside the bus as I rode it to work, standing outside the bus stop and looking at me with their eyeless faces.

The night they were at the foot of my bed, I knew I had to leave.

I packed up anything that mattered to me, got in my car, and drove until I ran out of miles or ran out of money.

Turns out, the money came first.

I ran out of gas next to a little motel that needed a desk clerk.

I've been handling that desk for the last two years. I'm pretty good at my job. I make the guests laugh, I'm always at work on time since I live on the premises, and I can eat anything I want from the hotel kitchen as long as I don't go too crazy. I found friends in this little town, not the same as those I had, but their good people.

They tell me often that I should be a comedian.

I tell them that in another life, I was.

When I go to sleep, I get to live that other life and listen to the chuckling crowd as it drags itself closer and closer to my stage.

I always wake up before they get me.

I hope they never do.