Life gets less funny as you get older
Although people can still get funnier
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Some artistic forms seem to be easier to get old in than others. It’s hard to mature gracefully as a pop star, as a certain 1980s icon currently demonstrates, but there’s no reason time can’t be kind to a comedian, as you only have more routines and experience to draw from, and comedy’s certainly one area where looks aren’t generally considered a dealbreaker.
Nonetheless, I’d argue there’s a fundamental challenge to ageing in the profession of comedian, namely that life itself gets less funny as you get older. The first half of our lives, or certainly our earlier life, can seem ideally suited to the comic spirit; it’s a time of acquisition, learning by failing and, crucially, an enormous amount of social contact.
The second half of life – if we are lucky enough to make it that far – is on the
surface a less auspicious set of circumstances for comedy. We enter into physical and mental decline, increasing personal loss, and for all the protestations as to the depth and power of life’s second part, it inevitably culminates in death.
This isn’t territory comedy can’t work with, of course, in fact it’s territory comedy thrives in; it just tends to mean a gap opens up increasingly profoundly between the humour and the stuff the comedian makes humour out of; the comic’s position moves closer towards Howard Jacobson’s explanation for Jewish comedy, ‘The Jews are funny because life is not.’