Yesterday went really well at rehearsal. The show is coming together well.
It was good to have some of the other actors sitting in the audience for some of the scenes and start to get a sense for where the laughter will be. One of the things actors have to be careful of, when doing a comedy, is not continuing on with the show if the audience is laughing. They need to pause and give time for the laughter and start again once it starts to die down. If they don’t do this they are training the audience to NOT laugh.
Perhaps there is a lesson for life in here too.
Give time for laughter.
If you are with someone and people are laughing don’t try to talk over it, let them laugh. Or, in an even larger sense, perhaps if you don’t give time for laughter in your life, it will eventually not be there at all?
One thing I thought of the other day, for parents who want to laugh more is to laugh whenever you child does.
I don’t care if they just did something wrong or destroyed your favorite vase, if they laugh, you laugh. It doesn’t mean they don’t get a punishment if they did something wrong, but the punishment can wait for a moment, they will still know they did something wrong.
The benefit for the parent is a whole world of laughter. Children laugh anywhere from 3 to 300 times as much as adults, so we can take a lesson from them when it comes to laughter.
Somewhere along the line the rest of us “learn” from parents, society, the media, whoever, that laughing so much is silly and childish. The problem is that those forces paint being silly and childish as a bad thing!
It’s NOT!
If we all had a little more silly in our lives, if we saw things as children do, I can guarantee everyone would be a lot happier and chances are there would be no war or poverty.
So the next time you plan on trying to talk over someone’s laughter, stop for a moment and …
Keep laughing.