How is it that a bunch of phone-addicted attention-seekers who are exposed to the horrors of being on Earth in 2026 keep getting up to tell jokes to rooms full of people? The trite answer is that we cannot do anything else. Comedians are famously useless at anything that isn’t comedy. The more noble answer is that comedy, while frivolous, is a survival instinct. And there’s an awful lot of surviving going on right now.
Like most artforms, the presentation of comedy is highly deceptive. A talented ballerina will present a human display of strength seemingly without effort, bodily flow absent resistance. To be able to achieve that presentation, the artist had to endure the opposite – strengthening their bodies using repeated, punishing force and resistance. The same performative lie is true of comedians. We are a bunch of clowns with varying degrees of mental illness, running onto a stage and cracking wise with a confidence and lightness belying the fact that we’re one bad show review away from spiraling into the abyss.
The mental and emotional fragility of a comedian is delicate at the best of times. And if this is the best of times, for the love of all that’s Holy – nobody tell that to me or any of my comedian friends.
Laughter is instinctual in mammals. When a chimp detects a nearby predator, it’ll let out a danger call. If that suspected dangerous leopard on the forest floor turns out to actually be a mouse – the chimp will laugh as a biological mechanism to reduce its tension. Instead of continuing on with heightened levels of danger hormones needlessly floating in its brain that trade off emotional wellbeing for the ability to run faster, the chimp can quickly return to a calm state with this ingenious evolutionary trick. Like a sneeze, ejecting emotional detritus from its brain.
Though this is a far more high-minded claim that a kiwi comedian would typically make – this is our offering to an audience. Come and sit in a dark room, filled with fellow travellers who are enduring their own hardships, difficulties and complications – and let us emotionally transform stalking leopards into mice for an hour for you. Let’s do the most human thing possible in the face of ludicrous odds stacked against our future. Let’s laugh at them. In the moment because it makes you feel better. But longer term because laughing is one of the most useful weapons we have to avoid paralysis. There is something deeply useful about laughing at the absurdity of where we find ourselves as a way to move forward.
Now, I’m not going to pretend every comedy show is setting out to achieve such lofty ambitions. A lot of my show is about me being too high and thinking about goats, for example. However, whatever the content of the individual show you get to, the function remains the same. We laugh so that we may live to fight on for another day.
See award-winning comedian Tim Batt’s show Eternal Optimist in the New Zealand International Comedy Festival, on 6-9 May in Wellington and 13-16 May in Auckland.
