Noam Dworman: commitment

Transcript context

…What’s the biggest thing about audiences laughing at comedy that you do not understand? Well, what’s interesting is, always, that the entire audience — or most of the audience — at the same instant in time seems to react the same way, to know whether something is funny in a way that nobody can explain. This will happen even if it’s the same comedian telling the same joke four days in a row. I will find myself laughing harder at the same joke, just as the entire room is laughing harder. I could go to the video, and it’s very difficult to pinpoint what he’s doing differently, but there’s something on a micro level that they do differently, and everybody perceives it the same way at the same time, and that’s the magic of it all. I don’t know if that’s a direct answer to your question, but that’s what it makes me think of. I don’t know how to explain that. There’s something about human synchronization of the audience in there. If you have to extrapolate that to broader social situations, what do you conclude?…

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