Comedy is like magic. It’s like a magician showing tricks to a little boy: the magician hopes he falls for it and the boy hopes to not expect what’s about to happen.

I don’t think there exists a good joke where the comic played on the expected - that’s not comedy, it’s formality. Still, an audience is not always going to laugh at a good joke. “Bombing” is when a comedian tries their best but the crowd is not into it. Was the comedian simply not funny? I don’t think so. I believe they weren’t brave enough. Like failing gamblers, you need to take risks when you’re desperate. A joke can be funny but the timing may not be right or the tone, the character the comedian has established or is portraying. A self-unaware, conventionally attractive white guy will not win over the laughs of his audience if he jokes about his romantic troubles - he’s too unrelatable.

In stand-up, everything is the performance - your posture, your clothes, your vibe - because that lets the audience know if you’re safe, if you’re fun to laugh at as well as with (but anybody can joke about sex and get laughs - it’s the panacea of comedy).

Up there, you are being gawked at for any evidence of joke. If somebody coughs on stage, it's a sign of sickness; if a comedian does it, it's a joke. Thus, Jeffrey Ross makes his lyme disease a character in his act.

Playing Chopin on a broken piano is not going to sound good, unless you make it into your art. Steve Lee has a disability that inhibits him from moving his hands, but he incorporates it into his act by calling himself the “Disabled Ninja” (he’s from China).

From the moment one stands up on stage to do stand-up, the performance begins. No, scratch that, it begins when you were born. Every comedian with a foreign name knows this because even the name they were born with is funny. A good comedian addresses anything odd to make a joke out of. Ari Matti ends his impeccable set by exclaiming how horrible the same set was received by the comedy club next door.

What makes a joke funny? It’s not the joke; it’s not the comedian; it’s not the crowd. Funny may be more in the perspective than in the content. Sometimes a sick and twisted, nonsensical or uncomfortable and frankly revolting perspective.

When I did stand-up in the Lebanon High School library during Halloween, with jokes written on a ripped piece of paper out of my Calculus notebook, the perspective I was bringing was not of somebody established with established jokes. I am this guy, coming from across the ocean from hell-knows-where, wearing a deflated inflatable ostrich costume. And I open up with a one-liner I got from a Laffy-Taffy: “What’s a snake's favorite subject?” The answer to that doesn’t matter to understand that what I was doing was utterly silly. What unraveled were 6 minutes of uncensored me. Stand-up is the most terrifying and most freeing experience. I saw a homosexual comedian outline his trauma coming out to his mother, an intimate moment, to a club of 50 half-drunk university students. I admire those comedians who can reveal their darkest secrets, as they tend to be the funniest. That lets the listeners know it is safe to laugh the language of joy. My crowd laughed less at my jokes and more at my weird accent. And all of a sudden everybody was laughing at me, but it was funny.