Comedy for the masses

I’ve always considered my humor to be multifaceted. There’s the more mature side that appreciates witty dialogue, pop culture references and political jokes as well as the college student who loves sarcasm, YouTube videos and collegehumor.com.

And then there’s the 5-year-old in me that laughs at bodily noises, slapstick humor and words such as “balls” (I even belong to a Facebook group for that). Needless to say, it doesn’t take much to make me laugh.

There are many different genres of comedy. We all love to laugh, but it takes different things to make us. While someone might LOL watching “Saturday Night Live,” someone else might double over with laughter after someone burps.

I’ve noticed that whenever I watch a movie with friends, see a comedy troupe perform or witness something that is genuinely funny to me, not everyone laughs or even cracks a smile. Comedy is so open to interpretation that few things appeal to every single kind of humor.

On Saturday, however, I was treated to a performance unlike any other I’ve seen.
Sarah Ruhl’s “The Clean House,” which  closed Saturday at the Wells-Metz Theatre, was a comedy for the masses.

“The Clean House” had humor ranging from irony to cheap humor to physical comedy that made every attendee laugh out loud at least once. Sitting with the other ushers in the balcony, I had a bird’s-eye view of the audience.

I noticed a middle-aged couple in front snicker at a sexually-explicit joke told in Portuguese; an elderly gentleman give a hearty chuckle at the husband leaving his wife due to Jewish law; a high school student burst into giggles at “a primal moment” during which two sisters fought on stage; and the whole audience shake with laughter
as a clean-freak character transformed the stark-white house into a dirty mess by throwing a fake tree.

Not only did this show make the audience laugh, but it made the audience think, giving a more profound side to comedy.

The depth of the play was shown through the main character, Matilde, whose mother died laughing at one of her father’s jokes.

She spends most of the play thinking up “the perfect joke,” and eventually kills another character with it. At the end of the show, she reflects how heaven must be a land of “untranslatable jokes, but everyone laughs anyway.”

This level of poignancy is seldom seen in typical comedies. We are used to cheesy romantic comedies that use cliched humor and Judd Apatow-like films that use cheap-shot jokes. The fact that “The Clean House” appealed to all types of humor yet had such profundity is impressive.

Ruhl showed that perhaps the greatest comedian is life itself, and sometimes we just have to laugh at it.