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The business of making people laugh

Being funny for a living is very serious business. How much would you pay for a laugh?

Jon Stewart warms up the crowd before taping The Daily Show.

Photograph: Scott Gries/Getty Images

What’s a laugh worth? You can get your yuks in a comedy club for $20 or less; for a few hours of humor in a movie theater, you’ll pay about $10. A whoopee cushion or a joy buzzer is significantly cheaper; to indulge in more highbrow humor—say, a framed New Yorker cartoon or the complete first three seasons of Saturday Night Live on DVD—you’ll spend $100 or more. But maybe it’s worth it. After all, laughing until tears run down your cheeks is priceless.

And these days, with the world in recession and pockets of violence around the globe, people are willing to pay for a good chuckle. That makes laughter big business. Stand-up comedy, rom-com movies, funny stories, gag gifts—strike the right funny bone and the money pours in. The American cable network Comedy Central, which hits both high and low with political satire like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and cartoons like South Park, has been an astonishing success, with more than 20 million subscribers and almost half a billion in ad revenue. Top-grossing comedies, like Kung Fu Panda for kids or Sex and the City for adults, have each brought in more than $400 million at the box office. And as long as there’s an 8-year-old boy trapped inside every one of us, some jokes will always find an audience. The iFart application, a digital whoopee cushion for Apple’s iPhone, has been purchased more than 350,000 times, making it one of the phone’s most popular add-ons.

But getting the belly laugh and the credit card number is far from simple. Which jokes turn lucrative and which don’t is a mysterious calculation. Only two Hollywood directors—Jay Roach (Meet the Fockers and two Austin Powers movies) and Chris Columbus (Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire )—have ever managed to produce more than one big mainstream comedy blockbuster. The iPhone application Pull My Finger, in which the old joke is activated digitally, beat iFart to market, then flamed out.

New York University associate arts professor Laurence Maslon co-wrote the book Make 'Em Laugh, a history of comedy in America that accompanied a six-part PBS series, and even after studying 100 years of success and failure in the funny business, he still can’t say why one comic concept will capture the imagination and another won’t. "If I knew that, you’d be reaching me in Beverly Hills right now," he said by phone from his New York apartment.

Novelty is part of the humor equation, though, and the constant quest for that newly relevant, surprising trope that will catch the public’s attention means an incessant demand for new material. For aspiring humorists, that spells opportunity; for established careerists, it equals insecurity. So even though everyone’s looking for a laugh to sell, and there’s plenty of money to be made selling it, making a living being funny is, well, not very.

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