Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
Interpretation
A comedian's role is to relieve tension and provoke laughter, but fear from the audience can hinder this process.
H. L. Mencken's quote suggests that for a comedian to be effective, there must be a willingness from the audience to engage and find humor in the material. If the audience is too afraid to laugh, either due to sensitivity or societal pressures, the comedian's ability to do their job is significantly diminished. This highlights the importance of a receptive atmosphere in comedy and the vulnerability involved in both performing and receiving humor.
In practice
In a comedy club, a comedian might reference this quote when encouraging the audience to let go of their inhibitions and enjoy the show.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
People would say I never censor. As Billy Crystal says, 'I don't have that button.'
I think the big lesson I've learned is that it's very hard to write satire in America because almost immediately, whatever you've thought of turns out to come true, or sometimes it already was true.
As you get older as a comedian and keep doing it, what you actually start to cherish on stage is not the build-up to the jokes, but how comfortable you can be in the silence and the non-laughing parts, and how long you can take the audience without a laugh to then get a huge reaction.
Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.
You know, crankiness is at the essence of all comedy.
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