My wife, with whom I recently celebrated 12 years of marriage, told me my latest email made her sad.
It was about my elderly dogs and so today I wanted to talk about something kind of opposite of sad: laughter.

Because shortform video feeds pass copyrighted content filter easier, YouTube has great amounts of copyrighted shows in shorts.
I find myself watching the show Sopranos one clip at a time. And today I saw this particular clip of Anthony Soprano.

He was talking to his shrink about how he and his friends used to make fun of a peer with a cleft palate.
Used to make him sing and do all sorts of amusing stuff for shits and giggles, then one day he saw him cry.
He didn't relate to the poor fellow back then, but apparently he had just played golf with some non-mafia people.
In this golf game he felt, for the first time, what it's like to be used for someone else's entertainment. It made him sick.

Then in a follow-up clip I saw the actual golf game. The other golfers were doctors, friends of Tony's neighbor.
They asked him if he knew other Italian mobs, if the Godfather was accurate, blah blah. Tony got angrier and angrier.
And it takes something like that to understand the pain he inflicted upon another person, in the same way.

I'm sure many people relate to Tony's perspective, because as we live our adult lives we definitely sometimes put on a show for others.
I vividly remember times in college when I put on a show for others to please others.
Usually while drunk, which made the next morning even more remorseful.

There's that story of Pagliacci, the village clown.

Related to being a clown, something that's super popular on Korean social media these days is a forum post that went viral.
The gist of it is, the OP's relationship with her boyfriend is getting serious and they're considering marriage.
But one problem: the boyfriend is a clown. And it seems that her father will be against the marriage because of it.
Then the post goes on to explain all of the professional clown lingo and the specifics of a career trajectory of clowns.
Because of the sheer relative ridiculousness of all these terms and concepts, the post went viral.
Through this trend clowns got an even more entertaining reputation than before.

(Somewhat random observation: in Korea we're not afraid of clowns the way Americans are. Hmm)

So it seems that being used for other people's laughter is not that good of an experience.
But there's a very strong counter example I want to expose you to, and it's Conan O'Brien.
I've always admired Conan's candor and general ability to generate laughter from any situation from years ago.
Since retiring from TV he's been hosting a podcast, and in the podcast he goes into a lot of detail about his upbringing.
His Irish trauma, growing up with many siblings, being a history buff, and so on.

There are two anecdotes I think are worth highlighting. One is about why he sings this really ridiculous song out of the blue sometimes.
Here's the entire anecdote:

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And another anecdote about how his first date with his wife went.

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The first one is about his upbringing and (I believe) how the concept of comedy started seeping into his unconscious mind.
There are tons of stories in between these two stories, but the second one highlights how he's just... Always in a show.
Even if you're on a first date with someone you just fell in love on first sight. You do this ridiculous voice because you're always a showman.
Then you have the Conan O'Brien Hot Ones episode. Which really cemented to me, how he's just the best showman of our time.
(and in case you don't know Hot Ones is a talk show where you eat progressively hotter wings and Conan just goes to town on it)

Conan gladly is a clown. People laugh at his expense, but what's so special about him to me is: he laughs at himself.
There are times in the podcast when he goes deep into his self-loathing and it, somewhat unexpectedly, makes sense.
How he would use that much of self-loathing and transmute it into something that's so polar opposite of it: laughter.

This is less about my commentary on the phenomenon of laughter and comedy. But my greater point is this:
To one person, becoming a laughing stock for something they want is a matter of morbid humiliation.
But to a person who decides to be a laughing stock for the sake of making others laugh,
​it's a great demonstration of personal power.