QotD
"With audiences nowadays I see it with these late-night [TV show]
people, Jay Leno, David Letterman and so on the audience applauds the
jokes rather than laughs at them, which is very discouraging.
"Laughter is involuntary. If it's funny you laugh. But you can
easily clap just to say [deadpan]: 'A ha, that's funny, I think that's
funny.' Sometimes they cut to the audience and you can see they are
applauding madly. But they're not laughing."
-- Tom Lehrer, in a
2003 interview in the Sydney Morning Herald (interviewer:
Tony Davis)