Laugh Lines

You never quite know what lines are going to work for an audience and what lines will do nothing. I’ve read scripts that seem flat on the page that jump to life in front of an audience, and scripts that read well that do nothing for the paying customers.

My character in Cinderella had a line that got a laugh each night that I never dreamed would get a laugh. Here’s the set-up: Because the Prince came back from his travels without a bride, the King (me) developed constant hiccups. So I spent my first scene hiccupping through my lines. After the Prince meets Cinderella and falls in love at the ball, the King says “I knew something had happened. I haven’t hiccupped for the past half hour!”

Like I said, this got a laugh opening night. As all good actors do, once I realized something was working, I started to tinker a bit with it. I found that the more I hiccupped in the earlier part of the scene, the more the audience laughed. Likewise, the more ecstatic I seemed to be about the hiccups going away, the more the audience laughed. By the end of the run, I was getting a really good laugh on the line.

You can rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, but until you are actually in front of an audience, you can’t know what your final performance will be like. I’ve worked with actors who didn’t vary what they were doing in rehearsal a bit from what they did in performance, going so far as to step on their own laugh lines or applause lines. I’ve worked with others who realize that it is a collaborative medium, and the audience is part of the collaboration, and that you have to take what they are giving you and modify what you are doing accordingly. The latter are people it is a joy to work with. The former? Not so much.