It’s the world we live in: every human activity broken down into measurable chunks, everything made quantifiable, the easier to be priced, packaged and sold. So why should comedy be spared? But still, this story has the air of a belated (or early) April Fool. Is there really a theatre in Barcelona that’s set up a pay-per-laugh scheme for comedy audiences? Are standup punters really being charged every time they crack a smile?
Apparently, they are. The Teatreneu club in Barcelona has introduced the system, in cahoots with ad agency The Cyranos McCann. It’s a response, reportedly, to a spike in Spanish government taxes on theatre tickets, which has scared audiences off live performance. This pay-per-laugh wheeze draws on facial recognition technology. A tablet is fitted to the back of each seat, which reads audience members’ facial expressions and runs up a tab of smirks, chuckles and belly laughs. Each laugh (the BBC tells us) is charged at €0.30 (24p), and once you’ve spent €24 (£19), you can knock yourself out – every subsequent laugh is free.
Now, I was once fingered as the real-life template for the anti-hero of Russell Kane’s novel The Humorist – a critic who is “incapable of laughing or smiling”. By that argument, surely I’d welcome an arrangement to secure me free comedy in perpetuity. Then there are those “high cultural capital” comedygoers – as per sociologist Sam Friedman’s research – who consider that “laughter contaminated the aesthetic experience” of comedy. Again, news of this scheme might prompt even these committed killjoys to break out a cheesy grin.
But even if I were stony-faced in the aisles, I wouldn’t want to spend half a comedy gig distracted by an image of that unsmiling mush on an iPad 12in from the end of my nose. And in fact, I like a laugh. Whether I’d like a laugh so much if I submitted to a system that monetised that laugh, making me highly conscious of every laugh I laughed, and every laugh I didn’t (to the detriment, you’d think, of much enjoying the act on stage) is less clear, Guardian informs.
