Courtney McGuire nervously stepped up to the microphone at the crowded Culture Shock in downtown Ithaca. Wearing her pinstriped New York shirt, she let loose a string of cuss words that sent the audience into stitches.

McGuire was among the many local comedians to do standup at ComedyFLOPs’ Comedy Festival, held in downtown Ithaca on Saturday. Ithacans gathered around, not just to laugh, but to celebrate laughter along with the comedians. The festival, held at three venues in the Commons, also included comedy workshops and improv sessions, one of them by Cornell’s very own Whistling Shrimp. 

“Once you get one person laughing, they get their friends to start laughing too and soon the whole room is laughing,” McGuire said. “The goal of comedy is to find something that your audience can relate to so that when you tell your joke, it’s like they’re reliving the experience with you.”

On consideration, it seems McGuire is right. In comedy, we always need something relatable that we can latch ourselves onto in order to laugh. For comedy to function, members of the audience must be able to locate a piece of the laugh that they can see in themselves. But finding this piece proves difficult. 

“[Being funny] really depends what kind of crowd you’re with,” said A.J. Foster, another comedian. “The same joke may not hit as well on different nights, or even in the same night but at different clubs. But you just have to have confidence in your own jokes.”

In accordance with these outlines, the best comedians are the ones that find topics that speak to the entire audience, rather than just a few in the audience. Most people say that they are pretty funny with the right people: their friends. But the transition from regaling your friends to bringing down a whole house of ages, sensibilities and cultures is where the art of standup lies.

“It takes about a year to figure out how badly you really suck [at standup],” said McGuire, who also noted the copious dedication it takes to excel in comedy.

On the other side of the comic equation, you find that comedy always pokes fun at someone and doing so may end up alienating some of the audience, the exact opposite of a comedian’s intentions. But therein lies the definition of comedy:  making fun of anything will end up offending someone.

So what’s the best subject to poke fun at?

Many of the best comedians immediately turned to their own lives for source material in order to take the offensive edge off the jests. And many of the worst comedians did exactly the opposite: they made fun of the audience.

One of the comedians, who got no laughter from the crowd, even began to single out individual audience members to insult in retaliation for what he perceived to be a weak reception, revealing his own homophobia in the process. The more he made fun of the audience, the less we laughed (if it is possible to get less laughter than silence) and the less we laughed, the more he antagonized us for not laughing. 

The most important step, then, is to start off on a good note that makes the audience at ease and build a rapport, steps this comedian failed to follow. Instead he dived headfirst into a failed comedy set that he claimed had worked for every other audience besides us.

Needless to say, he was not deemed the funniest person in Ithaca and was actually booed off the stage. But the strange thing was that the belligerent comedian was so sure of his own crude humor, that he was offended by the audience’s silence.

In this sense, it is the comedian’s job to unify himself with the audience and also to unify the audience members with each other. A comedian made a jab at how Cornellians are obnoxious, leaving me an outcast amongst the townies (they really do hate us and that is no joke). But for the vocal majority, the joke pleased the crowd.

Within each comedian’s set, he or she had a chance to create a comfortable atmosphere and temporarily befriend the audience. If the strategy proved successful, euphoria rushed over the audience along with the strange feeling that they would be friends with the comedian in real life, despite the fact that they all have never met.

But this feeling is not strange at all. The general consensus sits that humor is an important part of relationships. Before you laugh, you have to feel comfortable. The comedians that put people on edge by commenting on their characteristics (Jews, gays, African-Americans, etc.) were thus the worst at making people feel comfortable unless the comedians themselves were also of that subgroup.

A.J. Foster was aware of this. His set mainly consisted of plays on “ghetto” stereotypes and when he made a gay joke, he quickly clarified that he had gay friends and he was completely supportive of them. Even this little concession kept the crowd at bay.

All in all, ComedyFLOPs’ festival drew in a wide variety of comedians as well as a complementarily diverse crowd. This brought to light the comedian’s talents, or lack thereof, and proved one thing: comedy is a double-edged sword. It has the power to unite in hilarity or segregate in silence. The line is drawn between those who laugh and those who do not.