In a funny, audience-winning performance, Mr. Edwards appears to have traveled to 17th-century Vienna by way of Runyonland with stopovers in Mafioso hangouts, if only to inform his turn as the friendly hangman.
The crowd for the education part was 75 well-behaved students from Community Intermediate School 166 in the South Bronx, a chatty, enthusiastic group that seemed transfixed by the company's tales of Chinese-American life and the funny audience-participation routines.
And episode after episode, as long as it's funny, audiences don't really seem to mind.
When he's laughing because he has said something funny, the audience is finished with the laugh.
This is over in Princeton, Missouri, and she's playing 'When the Saints Come Marching In,' and, to make it funny — the audience wasn't paying much attention — she started bouncing up and down on the piano bench.
These guys all seem to be dressed as themselves, but were no less funny answering audience questions and singing a bit of "Day Man".
Do you have a favorite thing that you think is funny, but audiences more or less don't?
But it's more silly than funny, and audiences can be forgiven for wondering if an actor of restricted growth should have been cast.
You could cite "straight" actors such as Arthur Lowe, Robert Lindsay or Martin Freeman, who tipped up in TV comedies being the kind of funny that audiences remember for years.
This was met with some scepticism by producers, who feared that the scenes would not be funny to audiences and observed that, in any event, they were rarely at their best until a few nights after opening.
Try to make it funny so your audience enjoys hearing what you have to say.
