Second Nature
It was Original Nathaniel who suggested the bit name, because he had always loved Sci-fi and the sense he made of law in invented spaces. He sat across from NG-2 at a diner table littered with index cards and said, “You should do the **The Laws of Comedy**.”
NG-2 frowned. “Parody law is messy.” “Not parody of science fiction,” Original said. “Parody of how we keep wanting there to be rules. Try this: **One:** A comedian may not harm an audience, or, through inaction, allow an audience to come to harm—unless the harm is the insult of a truth they needed. **Two:** A comedian must obey the show order given by clubs, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law or common decency. **Three:** A comedian must protect his own ability to observe and think, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.” NG-2 looked at the cards for a long time. “I don’t laugh much,” he said. “But I can feel that.” “You could add the **Zeroth Law** later,” Original said. “A comedian may reorganize a civilization’s priorities if it will increase the total number of laughs experienced by conscious beings without making them stop being conscious.” “I think that one is a series closer,” NG-2 said.
They worked. They discovered how to write together, which is to say they discovered how to be brave about being wrong in the same room. Original had a metaphor generator that had been rusting and he oiled it by admitting what he had lost; NG-2 had a room-reader that could forecast storms and he used it to put their craft where it would catch rain. NG-3 came by and had coffee and then had to leave because the laughter shook him and he spilled it if he stayed too long.
They wrote a special. They called it **Second Nature** because the obvious thing is sometimes the best name.
Second Nature
Elena watched it from the side of the stage because she had come to prefer the angle where you can see the audience’s faces. She stood with her notebook, a habit she didn’t need and wouldn’t give up. NG-2 walked in like a person who had learned how to walk for this purpose. He acknowledged the cameras with a tilt of the head that said, **I know about you.**
The first twenty minutes were about duplications in ordinary life. The guy at the sandwich shop who greets you like a twin each day and like a stranger the next and how both are comforting. The duplicate emails from two committees at work that want to know if you are available to help with the same philanthropic cause, and the ethics of responding “yes” to both and helping once. He built from the trivial to the precise the way a builder stacks scaffolds to reach a roof he knows exists.
He segued to identity with a turn that would be formulaic if it were not true. “There is a version of me,” he said, “who is a ghost. He is very proud and he is very tired. He is watching this and he is thinking, *Good for him,* and then he is thinking, *Good for me.*” He told a thing Original had lived: going to a store and standing in front of a cereal shelf and understanding suddenly that the number of choices is how the store tells you, you are free. While it funnels you toward the brand that paid the best shelf-rent. He didn’t scold. He described gently enough that you heard yourself.
He took that into a riff about the paradox of choice in a life where someone else has chosen part of who you must be by copying you. He brought the room to the edge of disagreement and then invited them to come back with a gentleness that only works if you mean it. Halfway through he did the Comedy Laws bit. The room loved that there might be rules. They loved even more that he left space after each law for them to discover exceptions.
Then he did what Elena had not anticipated, which is why he had not told her. He brought Original Nathaniel on stage. The crowd stood *for him*, not for NG-2. For a minute it was a concert for a memory, and then Original said, “Please sit down; standing ruins my concentration,” and they laughed and sat. Original read two premises. NG-2 converted them into working bits in real time. It was a dance and a lecture on the unteachable, and the room understood both. They could feel themselves being taught a way of being taught. NG-3 watched from a balcony box, a smile too wide for his face. He looked like a man who had found a place for some of his laughter to live without drowning him. He took notes, the kind of notes that turn into care.
In the last ten minutes NG-2 stopped joking. He only said true things and let the room do the funny part. He said: “Law is how we tell each other what we owe and what we are owed. Before there is law there is an intuition. We ruin ourselves when we write laws that are not honest about intuitions. I do not laugh. I feel the topology of laughter more than it's physiology. But I do talk to people who do laugh, and I make a thing in them on purpose that they want made.” He said: “If I owe anyone beyond what I owe the audience, it is the man who taught me how to see a premise. I would like to pay him in attention, gratitude, and monthly checks.” The place shook; he had turned profit participation into a punchline and an ethic.
He ended with a sequence about an unexpected item in the bagging area that went somewhere Elena had not expected. “When you check out of yourself,” he said, “please do not forget you put your new self in the bagging area, where it waits for you to notice that you are heavier now because you are more.” He bowed twice, he did not laugh.
The Aftermath and the Before
Echo Arts went to work elsewhere. They tried models and response curves, and they had some success, because you can program a room to laugh if you teach it to want approval. But the city was now different around the edges. You could feel it in contracts, in the way agents pitched, in the way lawyers wrote *except* and *unless* in better places. The Bureau had a new guideline: **In improvisational performance by mindprint actors, assess authorship at the moment of integration.** It wasn’t elegant but it would do until someone wrote it better.
Original and NG-2 split time like civilized thieves who had decided to rob only their pasts. They wrote together one afternoon a week and apart the rest. Original found that the damage in his language trained him to be exacting with metaphors; words cost him more and he bought better ones. NG-2 discovered that he liked paying someone other than himself; he called it taxes to keep himself honest.
NG-3 took a job that looked small and was not: he ran an online room that measured collective states for unknown comics and fed them reports not of what to copy but of where originality might land. He taught them how to avoid **idea traffic jams**—places where too many premises were circling the same block honking the same horn. He became, without intending, an editor of the real-time city.
Elena went back to work. People called. They wanted her to rule on their selves. She did, carefully, remembering the night the room turned not into a mob but into a measurement.
She went once, months later, to a show where NG-2 was taping a second special. She brought Theo, who had become a convert and then a snob about his own conversion. “I saw him when he was raw,” he said to a woman in the lobby, as if he had a medal and wasn’t sure which side to pin it on.
NG-2 saw Elena from stage and inclined his head in a small bow of colleagues. He told new jokes. They were not as good as last time, and then they were better. That’s what craft looks like in public. In the lobby after, Original stood with a Sharpie signing a fan’s program. He looked up at Elena and said with artless warmth, “We’re good?” “You’re good,” she said. “Be careful.” He laughed. “I have an entire additional human to help me do that.”
She walked out into the night, which did not apologize for what it was. The bridge cables were taut against the dark. She thought of law as a system of cables and thought, too, of laughter as a system of cables. Both hold. Both can break. Both are better when they flex.
Appendix: Measurements and Miracles
In one of her binders Elena taped a slip of paper where she wrote down what she learned from the case, as she did for each case that taught her something more than it resolved. She wrote: A joke is a measurement that collapses uncertainty into pattern. The comic supplies energy; the audience does the computation. Clones change law because they confront us with our habit of owning what we merely influence. The act of influence is not ownership. Contracts must not be allowed to reach into futures where they can constrain people who did not sign them. We must write more modestly. Laughter’s origin cannot be exported. It resides in minds. Any system that extracts it as a commodity is practicing something like leechcraft—antique medicine that looks like care. A clone who cannot laugh can still be the best gardener of laughter.
A corporation will try to own audiences. That is their nature. Our nature is to resist that without demonizing coordination that actually builds good things. We must learn to distinguish between *coercive ownership* and *generative platforms*. You cannot legislate jokes, but you can legislate overreach. Do that well. She added, lightly, with a pen that leaked a little because pens do: **8. I should laugh more.**
Coda: The Laugh
It is hard to prove that a thing has never happened. It is even harder to prove that when it happens it is not an accident. But late one night after a show that went sideways and then came back better, NG-2 sat with Original at the diner and told him a joke he had come up with that day and had not tried on an audience because it felt too private. He said: “If you clone yourself, you think you’ll get help with chores. What you get is someone who knows exactly how you were going to avoid them.” Original barked a laugh and spilled coffee. NG-2 looked at him and then made a face as if he’d swallowed something electric. He put a hand to his mouth. “You all right?” Original asked, alarmed. “I think I just—” NG-2 said, and then, astonished, laughed. It was a strange sound, not like the audience’s, brighter, brittle, the laugh of a man hearing a password he didn’t know he knew. He shook his head afterwards. “I don’t know if that was the act or the reflex.” “Does it matter?” Original asked. NG-2 thought about it as he thought about everything. “Not tonight.”
Elena was not there, and law did not record it. Some things happen without the state. People laughed in a diner at midnight and paid their bills and went home to the selves they were unfolding like maps, making sure the new folds did not tear the old ones. The city did not notice and noticed everything.
In the morning, **The Variance** put a new rule under its sign: *Unexpected items welcome in the bagging area.*
And if you stood in the back of a small club in any city thereafter on any good night, you could feel a change that was not dramatic enough to become a headline. You could feel that the room had learned, a little, to measure itself. That was enough.
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