on serious people
Exclusive: Caroline Timoney, comedian
At the turn of the 20th century, philosopher Henri Bergson risked his career, reputation, and entire field of study to discuss a widely ignored human phenomenon: laughter. To take comedy seriously – a field known solely by clowns, by jesters, by proletariats – was to admit something fundamental about human nature, he argued, to look past the limits one could impose on their communities. Comedians were simply exposing the moment when the script slips.
What Bergson couldn’t have accounted for, however, were comedians raised in a raucous Philadelphia culture. Nor comedians that were triplets. Nor comedians working in abysmal economies, fired from their jobs only to be offered the same one back at a lower wage.
Caroline Timoney, LA-based comedian, however, can account for these specifics. In fact, she lives them.
Growing up with multiple siblings always comes with certainties, and competition is one of them. For Timoney, that competition led to artistry. Being creative, someone who brought something into the world, was what separated her from her siblings, she told me recently. It’s easy to see why; she talks timidly, but with energy, letting her facial expressions do most of the talking while the words arrive a beat later.
Her latest monthly stand-up show, Babe Stopppp, feels almost like an extension of these instincts. The quick pacing, the ability to recognize the shape of a joke and the audience’s reaction before even publishing it. Years of posting viral short-form comedy on TikTok trained a kind of reflex: noticing the strange rhythm of a moment and delivering it before the audience has time to do something else. Editing, she admits, has never been her favorite part of the process anyway. The joke either lands or it doesn’t.
Comedy, however, rarely begins with certainty. It rarely begins with the feeling of knowing what you’re going to say, when you’re going to say it, and exactly how you’re going to get there.
And it is never comfortable.
More often, it begins somewhere embarrassingly small. A failed job. A bad rule. A conversation you weren’t supposed to be a part of in the first place.
During her time at Georgetown, Timoney studied political science, the kind of major that prepares you for very serious conversations about very serious things. The campus was full of them — future diplomats, future policy advisors, future people who spoke neatly about the world. The contrast between her passion and her studies was hard to ignore.
Perhaps more than her Georgetown peers, Timoney knows that the moment someone begins taking themselves too seriously, the joke has already started writing itself. It’s the same instinct Bergson was chasing a century earlier, though he pursued it in the most serious way possible: by standing at a lectern and delivering lectures about laughter. Ten years after Laughter’s publication, he would speak at the University of Birmingham:
“But he who is sure, absolutely sure, of having produced a work which will endure and live, cares no more for praise and feels above glory, because he is a creator, because he knows it, because the joy he feels is the joy of a god.”
The joy that we feel, that Timoney feels, when we make someone laugh is not one of isolation. It is not one of clowns or of jesters or of overly forward government students. It may, for a moment at least, feel a little like being a god.