To-day my brain asked me, “What would be the most painful standup comedy experience to sit through?”

I told my brain, “I’d have to think about that.”

On stage is a boy. Eight years old, or old enough that the following cannot be excused as cute. With joke book in hand, he faces the patrons at their tables as they sip cocktails in low lighting. The stage lights are harsh and do no wonders to his early-onset acne.

He opens the book to the first page, frowns, and flips past the Library of Congress bits. The jokes having been found, he dutifully goes down the list. One joke at a time. No stage presence. It is clear from his delivery that he has not read through them before.

“Why did Jane divorce Tarzan?” he reads aloud to the microphone, sounding out the names.

A dreadful pause. He keeps his eyes glued on the book for seven seconds or so, and then looks up at the audience. His gaze pans over the patrons, left to right, as they poke at their small plates. A few muffled coughs. Nobody wants to catch his attention.

“He became too big a swinger,” he reads.

He evinces no understanding of what he just read. Then, as if to punctuate the matter, his face collapses into a smirk as he dabs with finger guns. “Deeez!” he says, the book hanging off to the side. Onto the next joke.

There is no variation in this procedure. The joke book itself seems to be decades out of date, filled with cultural and political references whose humour values, if any, have been denuded by the passage of time. The boy struggles to pronounce Henry Kissinger, so he stands there for half a minute before sheepishly mumbling through it. Mao he pronounces consistently as mayo, and nobody bothers to correct him.

There are also horrible ethnic stereotypes which surface from time to time in the punchlines. The boy is entirely oblivious to all of this. “Deeez!” he dabs.

(If you had to guess, he probably picked the stinger up from some cartoon character, or perhaps some Dreamworks protagonist with a punchable face.)

On and on, in the same vein. Will anybody say something? Not this crowd. Nobody seems to want to be the asshole who cries, “Kid, get off the stage!” Nobody will take one for the team. But you can tell that the first thing they’ll say to each other once they step out into the lobby after the show is, “That was painful.” “So awkward.” A few of the groups sitting at back tables have already left discreetly. You are already regretting taking your date to the comedy club to-night, but his poker face betrays nothing.

One hour and fifteen minutes later, the set is finally done, for there are no more pages in the joke book. “Deeez!” Finger guns. Nobody returns the gesture.

The host, sweating, comes out from stage left, takes the microphone. “Everybody give it up for Liam!”

Seven seconds of silence, but a woman at a front table starts a slow clap, which ripples weakly through the remaining audience as the rest of the patrons drift onto the street.

The host chuckles affably. “Thank you for coming to-night,” she says in an announcer voice, launching into an impassioned spiel about the other acts coming up this week, which goes in one ear and out the other. You and your date sit through it by unspoken mutual agreement instead of braving the mass exodus, that rush of elbows knocking glasses and jackets caught on purses. Now there’s just you two and the woman who started the clapping. You avert your eyes very purposefully and leave at a pace on the edge of impoliteness.

After you step through the double doors, you pick up chatter from the other patrons. The reception is exactly what you thought it might be—that was painful, so awkward—except for the detail that apparently this kid had some rare dermatological disease, some sort of advanced-stage cancer, and his dying wish was to live out his dream of being a standup comedian, and all this was conveyed in an announcement you didn’t hear because you came late. Ah. That’s why everyone was polite, at least until they were out of earshot. It was meant to be heartwarming.

“I wonder how much the mom paid them,” a woman pontificates to her friend at the swag bar as you pass by. A few seconds later and you’re outside under the awning.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t think—” you say to your date, but he shushes you. “It’s okay,” he says. He picks up the tab, but there is no second date.