I’ve been sitting on a joke for nearly two years now that I have never found a neat way to resolve and tell. The joke is as follows:

When I was 16, one of my best friends died. I’m 29 now and I still get sad thinking about it… because two weeks before she died she borrowed a Wiimote from me, and I’m afraid I’ve missed the window of asking for it back.

I’ve never once told, or even attempted to tell, this joke. I’ve written better jokes than this—and I’ve definitely written worse ones—but this joke has remained at the back of my mind for years now, enticing me to revisit it and to rework it, to change it, to mold it into something new. Reading it here now, it feels clunky and graceless. Is it even a joke, or is it just an attempt to find humor embedded in the process of losing a person I loved? I have found myself wrought with various fears surrounding this joke: fear of the joke failing; fear of my pain at the loss of my friend being misunderstood; fear of disrespecting her memory by making a joke about her death; fear of doing an injustice to her by simply not being good enough to make this kind of a joke.

If Ben Wasserman shares these fears, I would never know it.

I entered Sparrow Funeral Home in Brooklyn on the night of Saturday, July 30. Sparrow brands itself as “a contemporary funeral home;” a fitting subtitle as it feels akin to an art gallery, its walls occupied by large abstract works of art. Upon entering I was greeted with sparkling waters and a card which asked me to write on it the name of a loved one I had lost in my lifetime. I wrote my friend’s name, Chelsea, and turned the card over to reveal that on its back side was a bingo card. I entered the room that would hold the performance and found a seat near the front. The stage area was not an elevated stage but rather a clearing at the front of the room where a “set” stood. The set consisted of a curtain with multiple cardboard signs affixed to it—making up a sort of hardship tapestry—and a table containing a slew of objects (tissues, styrofoam balls, and other ephemera). A projector screen hung above the set. Everything was in its place. The show was ready to begin.

Now, I cannot speak to the opening act for every single iteration of Live After Death, but I can say that the opening act that I saw—stand up by comedian Martin Urbano—paired beautifully with Wasserman’s work, as if placed together by a comedy sommelier. In his comedy, Urbano effortlessly dances his way through some of our most difficult, distressing, and taboo topics. His setups prepare you to hear the worst (often leading to the audience preemptively recoiling) and his conclusions always turn the premise on its head, landing gracefully on innocuous and largely inoffensive punchlines. In this way, he incriminates the audience instead of himself; after all, he didn’t say anything wrong—but everyone else most certainly thought it. This push-and-pull rapport between Urbano and the viewer establishes a critical position for the audience early on as active participants in the show. They are laughing not just at how funny Urbano is, but also laughing at themselves. They fell into Urbano’s trap. They have been implicated. They are now a part of the show.

When he finally takes the stage, Ben Wasserman’s introduction to Live After Death is one that is dynamic, over the top, and utterly deceiving. Featuring cartoonish combat, mild pyrotechnics, costume changes, and set to a soundtrack of Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song,” it creates the expectation that what you are about to see is rooted in the absurd and is, perhaps, a flippant exploration of a serious topic. Instead, what follows is the most human and grounded-in-reality comedy show that I’ve ever experienced.

Wasserman settles into the stage wearing a wild smile and a sudden, mismatched sincerity. He begins the show by presenting us with this fact: over the course of three years, Wasserman lost his grandfather, his father, his brother, and four of his friends. It is a shocking amount of loss, to say the least, and that is immediately visible in the room; the mood changes, the crowd grows tight and somber. Mere seconds ago laughter, explosions, and loud music were ringing out, and yet in this moment the room is silent, charged with sympathy. Despite this shift, Wasserman remains cool and in control of the room. He presents his ideas and the mission of the show: it is about (and itself is an exercise in) navigating a post-loved-one world. We lose people, yes, but one of the great tragedies of loss comes after the fact when we realize that the world continues on as if everything remains the same. Wasserman illustrates this in the most literal sense.

With help from a somewhat reluctant audience member, Wasserman enters the next act of the show by juggling a set of balls on which the names of his loved ones are written. The audience member is instructed to add chaos to this act by tossing more balls into Wasserman’s juggling routine, each labeled with another obligation, responsibility, problem, or otherwise stressor, in Wasserman’s life. Despite receiving these instructions, the audience member selected for this task appears both hesitant and resistant to the action; she seems nervous and uncomfortable with being given the spotlight here, and her interactions with Wasserman seem combative and harsh. However, Wasserman champions onward, eventually convincing the audience member to fully participate in the act so that he may construct the visual metaphor. He is juggling all of his problems and, as he shows us by dropping every single ball thrown his way, he is doing it poorly.

*Bingo brings yet another interactive element to Live After Death.*

Despite being billed as a one man show, Live After Death actually ends up being composed of a massive cast of audience participants. Wasserman engages with the audience at a near-constant pace by seeking volunteers for various bits, asking questions of individual audience members, even giving away a prize to the bingo winner (which, coincidentally, happened to be me—many thanks to the couple near me who spilled their drink at the start of the show). Wasserman strikes a perfect balance of being both a madman and a beacon of empathy in these interactions. When the audience members are onstage participating in his bits, Wasserman is often comically boisterous and aggressive in his direction to them by shouting at them, playfully teasing them, and becoming visibly exasperated with the fact that they aren’t getting things perfect their first try. When Wasserman engages with the audience members one-on-one by asking about the losses they have suffered in their lives, though, he meets them only with patience, kindness, understanding, and empathy. Jokes are still made, yes, but never to the end result of causing pain; the space becomes one that is supportive and healing not just for Wasserman, but for everyone involved. For Wasserman, there is no way of knowing what these audience members will say or do when selected to speak or perform in the show, but he does a masterful job of navigating every heartfelt response to his questions, every fumbling of the actions he has instructed them to take, and every surprise that comes from having strangers play the largest part in what he refers to as his “big show.” Perhaps one of the core lessons to be learned from Live After Death is revealed through this involvement with the unknown: we cannot control the world around us—we can only control how we react to it.

I don’t want to give away the entire show, so I will not describe the rest of it in such detail; however, I will say this: for a show built on a morbid premise and set in a devastating and harsh reality, Live After Death is a deeply optimistic approach to the subject of death, and is packed from start to finish with pleasant surprises. At the end of the show, as I observed myself and multiple other audience members wiping tears from their eyes, it became apparent to me that Wasserman’s work here is nothing shy of a masterpiece. People stood and clapped. They embraced those who were sitting next to them. A fresh sense of intimacy and camaraderie hung in the air; what we witnessed was not simply a comedy show, but a show that exists at the intersection of alternative comedy, group therapy, and experimental performance.

*Tony’s Italian Tissues*, *the prize for the bingo winner. They’re not soft.*

While over the course of the show Wasserman does reveal some details about the loved ones whose losses precipitated the show, I did not leave feeling like I had attended a memorial service for them. It would also be inaccurate to call Live After Death a celebration of their lives. All in all, I gained very little knowledge about them, and that seems to be part of the point. The show is not necessarily about the people Ben Wasserman lost; rather, it remains true to its name: for better or for worse, we live after death.