Stand up falls down.

It's god awful being in an audience when a stand up dies.
You are complicit in that death. Your lack of response just draws the rope ever tighter as he/she desperately gasps for the oxygen of humour, the breath of laughter.

At first, you are sympathetic, like holding out your arms to a child who is taking it's first steps, willing it to succeed, praying for that child not to fall. But then before your very eyes, that child turns into a drunk tramp staggering and falling, there is nothing you can do. You recoil and watch.

Then you remember this wanker is charging you good money, and how dare they make you feel like this. I've seen famous and unknown stand ups die.
There is no difference. Both smell of dead dreams.

I vaguely knew one stand up. (He is now massively successful).
His routine was crap. And he knew it. In his final show of the festival, he did the entire set with his cock hanging out of his trousers.
It still wasn't funny.

I think it may have been the saddest thing I've ever seen.