Yesterday at my work they had a Christmas event where normally they hire a speaker to come to (normally in person, but now on a Teams call), and this year they brought in a lady who's a comedian and minor Canadian celebrity.

She got through the first 25 minutes or so of her routine (which was incredibly awkward -- standup does not work without a crowd, and it's just you telling jokes to your own empty living room) and eventually at one point her audio got stuck as she was saying the word "and" and it literally just kept looping her saying "and and and and and" over and over. They tried to troubleshoot it for about 10 minutes. Her video was still working, but every time they enabled her audio again it was just the looping "and and and and." I felt kinda bad for her. The whole thing felt like a plastic recreation of a real experience, and the technical difficulties at the end were emblematic of it all.

> standup does not work without a crowd

There's a Zoom comedy show my partner has been attending for 1.5 years, and she bawls every week. So, it's possible for a show to work out.

Maybe she was self-aware of the situation as well and decided to turn it into material for next joke

Since there is a sub-set of people that don't even join company happy hours in person, that feature alone could not be sufficient so.