How Do You Use Stand Up?

I’ve been thinking about Hugh’s comments regarding how art is used:

To me, the interesting thing about art is not the usual “Heroic, absinthe-soaked, vision quest lone individual archetypal artist crap”, but how the art is USED by the person who has it hanging on the wall. What’s it actually there for? Decoration? Showing off? A conversation starter? An ice breaker? A way of telling a story? Something to brighten up the room? A symbol of social status? An expression of individual worldview? An expression of emotion? A totem to remind oneself of something inspirational and/or important? Perhaps a bit of all these?

How would this viewpoint apply to stand up comedy? Do you use stand up when retelling a comic’s joke to your friend’s the next day? Do you want a take home souvenir after the show to put up on your wall to use as a conversation starter? Would you want a favorite comedian to send you a videotaped version of a joke personlized for your girlfriend’s birthday?

Thinking about making the stand up experience last longer than the show led to trying a visual representation of one of my jokes:

I think many of my jokes would lend themselves to a similar form, but is this something anyone wants?