Comedy is surprises, so if you’re intending to make somebody laugh and they don’t laugh, that’s funny.

Macdonald frames comedy as an art of violated expectation: the laugh comes from surprise—an abrupt turn in logic, timing, or social meaning. He then extends that principle into a self-referential joke: if a comedian aims for laughter and gets silence, the mismatch itself becomes an unexpected outcome, and therefore (in his view) a kind of comedy. The line also reflects his persona—deadpan, contrarian, and willing to treat failure as material rather than embarrassment. Implicitly, it suggests that a comedian’s job is not to control the audience but to stay alert to the oddness of what actually happens and convert it into humor.