Balloon

EXAGGERATION — blowing a small true thing up to a huge, impossible size, so the size itself becomes the joke while the truth underneath keeps it recognisable.

Loading audio…

Press play to listen along. The line being read lights up as you go.

Show full transcript

Loading transcript…

01 Opening

Balloon is a round, cheerful pufferfish-tween who can inflate to three times his size in a single breath — which is exactly how he thinks about comedy: take a small true thing, and blow it up.

He teaches exaggeration. "Every one of us has felt a small true thing," he says, puffing up a little for emphasis. "Waited a long time. Been really hungry. Had a teacher talk just a bit too long. My whole trick is to take that small true feeling and inflate it — bigger, bigger, past the point of possible — until the size itself is the joke. But here's the secret —" he lets some air out — "the truth has to stay in there. A giant nonsense with no truth inside is just noise. A giant truth is a laugh."

He demonstrates. "This morning I waited for the bus. A perfectly normal wait." He begins to swell. "By the time it came, I had aged visibly. Small woodland creatures had built a home in my shadow. Historians were arriving to study the ancient mouse who had stood at the stop since the dawn of time." The club is helpless. "See? Everyone's waited for a bus. I just blew that tiny true feeling up until you could see it from space."

02 Balloon

Balloon grew up in a coral town where his whole family puffed up when startled — and where, he noticed, the puffing always got a laugh.

He was a nervous young fish, and he inflated easily, and at first he was embarrassed by it. But he noticed that when he described his small fears at their true size, nobody paid much attention — and when he blew them up enormous, everybody laughed and leaned in, because the huge version was somehow more honest about how the fear had felt. "I wasn't a little nervous about the reef exam," he'd say. "I was so nervous the entire ocean could hear my heart, and three passing whales asked if I was all right." That got a laugh — and it was, in the way that matters, true.

A dry old eel once told him exaggeration was "just lying for attention." It stung. But his aunt corrected it. "It's not lying, little one — everyone in the room knows you didn't age a hundred years at the bus stop. You're not fooling anyone. You're telling the truth about a feeling by drawing it giant, so everyone can finally see it. That's not a lie. That's a magnifying glass." Balloon never felt small about his big descriptions again.

03 Balloon

When he was older, Balloon bobbed his way to the JestForge comedy club, which had been looking for someone who knew how to make the truth enormous.

04 Balloon

He teaches the young comics to inflate the truth, not invent a lie.

"Start with something true and small," he tells them. "Everyone's felt it. Then —" he puffs up — "blow it up. Past big. Past silly. Until the size is the funny part." He sets a kid going. "You were a little bored in class. True. Now inflate it."

"I was so bored," the kid tries, "that... I watched a plant grow. All of it. From seed."

"Bigger!" cries Balloon, delighted. "So bored that entire civilisations rose and fell on my desk while the clock moved one minute." The club roars. "That's it. But notice —" he settles, serious for a beat — "it only works because everyone's really been that bored. The truth is the string that keeps the balloon from floating off into nonsense. Stretch a real thing. Never inflate a nothing."

05 Closing

He still puffs up when he's startled, at the club and off it, and has made his peace with being the roundest fish in any room.

The thing Balloon hopes the young comics carry is that exaggeration is a way of telling the truth louder — that the point of blowing a thing up is not to lie, but to make a real feeling so big that everyone in the room can finally see the thing they'd all quietly felt.

"Find the small true thing," he tells them, "and blow it up till it fills the sky. But keep the truth inside — that's the string. A giant truth is a laugh. A giant nothing just floats away."

When the club empties, Balloon lets out a long slow breath and drifts back to his ordinary size, feeling the round, warm gladness he first felt in the coral town: that the biggest, silliest version of a feeling is sometimes the most honest one there is — and that a room laughing at a giant truth is a room that has just felt understood.

The JestForge ensemble

Balloon is part of JestForge's distributed-narrative cast. Each character embodies a different curricular primitive; together they teach the full subject.