If this is an excerpt from a story, I wouldn’t be of much help. But from a layman's perspective, it seems like the character is attempting to please the failed humorist or he or she would have been frank. This in turn may have triggered a chain reaction, prompting the humorist to continue with his jokes which would have further affected the character. He or she is also giving the former a false sense of happiness and appreciation.
This passage may not affect the whole story in a remarkably discernible manner, but it definitely proves the character's penchant for politeness. And that may be be a deciding factor in his or her further decisions that ultimately define the plot of the story.
Our Town by Thornton Wilder is a modernist play because it explores the transience of human life, in a sense that the characters in the play highlight the significance of the little things that they do in their daily lives. The play is also narrated through the view of a stage manager which openly tells the audience about how the stage is designed and what each prop is meant for. The stage manager is a character both inside and outside the play which blurs the wall between the reality that what the audience is about to see is fictional, and the fiction that the play is supposedly real in the character's point of view. This characteristic of the play destabilizes the line between fact and fiction and is considered a modernist play based on that setting itself, among all other themes of the play.
