It was funny: You have to give It that. The just-ended Broadway season drew a great many laughs. Sometimes it even meant to. If you acknowledge the uproarious genius of Dame Edna, you must also acknowledge the unintentional hilarity of “The Glass Menagerie” and the comic misrule of “Julius Caesar.” Among new musicals, I’ll grant you the clever originality of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” as long as you bear in mind “Good Vibrations,” the title of which includes an adjective I would not have chosen, and “Dracula,” which sucked.

The ability to laugh in dire situations proves useful around Broadway, where life forever hovers over a pit of poignant silliness. Look at this week. On Monday, the Broadway community gathered to remember Arthur Miller, whose most famous character in his most famous play represents an individual’s lonely struggle against an onrushing corporate hoard. A few hours later, two august Broadway houses, the Royale (built in 1927) and the Plymouth (built in 1917), were renamed for the current chairman and former president of the Shubert organization – which owns the buildings. The Shubert organization owns many buildings.

Some in the Broadway community took umbrage at this. According to press accounts, during the renaming celebration, a pair of “Avenue Q”-style puppets, dressed to resemble the two men, explained they were renaming the theaters after themselves “because we can.” The complainers have clearly not acquired that essential Broadway tool: the trouper’s smile.

It is a smile you often see beaming at you across the footlights in Broadway houses, usually bracketed by jazz hands.

The trouper’s smile is indifferent to setbacks, bleak ironies, or pain: Lose a job, see precious old buildings treated unjustly, get shot a couple times in the foot? No matter. The trouper’s smile must neither budge nor fade. It is a mask as well as a mindset, a willingness to grin and bear it, to insist that the show must go on. For if you wear a trouper’s smile, and look always on the bright side of things, you may see in Monday’s ceremonies a cheering lesson: If a theater’s name can be changed once, it can be changed twice.

With yesterday’s announcement of the Tony nominees, Broadway enters a season all but devoted to the trouper’s smile. You’ll see them everywhere for the next weeks, as nominees are paraded before every constituency in the Broadway community. There will be breakfasts, brunches, and dinners. There will be photo ops. Interviews will be given and vast sums of money will change hands, flowing from the pockets of Broadway ticket buyers to the advertising department of The New York Times – and to the agencies that whip up the artful displays soon to appear like wallpaper there. When will they start giving a Tony Award for Best Tony Award Campaign?

In the meantime, Broadway will enjoy itself by complaining about who didn’t get the nomination they deserved, and vice versa. This is useful because it allows people to talk about the shows without actually talking about the shows; it’s a breeze. Each complainer will have his or her own pet outrage. (Denis O’Hare’s omission from the nominees for Best Featured Actor in a Musical seems as good a choice as any.) The real trouble seems to be in the system itself. In the acting categories, five performers are nominated, whether it’s a relatively weak category, such as Best Actress in a Musical, or an exceptionally strong one, such as Best Featured Actor in a Play.

Consider these performances in the latter: Robert Prosky in “Democracy,” Ruben Santiago-Hudson in “Gem of the Ocean,” Zeljko Ivanek in “The Pillowman,” Arye Gross in “Brooklyn Boy,” Byron Jennings in “Sight Unseen.” All were flawless or close to it; none earned a nomination. This tells me there is something whimsical and unjust about the way nominations are handed out – there should be more slots for strong years.

It also tells me that there’s real merit to the complaint several actress friends of mine have been making this year, that Broadway is overwhelmingly skewed toward roles for men. “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Twelve Angry Men,” “Democracy,” and “The Pillowman” included nary a woman; the appearance of “Steel Magnolias” almost seems a desperate, parody tempting effort to balance the scales. I would rather have seen the producers recast “Julius Caesar” with reversed genders. Granted, “Friends, Romans, countrywomen, lend me your ears,” does not scan, but still this would have been an improvement over the current version.

Yet amid the usual malfeasances of this Broadway season – the quality material sunk by inadequate celebrities, the continuing inability to find anything really exciting in new musical theater – one encouraging trend did appear. It could be detected on Broadway, in shows like “Doubt,” “Spelling Bee,” and “Spamalot,” and off-Broadway in “Shockheaded Peter,” “Thom Pain,” and “Boozy.” All of a sudden, playwrights and directors seem to rediscover their audience. We are not treated to plays through a keyhole, but to plays that draw us into a joint exercise, a shared experience.

Sometimes this took a joking form, as when volunteer contestants file onstage at “Spelling Bee.” But it could also have a subtler, more potent effect. “What do you do when you’re not sure?” runs the provocative first line of “Doubt.” It is delivered directly to us, as a priest addresses his congregation: We are not just involved; we are implicated. It is marvelously theatrical. Contrast this with, say, the stuffy naturalism of “Twelve Angry Men,” a show that began the season as a wonderful movie, and ended the season as a wonderful movie that became a dull play. The memory of so many of these experiences from this year – the historian character in “Spamalot,” the relentless queries by Dame Edna, the diabolically funny emcee in “Shockheaded Peter” – is enough to provoke a A smile, and not a trouper’s smile, either.