Spectator sports are supposed to be enjoyable, no? Entertainment is the key word here – modern sports are part of showbiz, we’re told. Seems about right to me. The celebrity status and the salaries of today’s sports stars fit right in with that notion.

It’s fashionable to think of soccer as theater, and that too makes sense. An hour and a half of players strutting and fretting in a brightly lit arena, with the audience paying a small fortune to watch the live performance – yes, that sounds like Broadway.

Open-air Broadway, maybe, but sliding roofs will soon take care of that difference. Anyway, remember that the original Globe Theatre was open to the elements, and most of the spectators had to stand. Soccer, with standing now banned in most large stadiums, is merely doing quickly what it took the theater hundreds of years to perfect.

It won’t do to push the parallel much further. Obviously, there’s not much by way of intellectual fodder in sport. And yes, I’m aware that plenty of critics would make the same accusation about today’s Broadway; and yes, I’m also aware (aren’t I ever!) of the army of sociologists intent on intellectualizing sport with their academic interpretations.

On the whole, though, good soccer is good theater. It offers action, drama, tragedy, and suspense; it brings both sadness and joy, tears and laughter . . . and there, on that word laughter, the doubts assemble and I must pause.

Events in soccer this weekend have jolted my thinking somewhat. Comedy, humor — two of the fundamentals of theater, but how much of either is there in today’s soccer?

On Saturday, at Arsenal’s Highbury stadium in London, two of the club’s French players indulged in a moment of improvisation, something that was not in the script.

In the 74th minute of its game against Manchester City, Arsenal was awarded a penalty kick. This was the second one – 13 minutes earlier, Roberto Pires had smashed the first one into the net to give Arsenal a 1-0 lead. Pires stepped up to take the second, but instead of whacking the ball goalward, he tried to prod it sideways as teammate Thierry Henry raced into the penalty area to deliver the shot. Pires messed it up, failed to move the ball far enough, and took another poke at it. But by that time a bevy of City defenders had arrived to clear the ball. Henry never got to touch it at all.

Embarrassing it certainly was. By touching the ball twice, Pires had committed an offense, so City was awarded a free kick. Arsenal struggled on with what should have been 2-0 lead and held out for the 1-0 win, much to the relief of Pires and Henry.

What the pair tried to do is perfectly legal, but virtually never attempted – why would one do that when most penalty kicks, taken in the normal way, result in goals?

Arsenal coach Arsene Wenger, another Frenchman, said his reaction to the incident was “disbelief.” “What is terrible is that it will be interpreted as a lack of seriousness and respect,” he said.

Sure enough, Manchester City’s defender Sylvain Distin (yet another Frenchman) said he “felt it was a little bit disrespectful to us.”

There you have it. An attempt to do something different, something innovative – yes, something with an element of fun in it – gets criticized as being not serious enough, and showing a lack of respect.

The criticisms, you can be sure, would have been much more strident had Manchester managed to tie, or even win, the game. Henry felt obliged to issue an apology “to all the Arsenal fans, because it wasn’t the right thing to do.” It was his idea he said, “but it wasn’t my idea to make his [Pires’s] leg go numb.”

It was left to Pires, he of the numb leg, to restore sanity – and comedy – to the incident. Speaking on French television, he remarked “We put some humor into soccer, it’s not that bad. Anyway, it makes us laugh now. Especially as we won.”

A brave remark that set me pondering: Just how much humor is there in soccer these days? Not much, I fear. The tone is set by the most publicized, most quoted, most feared, most everything coach in the game – Chelsea’s Jose Mourinho, who seems to be utterly without a sense of humor.

How many real smiles – real, happy, enjoy-the-moment, smiles – do we see from players on the soccer field? Very, very few. The current face of soccer has a harassed snarl on it – as though anything more relaxed will, in Wenger’s words, betray “a lack of seriousness.”

Yes, I can think of a glittering exception. One name, and one only, comes immediately to mind: Barcelona’s Brazilian star Ronaldinho, blessed with a perpetual smile that seems to permeate and brighten every game he plays.

But it would take a soccer genius to buck the trend of unsmiling gravity. Elsewhere, earnestness reigns. Even in Brazil, as another weekend happening shows. Sao Paulo’s goalkeeper Rogerio has scored 51 goals for his team. He is a super free-kick taker, expert at scoring goals by bending the ball around the opponents’ defensive wall. To do that, he has to leave his own goal, and sally some 70 or so yards upfield. He sallied forth again on Sunday, against Santos, but this time things went badly wrong. His kick hit the wall; Santos latched on to the ball, and raced away to score, with Rogerio bringing up the rear in the futile race to get back into his unguarded goal.

And yes, I did find the whole scene rather hilarious. Sao Paulo coach Paulo Autuori, inevitably, did not. His team lost the game on that goal, and he opted for a pragmatic shrug: “It was going to happen one day, but we still have confidence in him and he’s going to keep taking free kicks.”

And I’m going to keep scanning coaches’ quotes for signs that humor is not a lost cause in the theater of soccer. I’m hoping for a nugget or two like this one, from a 1970s post game interview in England: The losing coach, asked for his opinion of the referee, replied, “It has always been my policy not to comment on referees, and I’m certainly not making an exception for this idiot.”

pgardner@nysun.com