Audience Metaphors
There’s a lot going on in the series of interviews masquerading as a documentary, Dying Laughing. However, I’d like to start with one I’ve been working on of late – audiences.
I’m a big fan of metaphors and similies. When you ask people to describe things by saying what it is similar to, you find out a lot about what they think. Some metaphors, as described by George Lakoff, are old and have become so common, we don’t even think of them as such.
Objects
One such metaphor is “making an audience laugh.” In the documentary, Dying Laughing, it rolls off the tongue of Jamie Foxx and Jeff Joseph; Steve Coogan says it three times, and Stephen K. Amos says he wants to “make them laugh and think,” but he’s still the one doing all the work.
This is that metaphor of the audience as an object that gets acted upon. It shows up in other places as well, such as when Jaime Fox talks about the comic’s desire: “you want to be dangerous. You want to provoke. You want to move the needle.” Again, the needle is the object that measures the change in the audience.
It’s also present in Tommy Davidson’s metaphor for comedy as shooting zombies, the zombies are not full-fledged people. Paul Provenza says, “We’re asking a room full of hundreds of people to have an involuntary physical response simultaneously. It’s f–king weird.” The idea of humor as an “involuntary physical response” is born of Relief theory, which basically reduces audience members to unthinking, unconscious, dare we say, zombies.
Tommy Davidson uses a second metaphor of surfing, which is not much better; not much thought going on in a force of nature. Jamie Foxx, also talks about a laugh as a wave: “”When you tell that joke and it goes to the back of the house and it comes roaring back to your face… there’s nothing like that feeling.” The wave goes out and (hopefully) comes back. Same can be said of Jeff Joseph’s metaphor about driving a car; the car has no thoughts of its own.
Cedric the Entertainer goes so far as to cast the audience as animals:
The audience is a group of wild horses. They’re coming in from all walks of life. They’re in there and all kinds of stuff is going on. And you know… And so when you walk out on stage, the only thing you can do is like grab the reins, and just try to ride it, like just totally just try to like get it, like hyah, everybody get in line gyah, gyah. Like, listen to me, I’m the guy.
Voters
There are other metaphors that reference the Popular models of audiences I previously outlined. We can see the voter metaphor when Rick Overton talks about gaining “full approval or full disapproval on your essence, on what you actually believe and how you really see life.” Or when Kim Whitley says, “Every audience is different. I think you should be nervous, I think there should be some anticipation of ‘oh my god are they gonna like this one, is it gonna hit?’” Kevin Hart, Tom Dreeson and Jerry Seinfeld all similarly speak of a call and response.
Tom Dreeson: “Ask question, get a response.”
Jerry Seinfeld: “I’m in charge, and you’re… I’m going to question you. The first thing I’m going to say is a question to you.”
Tom Dreeson: “Here’s the point: I talk, you react, I talk, you react, I talk you react. I’ve got them into my rhythm, this is my trick to get them into my rhythm and focus on me.”
The vote must always be a called. We can petition, but not vote at random.
But this is all very adversarial, and the comic maintains control. The same is true when Jerry Seinfeld or Jerry Lewis talk about success (perfect symphonies and risk that scores) or when Royale Watkins, Allan Havey, Kevin Hart and Chris Rock talk about bombing, they talk about skills and tools that the professional comic can use to overcome any problem on-stage.
Lovers
We can see the lover model when Sarah Silverman talks about comics as “pleasing the audience” and trying to “have approval.” Or when Bob Saget talks about what he likes about doing stand-up, “Cause It’s a relationship with that audience. It’s a date, it’s a special moment to me, every one of ’em.”
Sandra Bernhard says, “When they love you and you’re there for them and you connect with them, it’s perfection.”
I would put in the same category, and for the same reason, Sean Lock’s statement: “There’s an element of people needing to go to see someone to either explain the world to them or talk about the world or see if some of their experiences are reflected there and they’re in touch with that.” Lock is talking about an intimate connection or resonance with the audience through the material.
Sublimation
Another model we can find in this conversation, is the idea that the audience must be worked on. Seinfeld tells us,
The first time you go on stage, you have no idea how harsh an environment it actually is. And… Because when you watch comedians, when you don’t know anything about it, it seems like the audience is kinda having a good time anyway, and this guy comes on and he says some funny things and they have a better time. That’s what it looks like. That’s not what’s happening. At all. What’s happening is nothing. Absolutely nothing. It is a dead solid quiet room of unhappy people and you have to start from that.
When asked, “Are you seeking their approval?” Seinfeld replies, “No, I’m seeking their sublimation.”
Steve Coogan believes a laugh to be a statement of this sublimation or unification [more on this later]:
You can have a crowd of people – a huge crowd of people – who are all disparate, politically and um, in terms of their taste and their class, and they’re all from different backgrounds and … different outlooks on life. But if you’ve made them all laugh at the same time, then suddenly all those people, all things that made them different sort of vanish, and at that one moment of laughter they’re all united, they all agree, Because if you all laugh you’re all agreeing on one thing: that that thing that just happened was funny, and that’s really an incredibly powerful thing.
Sam Tripoli notes that,
Comedians, in my opinion, are Jedis, they play mind tricks on people. And the best comedians put an entire crowd in like kind of a trance, so the entire group is thinking as one and thinking in that comic’s mind thought process. And that’s why it’s like when somebody messes up a line, it’s almost like the record screeched, and everyone comes out of the trance and he has to put them back into the trance. And that’s how you get crowds thinking in rhythm with your act and that’s why the great comics have a rhythm to their act.
Hecklers
In this idea, the audience MUST be put into a trance-like state, or you lose the room. Hart notes, “The minute you lose people’s attention, they start talking and that talking can gravitate towards the stage it can fuck up the whole environment.”
Cedric the Entertainer agrees,
[I]f you start to let people kinda go off on their own, next thing you know this group over here is chattering, and now these people want to talk to them, and somebody tells that guy to shut up, and next thing you know you don’t have the room at all and it’s that fast.
Perhaps the easiest example of the potential to lose a room are the 16 separate heckler stories. Billy Connolly ties it together for us,
All that stuff about warming the audience up and all that stuff that people talk about. You do it somewhat unconsciously, you start some way you build up, but what you do is there’s 3000 people in the room or maybe 400 or 200 whatever number there is, you get it to one, you get them all into one big forehead, and and so just speak to the forehead and there’s one big forehead in the room, but when the heckler says blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, *pshhhoom* it becomes 3000 again, now I have to go gather gather, gather, gather, and get them all in like a shepherd and then [you] blah, blah, blah, and [the heckler] goes blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, *pshhhooom*.
Agents
Royale Watkins, in talking about his bombing experience, talks about this in more positive terms, recognizing that the audience always had that power and that right:
[T]hen after maybe two or three people got you know, say, ‘Oh, we can control this,’ you know what I mean? The crowd realized ‘Well we’re part of this show too, and if this guy isn’t giving us what we want, fuck, we’ll give ourselves what we want, which is to get his ass off stage.’ And then the surround sound kicked in, and they started booing.
This is a better model, one that recognizes the audience’s ability to act, which I’ve talked about elsewhere. We can see more positive hints of this when Seinfeld, or Lewis, or Amy Schumer, or Billy Connolly talk about people laughing, seemingly spontaneously.
References:
Lakoff, George. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980.
Wilson, Nathan. Was That Supposed to be Funny? A Rhetorical Analysis of Politics, Problems and Contradictions in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy. Dissertation in partial completion of the Ph.D. August, 2008.
