Betsy Borns begins her book, Comic Lives, with a chapter on audience, yet while the motive for audience attendance is clear (tension release, in her opinion), what the audience is able to do is less clear. Borns implies at least five models of audience agency – or ability to act: Objects, Customers, Voters, Directors, and Lovers.
1. Objects
First is the idea that the audience is a passive object upon which the comic acts; they are not agents in their own right. Borns suggests comics are “cerebral strippers, seducing us, ever so slowly, as they peel off layer upon layer of our collective repression until finally, when the laughter dies down, we find ourselves naked, brains exposed to the cross-ventilation of comic insight and age-old inhibition” (14). We just sit passively and are worked on.
You see this view a lot when people talk about “making [the audience] laugh.” We have no power over it – it has to happen, if the comic is doing their job.
Similarly, we’re unsophisticated. Borns notes that audiences are unaware of artistic distinctions (such as the distinction between the dick joke and sexual humor), and it’s up to the comic to shepherd them.
2. Customers
Another view says our agency stops once we’ve bought a ticket or entered the venue. The audience is active in seeking out the comics (i.e. as customers), but passive in terms of the humor that we get (i.e. we don’t actively determine the process). Stand-up comic Alan Havey notes
[W]hen they [the audience] come in to see a comedian they want to be grabbed. They want someone taking over for a couple of hours, or twenty-minutes, or whatever—it’s like going to prostitutes, therapists or the movies (17).
In each case, we choose our caregiver, then agree to be “worked on.” This simile also is suggested by Bill Grundfest, owner of New York’s Comedy Cellar (13).
3. Voters
Another view is that the audience’s role is democratic ratification – voting for the joke with laughter or vetoing it through silence or taking umbrage (booing, heckling or walking out) – but always after the fact. We only get to react. George Carlin notes:
People vote when they laugh…. This happens when you get to any subject where people don’t want to reveal their comfort level with it—even if it’s not something they’re intimately involved with…. [an audience member] doesn’t want to reveal [this comfort level], so he goes, ‘Hmm, I don’t understand this at all,’ and he certainly isn’t going to laugh at it (18).
4. Directors
Also present is the notion that the comedian is the agent of the audience; they ultimately direct her/his action and thereby their consumption. Jerry Seinfeld explains:
Comedy is a dialogue, not a monologue—that’s what makes an act click. The laughter becomes the audience’s part, and the comedian responds; it’s give and take (16).
Here we see a sort of call and response in reverse, the audience calls out for more of the same (or for something different), and the comedian obliges them.
This makes the audience more active than simple customers or voters, as it makes the comic react to them in real time, but they’re still not quite equals.
5. Lovers
Finally, Borns notes that audiences can be seen as active, so that comedians cannot just dominate, but must also seduce – they must make the audience like them as people, they must “pitch woo” (23).
Here we have the power, not just to direct or vote after the fact, but so much so that the comic must think of us in advance. Most good comics would agree with this, when confronted with the options, but when they’re just riffing about humor they speak in terms of one of the others, which misrepresents what they’re doing.
We might also call attention to Joe Rogan, who, in an interview with Brian McKim of SheckyMagazine.com, says he likes to play smaller rooms because:
I really think something is lost when you do stand-up for a big crowd. It’s sort of that diffusion-of-responsibility thing where the audience isn’t totally connected to the show. It’s no longer intimate. It’s a ‘show,’ and you’re not really ‘one’ with the crowd for the most part.
This intimacy and sense of being “one” with the crowd points to a deeper connection than acting on them, letting them choose your show but not the material, letting them vote on the material, especially to the extent that they direct your comedy; instead, you’re in a relationship with them.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
How much power do you exercise when you watch stand-up? Do you “just watch”? Comics, how do you think about your audience?
References:
Borns, Betsy. Comic Lives: Inside the World of Stand-Up Comedy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
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.
