Who ARE These People?: Managing Your Audience

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Jun 27, 2005

Conclusion

I should have prefaced this article by saying that managing audiences is difficult, and is in fact probably the weakest aspect of my act as a whole. (But then, would you have read this far?) But the most important thing to remember, and sometimes the easiest thing to forget, is that it's YOUR show, dammit. These people paid money to see YOU. (Not only you, but don't sell yourself short.) You have the microphone, and, as the old adage goes, "They're more scared of you than you are of them."

I worked an opening weekend at a new club in northern Florida not too long ago. After a show, the owner -- who had never seen stand-up comedy before he dropped six figures into a brand new club -- came up to me and the MC, an established road dog himself, and asked a simple question: "Why do you guys get so upset when people talk during the show?" The MC and I, with hundreds of shows' worth of experience combined, looked at one another, then him, and then the floor. "I don't know," the MC finally mumbled. "Me neither," I said. It seemed self-evident, from doing shows with disruptive or talkative audiences and hearing other comedians discuss similar experiences, the audiences should be silent, except for laughter. But I had never considered why.

I think the answer is that laughter is a very fragile medium. Audience response can be affected by so many things -- the number of people in the crowd, where they're sitting, how tight they are, how big the room is, how the sound system is, ad nauseum. It is a physical, flowing being, when created correctly. People who talk during YOUR show disrupt that medium -- they disrupt the flow of your presentation, and the flow of the laughter that should be your response. The MC and I know what it is to kill -- to have an audience sit rapt and hang on every word, die laughing at things that aren't funny, and give applause breaks when you tie your shoelace. It's an unbelievable feeling, and disruptive audience members can take that away. You need to learn to put them in their place, while staying on the good side of them AND the rest of the crowd.

Until next week...keep 'em laughing. With the holiday on the 4th, next article will be on the 5th. Topic TBA.

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