A B C D E F G H I J L M N O P R S T Z
Ad-lib - Something made up there and then. There are many masters of ad-lib who do make it up as they go along such as Ross Noble and Jason Byrne. There are also many masters who make it look like they're ad-libbing but they're not - they're in fact ultra-scripted - but their style hides that fact well - e.g. Eddie Izzard and Harry HillAudience - Those, which laugh at, not with the comedian. Or is it? Come on an audience is bleedin obvious aint it? Is it? What size constitutes an audience? Could be your mum or a thousand paying punters. If you read enough books or blogs on the topic by professional comedians you will soon note that the audience is the key source of misery, power and joy for them. It is a many- headed monster as likely to bite as feed from the comedian’s hand.
This contributor has told an admittedly simple intro joke to a seemingly similar audience and met silence, groans and uproarious laughter and applause on different occasions. Were they actually very different in their make up, warmed up or cooled down by the preceding act or was it the moon or something like that?
Any discussion on audiences means a lot of question marks – does it not? An audience may be very unresponsive to your material. Richard Herring has coined the term ‘comedically’ illiterate’ to describe this. A group of people genetically unable to laugh at your best material.
Ken Dodd strangely scientific and systematic for a man, who mines jam butties, puts out tester jokes to adapt his material to the specific audience for the rest of the set.
Experience indicates a drunken audience is primed to laugh (or lynch you) After that certainty it becomes a mystery. Is for instance a paying audience more likely to laugh than non-paying one? Is a comedy club audience the best suited to a specific comedian?
In the MUCK group we have found to our annoyance that an audience of would be comedians offer little indication as to whether material would work in front of comedy club audience. For the newbie comedian spare no embarrassment in trying out your material on any audience – anybody passing any person or people prepared to spare the time or not notice you have shoehorned a joke into your normal conversation.
Does your comedy require a certain demographic in the audience? When a comedian is competent and famous enough they are on a winner as the seats will be filled with those wishing to see them and they are pre-tuned into them. Apart from mental health or ego problems – and its not as if comedians are prone to them – they are bound to succeed. Sad to relate for the rest of us in the ditch it means we labour like Sisyphus to roll our shtick to the top of an audience that doesn’t know us. The comic boulder we are pushing will often fall back on us ……painfully.
This is known as learning. Regrouping and tending to our broken toes at the bottom of the ditch we are then faced with the dilemma of whether to blame it on the collective stupidity of THAT audience or realising we are not naturally gifted and had better get with the programme and refine our material and comic persona, so we find enough common denominators out there for us to work any audience. The audience – love it or leave it?
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