The Magicanada Project

BrianMillerMagic · Joined: 14 Aug 2007 Posts: 543 Location: New York State

Hey everyone,

Just some brief comments regarding our opening night of Laugh It Up! 2009 Comedy Competition at the SAKE Club. This is a four week event that I've been putting together for a couple months now, and opening night was less successful than I was hoping it would be after all this work. We had about 30 (max) people in the audience, and as an audience, they really weren't willing to laugh hard or frequently.

As the main host of the show, I performed 12 minutes to get the show started, and it took the first 4-5 minutes of my set to really get the audience laughing at anything significantly, even though my set was all guaranteed material that I've performed for years and even on Broadway.

An audience can seriously make or break a show, especially a comedy show. The psychology of it, in laymen's terms, is that if the individual members of an audience feel like individuals rather than a part of a greater whole, they will be too self-conscious to let loose and express themselves via laughter. That's precisely what happened at this show, and is something that you always run the risk of with smaller audiences.

What I realized about 4-5 minutes into my set is that, with an audience who doesn't really feel like a group, you simply cannot rely on the give-and-take that you normally get performing stand-up comedy. Instead I shifted my performance style from stand-up to monologue. What I mean is that I stopped pausing after punchlines where laughs normally come in my bits. I simply continued talking and let the audience laugh along wherever and whenever they felt like it. With that kind of an audience it came much more naturally to do it that way.

The point is this: do not be afraid to consciously readjust your show in response to an audience's particular characteristics. Be careful not to fall into a rhythm too easily, because that rhythm will not work with every audience. In other words, don't turn on auto-pilot because as soon as you do you're liable to lose the audience, perhaps without even noticing it.

Brian

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