Becoming a Stand-Up Comedian: Managing Your Audience

People often tell me that it must be wonderful to be a comic, since I don't have a boss. It is wonderful to be a comic - but I do have a boss: the audience. They pay our salaries (indirectly, anyway); judge our performance; and, occasionally, do things that really piss us off. As a group, audiences can be good or bad, easy or tough, and, individually, customers can do a lot to disrupt a show - often unintentionally. Managing audiences can be tricky, but it is an essential skill as you move along in the comedy business, in particular as you work the road.

Tough Audiences

They don't laugh; they don't clap; they don't answer when you ask a question. You're not sure why they even bothered to show up (don't ask me, I don't know either). Facing a tough audience is a frustrating, but common, experience in standup comedy.

What can you do against them? As mentioned in "All About Bombing", you need to bring the energy yourself. Move more on stage; engage the audience visually and verbally; increase the inflection and the emotion in your voice. Some days you'll get 'em; other days you won't. The best you can do is give away as much energy as you can, and hope the audience starts to reciprocate.

Hecklers

Everyone's heard of hecklers, but all for the discussion about them, I've found them to be exceedingly rare. (The most famous instance of heckling came at a one-nighter at a Holiday Inn in the South, where a customer was heckling a guitar act. The comic stood up, picked up his guitar, and smashed it over the audience member's head. The guy sued the booker, the hotel, and the comic for a bundle.) I've only faced hecklers -- out and out, mean-spirited, "you suck!" kind of hecklers - two or three times in my career. There are a lot of stock lines for dealing with hecklers - "I don't come to where you work and knock the broom out of your hand" is one of the tamer ones - but generally speaking, you want to ignore them the first time, be polite the second time, and go after them the third time. If the audience is on your side at all, they'll support you if you go after the heckler.