Textick

The comedy night was great fun, but it was also a fascinating expose of social taboos. It’s like this: the audience will be laughing, laughing, laughing. They’ll love the comic, they’ll think he’s the greatest, funniest, wittiest most brilliant person they’ve ever seen. And then he makes one bad joke, he mentions something that people don’t like, and he’s gone (I’m saying ‘he’ because there were, sadly, no female comediennes last night). The audience can turn so viciously fast. I observed that the following points cause immediate ‘boos’ from the audience:

1) Fat Chick Jokes (it’s amazing how nobody, male nor female, has the patience to listen to some guy bang on about how fat his girlfriend is, or how her best friend has her own gravitational pull)
2) Paedophile Jokes (because they’re always made by the guy who really does look like a paedophile)
3) George Bush Jokes (okay, sometimes they can be genuinely clever, but most times it’s because he’s just too easy a target)
4) One Liner Jokes (you know, the ones where there’s a pause before the woeful punchline. The audience will usually sit still for about four or five one-liners, but if they sense that that is all your act is made up of, they quickly turn)
5) Anything beginning ‘So I just broke up with my girlfriend’ (for men) or ‘So my divorce just came through’ (for women).

Generally the audience will be so willing to embrace anybody, but if you’re nearing elderliness, you’ll be loved so much you won’t know what to do with yourself. The audience will give you Grandpa hugs, will begin to chant your name, will give you a standing ovation. Such was the case with one gentleman, a slightly emaciated looking man with showbiz appeal and Grandpa one-liners, but he had the audience in his wrinkly little hand. Naturally he got through to the finals. It came down to himself and another gentlemen (who, frankly, was much more deserving of being there purely because all his material was original, and was about telling a story rather than about telling single jokes). So it came down to a joke-off. The old boy had it in the bag, there wasn’t a doubt in the world. The younger guy was nervous (you could tell it meant more to him to win, but he knew he couldn’t compete with the Grandpa charm of his rival). He made a couple of flubbish jokes, not particularly funny, not particularly unfunny, but obviously dragged out of the recesses of his comic mind out of desperation. Then the old man went. The crowd was chanting his name, drumming their feet, cheering before he’d even got remotely close to his punchline. It began ‘The other day I saw a women in great danger of being sexually violated, but I prevented it.’ And he said the lead-in a few more times because the cheers were so loud and the stampeding feet so riotous. And then people picked the punchline. And the cheers died, and the stamping feet slowed down. And the MC said ‘…remember when AC Milan were 3 goals up at halftime?’ (for those football ludites out there, this refers to last years Champions League, when Liverpool had the comeback of the century, scoring 3 goals in the second half to draw, and then winning the penalty shootout). Basically, the MC was pointing out that the old man, who was clearly the favourite, had just flubbed his chances, and now the other guy was probably going to win. And win the young guy did! So the moral of the story is: no matter how well you think you know your audience, no matter how amazing you think they think you are, they can turn in two seconds, like a pack of rabid dogs, or somebody who has just been bitten by a zombie. There are some lines that once crossed, it seems, will never win you friends in your audience.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 at 1:11 am and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.