Crowd Atlas [v1]
If I was good enough at comedy, I'd never have to have another conversation again...
“Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future” - Cloud Atlas
On March 5, 2024, the day before what would have been my late younger brother's forty-fifth birthday, I'm closing the Tuesday night ProAmshow at the Comic Strip.
This particular evening a little heavier on the Am side. It's a developmental night and it’s usually a lot of fun. Comedians of varied experience levels are going up from people who lost their fantasy league to hopefuls trying comedy for the first time to pros working on new material.
And tonight the audience is having none of it.
It wouldn't normally matter much to me. My time is an island unto itself. My responsibility on a Tuesday show is to grow as a performer.What happens before or after my five minutes on stage isn't my concern.
But I'm not doing five minutes. I'm headlining, which means I feel obligated to do as well as possible.
Closing an amateur night isn't an enormous deal in the scheme of things–someone has to go on last, after all–but it is an acknowledgement of my ability and an chance to prove myself.
It's also an opportunity to talk about Dorothy. I have ten to fifteen minutes to work with instead of five which means I have time to let them get to know me, ease into and develop the material about her, and get out again if it doesn't go well.
I'm still nervous about it. And that was before I saw this audience.
Onstage people are trying different relational gambits: flattering the crowd, criticizing the crowd, criticizing themselves, begging for approval or demanding it. Others simply put their heads down and plow through material to uncomfortable silence. Every three or four comics, someone--usually a comedian with more experience– get a momentary laugh or two but can't sustain their momentum and the silence resumes.
You wouldn't know this would be a tough crowd by looking at them. Coming in, they looked like any other audience. You can't typically See the difference between crowds. But you can hear them.
You can feel it.
Crowd formations are endless and varied. There are hot crowds and cold crowds. There are chatty crowds, buzzing with table talk like static electricity.There are corporate crowds where people look to their boss or coworkers for permission to laugh. There are crowds that are dominated by one or two large groups, and there are crowds that aren't crowds at all but individual tables sharing a space, demographics or some ineffable force, that won't allow them to come together as a whole. Crowds create shows where you thrive, and ones you barely survive.
And then there are these guys.
***
In 2020 when the world asked me to stay indoors and away from people, I thought: damn...I've been training for this moment my whole life.
I'm not a people person.
When a child me saw a kid from my school at the mall or library I would immediately change directions and hide, lurking behind bookshelves until I was sure there was no chance of crossing paths.
I'm fond of people. I don't dislike my fellow humans. I just don't fully understand or trust them. I'm never sure what they want from me, and I worry it's something beyond my capacity to give. And so I love from a safe distance, looking to please without revealing my needs, because letting people know what you want gives them the power to withhold it from you.
No wonder comedy seems perfect. It’s a social act for an antisocial person. I know how long I'll be up there and I can plan every word I want to say. It's as controlled a group situation as it's possible to get. I can be in front of people and hide from them at the same time.
I'll never have to have an unstructured conversation again.
Well…
Except with other comedians. And showrunners. And bar staff. Turns out ninety percent of success in this business is social skills. You need to ask showrunners for spots and money without being obnoxious about it, fun for other comics to hang around with, and pleasant to bar and club staff.
I’m doomed.
The first time I did comedy my strategy for success was betting I could get good enough at comedy that I didn’t have to ask anyone for anything. It’s the Become a Rock Star method of success. Instead of learning to ask girls out, become rich and famous and then they’ll come to you.
It worked as well as you’d expect.
Theae days I’m less naive and more sociable. The business end of show business remains a challenge, but I’m putting myself out there more, adjusting my expectations, and seeing results.
The comedian's relationship with the ticket-buying public is different than the byzantine social dynamics within the industry. Our livelihood depends on strangers we rarely even meet.
As a result, our connection with the crowd is fraught with ambivalence. We want these shadowy figures in the dark to like us, but we’re also afraid of them. We need them, and we want very badly not to. The general public trigger in comedians what women do to disenfranchised men: a desire to satisfy and anxiety in equal measure. Is it a surprise some of us need to guard against resentment?
In the 2000s it was a badge of honor to meet the crowd with an adversarial stance. “Some audiences, you don't want to do well for,” one Seattle comic said cryptically at a Londonderry Yuk Yuks preshow workshop. Even mellowed with age, you can still see the rebellious shades in Kamal Alaeddine's occasional forays into absurdism, Andrew Iwanyk's crowd work, or Sean Lecomber's seeming complete indifference to whether or not he is well received.
I was too much of a people pleaser to go that route. Instead I saw crowds as some mysterious other, unpredictable and often not what they first appeared. I'd study them from beside the sound booth as though standing on a beach before a dark and fathomless ocean, trying to learn its secrets from just the sound of the waves..
Then the host would say my name, and I'd dive in.
It will be at least three more comics before tonight’s host Jay R, a grizzled cat lover and pro wrestling afficionado from Vancouver via Newfoundland, says my name, and the crowd is still ice cold.
Worse, not only is the show going badly, we've reached the point where the audience knows the show is going badly, creating a feedback loop of awkwardness between performer and audience. Everyone is painfully, laugh-stranglingly self-conscious to what is happening and no one knows how to stop it.
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Jules Balluffi finishes her set, cedes the stage to Jay R, and rejoins the comics, pink-faced and grimacing. The comedians section is thinning out. People who have done their sets and people who were unable to get on are leaving to see if they can get on at BlakBar.
I'm glad they're gone and miss them at the same time. On one hand, I like not having the pressure of the possibility of bombing in front of my peers.
On the other, a set doesn't count unless another comedian is there to see it. It's an irrational remnant of my formative years –audience opinion doesn't matter, other comedians’ do–but early experiences are hard to shake.
If I were hosting, I'd have a chance to go up in between acts and manage the crowd to the best of my ability. As the closer I'm powerless until my time to take the stage.
I can't not address the silence and discomfort in the room. But all the comics on the show know all the same tricks I do and not only are they not working, they've been tried enough times by enough comics that any effect they might have had has been blunted from overuse.
Do I still plan to talk about Dorothy? How will I feel if it goes wrong? Is this a situation where it is better to play it safe? or is this a situation where it doesn't matter how I play it, so I might as well do what meams most to me?
With three comics to go, a vague plan surfaces in my mind, a distant memory of a veteran's trick. It's a survive move not a thrive move, but it's all I have.
I'm closing the show, but what I need is a way to open it.
And so three comedians later, Jay R brings me up and I greet the audience, saying, “Hello, everybody. I just got here, how’s the show been going?”
They laugh.
Not a lot.
But enough.
I might have a chance here.
***
Here's why I think that line worked.
It puts separation between me and the rest if the show. I'm not one of those other guys. It wasn't my fault. I wasnt even there. Let's start over.
I'm acknowledging their shared experience of the show. Hopefully, reminding them of their shared experience will them closer as a group.
I've implied that I'm unaware of something the audience knows–that the show has been bad. And here I come, obliviously strolling into the meat grinder. Unseen danger is funny, right?
Alternately, they know damn well I'm lying. But that I'm aware of what's going on and confident enough to joke about it helps them trust me.
Or it could have been none of those things. After all, Jay R told them I was the headliner and gave me a hell of an intro.
Maybe they just thought I knew what I was doing.
***
Stand-up instruction usually splits comedy into two elements: performance and writing…the things you do and the things you say.
They're missing something.
There's a third category…relating, what burlesque dancers call the art of the tease and pro wrestlers refer to as ‘psychology.’ The funny part might get the glory, but our relationship with the audience wins championships.
At its simplest, relating is the everchanging answer to an ongoing series of unspoken and mostly unconscious questions: What connects us to this comic? How do we feel about them and what do they feel about us? How are we experiencing the show together?
It's a lot of work that also needs to be invisible and appear effortless. Great comedians are master mappers andmanipulations of emotional space. They dance between “me” and “you”, “we” and “they” with the shifting of a pronoun; they swoop and dive from high status to low; they bestow and revoke membership. Who is us? Who is them? Are they representatives of the people or outsiders with an alternative viewpoint? Who gets to laugh and who is deserving of mockery?
And not so great comics..?
They misread the room. They are blind to the audience's perceptions. They attack people the crowd empathizes with. They assume common ground in a swamp where no one wants to join them. They alienate where they should be conciliatory, shrink away from where they should assert themselves.
Comedy, like marital arts and marriage, is about managing distance. How close? Which side are you on and who else is with you? In and out. Who is above you and what is beneath you?
This is where things get tricky with Dorothy. I want them to laugh, but I don't want them laughing at her…which is good because most people don't want to laugh at her either. We like to laugh at people who deserve it and when it comes to getting cancer and dying, deserves got nothing to do with it.
But there are funny moments, funny thoughts and in those moments, in those thoughts, there are opportunities to connect with others who have lost someone and opportunities to reassure people untouched by grief, that it is a survivable experience.
It's a dance. I need to be close enough to the audience for empathy while keeping enough distance from them that they feel comfortable laughing at me. It's an excercise in empathic gravity. Too close pulls them in hard and fast, too far away and they drift off into the stars.
I fail more frequently than I succeed, but in the last month or so the successes are coming together.
Tonight I bring the Dorothy material out in front of a crowd that and it goes better than expected.
Considering where we started from, it’s a win.
***
In comedy, manipulation is baked into the business. Where then is the room for real connection?
The answer is everywhere you care to look.
Everywhere doesn't mean everyone finds it. Connection is like the Soto Zen theory of enlightenment. It's all around us all of the time, but mostly we're too busy thinking of something else to notice.
As for why that is, I believe that performing comedy engages the crisis circuits in our brain. It's a short term rush, but isn't great for seeing deeper, wider, or longer term, making it both addictive and misleading.
For some, the rush comes from the fear. But fear makes it hard to love, and there are a lot of things to be afraid of in comedy. Fear of forgetting material, Fear of bombing, fear of being heckled or judged.
For some it's pride. It can be pride in oneself…I'm better and deeper and more interesting than these people…or it can be pride in one's prowess: look what I can do.
Look what I can make them feel.
This kind of pride isn't unique to comedy. I felt it on the Distress Line too, that I was so knowledgeable about the ways humans hurt themselves that I was immune to it myself. I was the Helper and to need help myself was personal failure.
Since my post-Dorothy return to comedy, I see things differently. Crowds aren't crowds. They are groups of people, and those people are like me. Not better, not worse. But for circumstances, I could be anyone in this audience, and they could as easily have been me.
These people are going to die like Dorothy did, like I will someday..When I remember that guy is going to dies, worrying about whether they think Im funny seems like a deeply misplaced priority.
I hope they enjoy themselves, but that isnt something I control. I can only give the best of me and hope they come along.
Nor do I need to compare any crowd to past audiences or potential future ones. I dont need judge the reality against the show that exists only in my mind. We'll meet each other where we're at and let the laughs fall where they may.
A movie I watched called Cloud Atlas posits that we flow from life to life. And while it might be silly to take ideas on the afterlife from the makers of the Speed Racer movie, I like that thought. We often define ourselves and others by our characteristics–our gender, race, or political or sexual orientation; our economic class or our birth generation, our neurodivergence or our attachment style. These things feel permanent and unchanging and so they feel like they are us. But if you believe you will experience multiple identities in your flow through time, it's easier to hold less tightly to the one you currently have.
Big shows or small I'm grateful to whoever shows up. They make it possible. Other people are people. They have lives and interests. They don't care about me all that much. But they showed up, and that means a lot.
Especially on development nights like the Tuesday Pro Am, theyre probably doing more for me than I am for them, and I appreciate them, no matter how many or how few they are.
I still get strong emotional reactions. I worry before shows, beat myself up after. But I'm starting to realize those feelings aren't reality. They're very normal reactions to a very unusual lifestyle choice.
How good it feels to do well, how bad it feels to do poorly, and how little those things matter in the scheme of things. Because beneath it all, holding it up, is love. Love is the water that makes up the waves amidst the storms of killing amd dying. I am by myself onstage, but when i look outlet the people I'm performing for, I realize I am never alone.
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