Blaming The Crowd
What I Do Instead (Comedy Mindhacks #110)
I’ve mentioned it before on this site but recently, about 30 seconds before I went on stage at The Lab at Zanies, a well-known comedian came over to me and said something to the effect of, “Whew, don’t expect much; this crowd is rough!” I appreciated the gesture because I know he wasn’t trying to discourage me. I’ve heard many other comedians say almost the same exact thing. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times.
But I have to admit, the phrase feels off to me. And I think saying it is one of the easiest traps comedians can fall into over time. Things like: The crowd was cold. The audience was distracted. Nobody got it. Everybody was too tired, too drunk, too sober, too old, or too emotionally dead inside to appreciate the apparent brilliance. I guess, to me, blaming audiences starts becoming like an emotional comfort food at some point. It’s a way to protect one’s ego if disappointment shows up.
Look, I get that crowds can be difficult sometimes. No doubt about that! And while all crowds are different, there are some generalizations that can be made. For instance, a just-off-work Monday night crowd behaves very differently than a packed Saturday-night comedy-club crowd. Crowds at free shows feel different than paid shows. Church crowds respond differently than dive-bar crowds. Crowds in venues where food and drinks are offered are different than rooms where people are halfway through appetizers when a comedian’s trying to drop punchlines. Room conditions and crowds genuinely matter in stand-up comedy.
I think some of the recent obsession over crowd work online has complicated this even further. It seems like people are constantly arguing now about whether audience members are planted at shows or whether certain crowd-work moments are staged ahead of time. Magicians have long done this, and comedians sometimes do, too, I guess, because entertainment has always involved some degree of orchestration. But what gets lost in all those debates is that crowd interaction still depends heavily on reading energy correctly in real time. Even the best crowd-work comedian in the world can look completely average if the room’s energy feels tense, distracted, exhausted, or emotionally closed off that particular night. And if you lose them at some point, that only compounds the difficulty.
But recognizing difficult conditions is very different from emotionally hiding inside those conditions afterward. And THAT’S my point! That realization hit me hard, like a ton of bricks, after a rough set where I spent the entire drive home trying to mentally prosecute audience members afterward. “They just didn’t get it!” “That audience sucked!” “Those people don’t understand comedy!” Every single thing I said was a way to try to protect my ego. But something else hit me, too: While I was doing that, I was also preventing myself from learning anything useful from the experience. In other words, I walked away emotionally intact while my comedy stayed exactly where it already was creatively.
That’s the seductive part about blaming audiences after weak sets. It offers immediate relief right when disappointment presses hardest against a comedian’s identity and insecurities. If the crowd’s always the problem, then I never have to examine my pacing honestly or question whether the setup dragged too long or if my joke just sucked. I never have to consider whether the premise felt much clearer inside my own head than it sounded out loud to strangers hearing it cold. Defensiveness freezes curiosity faster than almost anything else in comedy because protecting one’s ego always feels easier than adapting publicly.
Over time, I’ve learned to take rough sets less personal and treat them much more like a diagnostic tool. That is, instead of mentally shutting down after jokes failed, I’ve learned to started ask better questions afterward about what the room might actually have wanted or needed from me. And I ask questions like: Did I rush the setup for this particular room? Did I fail to establish enough trust before moving into sharper material? Did I move too quickly between ideas without giving audiences enough time to process transitions naturally? Did the crowd need stronger emotional grounding before following me into stranger observations and perspectives? Those kinds of questions have helped my comedy growth far more than blaming strangers ever has.
Here’s another thing: For me, comedy became so much psychologically healthier once I stopped viewing audiences like enemies waiting for me to crash and burn. More often than not, the audience showed up to laugh and they want every comedian to do well. That’s also helped me overcome the desire to have every crowd like me and my jokes in order to validate my identity. Ironically, audiences usually respond better to that version of me anyway because my confidence breathes better once defensiveness has exited the room.
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