Simplest rule of being a comedian, if the audience isn’t laughing, tell a different joke.
The audience isn’t wrong just because you can’t stick anything with them, and if you bomb out then you just sucked for that audience and that is also, not their fault.
Seinfeld at least had the common sense to bow out of the college circuit when he realized his material wasn’t landing anymore, even if he made a spectacle of being a crying little pansy about it.
And don’t even get me started about Bill Maher, if you ever wanna snap a Millenial or Zoomer out of a weed phase, tell them that if they don’t stop they could turn out like Bill Maher, and those youngins will be sober as mormons by the time you’ve finished the sentence.
I’m painfully out of the loop with most pop culture. I blame the isopods I live with under this rock; they only like to watch live stream gaming which bores me to tears. Because of this, I’m unaware of the Seinfeld crying like a pansy bit you reference. Mind filling me in a bit? Even if it’s just enough to give me bits to search, that would be great.
It was a few years ago, like pre-covid, he made a big statement about how he isn’t doing colleges anymore because college students are “too sensitive” and “don’t appreciate a good joke anymore.”
I would say that the audience can be “wrong”, where I mostly mean “inappropriate for the specific comedian” at least.
One example that comes to mind is this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M4ckxcHx1q4 (Which unfortunately is in Italian). This monologue is an incredible piece on feminism, and the audience was extremely silent and unresponsive, probably because they were a “TV crowd” with a stand-up comedian (the best Italy has ever had IMHO) who was totally out of their league. In this case, the comedian ended up “rebuking” the audience and I think he was right at that.
The guy might have had a noble cause but the second he started talking at them instead of trying to change up the set or whatever it broke with being a comedy act and became a public speech, and you and I may agree that some people need to hear that shit, but what I don’t imagine is that this guy went into that speech expecting the audience to be doing much more laughing before he left the stage.
That’s what I mean when I talk about the audience isn’t wrong, calling out bullshit is fine, lecturing from the stand is a bit self righteous but fine, but throwing a fit because you think you’re entitled to the audience finding you funny is what I’m raising the point against. Not calling out crowd misogyny, but telling them they’re all backwards hicks because your theory heavy set that doubles as a thesis statement on the works of Andrea Dworken sailed over all their heads.
Yeah, I can see your point and I would say I generally agree.
Stand up comedy though I think is quite a gray area. Ultimately cannot be seen as pure entertainment as that’s exactly what it distanced from when it was born. Laughing ultimately is just the mean but not the goal of this particular form of comedy.
But I agree about not being entitled to a crowd that finds you funny and throwing a fit about that.
There are always exceptions though. Like Bill Burr roasting a crowd in Philly. https://youtu.be/dEKNLxjZLNU?feature=shared
Except for the fact that there are audiences that laugh at jokes like those, but those jokes cannot be made anymore. Some of the most recognizable comedy songs for people in Poland in the noughties were like this. They just wouldn’t be accepted nowadays. There is a band called “Big Cyc” which translates to “large tit” (as in breast, a singular one). They parodied everything around . So they had an extremely racist anti-racism song. They had “Every man is a pig”. They had songs taking a piss out of the typical old conservative, comparing them to a military army.
None of those are played in the radio despite most Poles knowing the lyrics and loving those songs. Songs like those, like “Little tiny mustache” can’t be sung anymore.
Political correctness isn’t killing comedy. There have always been social taboos and subjects that were best handled carefully (or avoided entirely). This has been true for as long as comedy has existed.
A good comedian can dance on the edge of acceptability without falling over that edge. Other comedians can be funny by going in a different direction entirely.
Commercialism kills comedy. Studio interference kills comedy. Execs hiring the cheapest staff instead of the best staff kills comedy. Excessive analysis kills comedy. Feel free to add any culprits I’ve missed.
I just saw a live comedy show this Saturday where the women used the ghosts of their aborted fetuses to attack the Supreme Court. It was very funny, in poor taste, well executed and didn’t feel like it crossed a line.
You can do edgy humor, you just also have to make sure it’s fun and actually funny to most people.
A good comedian can dance on the edge of acceptability without falling over that edge
To illustrate that, here is Stuart Lee getting the audience to give a round of applause for terrorists
General rule: don’t punch down. Now you’re a bully.
The term “political correctness” is horribly outdated, considering being a hateful bigot will let you do very well politically in red states.
Similar to what others have said, comedy is a form of communication (or artform if you’re reading the other comments; I’m riffing on this motif though).
If you can’t convey your message (joke) properly, your audience is going to be pissed. There is a difference in saying 'carrots are a plague on humanity" and ‘i just don’t like carrots’. As tastes and sensitivities change, so too must the writer. literature, for instance, evolved in its composition. Earlier works from even the mid-20th century are wildly different in their writing style than modern stuff from the end of the 20th century; all due to reader preferences.
The same happens with comedy.
