Performance Anxiety

I just watched a DVD of the Upright Citizens Brigade's Asssscat improv show; as is usually the case, the live audience was laughing a lot harder than seemed warranted.  People often ascribe this phenomena to the "communal experience", where the crowd feeds off itself through the empathetic response.  Another explanation is that the audience paid good money to have a good time, and goddammit that's what they're going to do.

But in the case of Assssscat, which was performed in the tiny, 92-seat UCB Theatre, it seems like the laughter-threshold of the audience was lowered by a subconscious politeness-mechanism, where the audience unwittingly feels like it would be assholish to not laugh at the somewhat clever antics of the comedy brigade.  The setting is so intimate that the actors can see the faces of every member of the audience, and each of these audience members may feel that they themselves are putting on a reciprocal performance for the sake of the actors.

Asssscat, all up in my grill.

This is like when you're meeting someone for the first time, where you feel like you're each assessing each other, and the pressure to accept and be accepted causes you to laugh at each other's shitty jokes.  Of course, that only applies when the two people actually care what the other person thinks; with comedy, if the audience doesn't respect you, they won't bother with polite laughter.

The social pressure is not just in the audience's mind, on Comedy and Everything Else, stand-ups Todd Glass and Jimmy Dore discuss taking it personally whenever there's some fucker in the audience who's not laughing.  They also say that anytime someone gets up and leaves during a show, they'll neurotically assume it was because the person hated their act, not because the babysitter just called with an emergency.

Doug Benson likes to talk about how, ever since he established himself as the preeminent stoner-comic, some hardcore drug-dealer types will come to his show, and sit in the front row with thuggish expressions on their faces the whole time.  This consumes Doug throughout his set, he's worried they want to kick his ass because of how shitty his material is, but after the show, they'll come up to him and give him daps, telling him how much they loved it.  These gangsters don't have the polite-laughter mechanism ingrained in them, and that makes them stand out among Doug's crowd.

The phenomenon doesn't transfer to large venues.  Many comedians have talked about much harder it is to control a big audience of several thousand people. This is because, in a large crowd, the people don't feel the need to kiss your ass.  Its like being on the streets of New York, people won't even acknowledge your existence; meanwhile, if you're in Middleton, Wisconsin, you're considered a jerk if you don't greet every passerby with a nod and a smile.

But even if the chuckles at these comedy shows are born out of anxiety rather than humor, that doesn't mean they're invalid.  People go to haunted houses to feel scared, and on rollercoasters to feel nauseous, why shouldn't there be some way to induce awkward laughter?