Every stand-up comedian has a story about a heckler who came up to them after a show with a big smile on his face (it’s always a he) and asserted, “I was helping you!” And I guarantee that every stand-up comedian who hears that at least thinks, if not actually says, “Please go fuck yourself.”
As for me, I always try to be a good audience. In any context.
For instance, I’m usually the only one on the plane who pays attention to the flight attendants as they go through their standard safety briefing. Of course, I know where the exits are. I know I’m supposed to put my mask on before helping anyone else. I know my seat cushion can be used as a flotation device. Although, if the plane actually crashes in the ocean, I’m not going to be real picky. I’m going to use any piece of the plane as a flotation device. I’ll use the obnoxious kid who’s been kicking my seat the whole trip as a flotation device.
My point is, I don’t care if I’ve seen this routine hundreds of times, I’m going to give the cabin crew member the gift of my attention. It’s only fair. I spent the seminal phase of my career in comedy clubs fighting to keep the attention of rooms full of strangers. Attention is a sign of respect for the speaker, be they comedian, politician, author, singer, preacher, tour guide, or bored airline attendant.
Not only that, when I enter a room for a presentation, I have no qualms about sitting close to the front. I would hate to walk into a room to give a talk and see everyone sitting in the back. Physical proximity is key to effective communication. Any stand-up will tell you that the people laughing hardest are usually the ones closest to the stage. It’s not that the joke gets less funny as it travels at the speed of sound to the back of the room. It’s that the people in front are more engaged. They are more engaged because they know the performer can see them. They are communing.
Every so often when I performed, I would notice someone sitting up front, who, for whatever reason, didn’t appear to be responding like everyone else. No telling why. They could have been worried about the new babysitter, or the argument with the spouse on the ride over, or their boring date. Or maybe whatever I was doing wasn’t funny to them, or they were enjoying it just fine but weren’t all that expressive. My mother was like that. She was a quiet laugher. She laughed on the inside. She enjoyed a good joke as much as anyone else; she just wasn’t the type to open her mouth, throw her head back, and guffaw.
You don’t want too many people in the audience like my mother, though. You need laughers, not smilers. So when I would spot this seemingly unresponsive person, I would subtly shift my attention to them. I wouldn’t point them out or embarrass them. I would just catch their eye and play to them for a few moments as if they were the only person in the room. I can’t think of a time that didn’t work. Sometimes I got just a grin, sometimes a chuckle, but each time making that connection loosened the lid a little and awakened the person to the fact that I was paying attention, too.
Even when I watch a TV show or movie, I’m a courteous audience. Despite my being a professional storyteller who traffics in twists and turns, I don’t expend too many brain cells trying to stay ahead of the narrative. Unless it telegraphs a plot point so obvious and egregious, I let the story wash over me, unlike some people I know, who in an effort to either brace herself for a shock or prove she’s smarter than the writer, constantly shouts out what she thinks is going to happen next. Okay, maybe she doesn’t literally shout, but it sure feels like a bullhorn in my ear. She’s not right all the time, but when she is, she can drain the suspense from the scene for the gullible dullard sitting on the couch next to her, who then must also endure the self-satisfied QED: “Told ya.”
“Good work, Inspector Smarty-Pants.”
Being a good audience is a grave responsibility and as such can be stressful. Back in the early nineties, our friends, Wendy and Devin, called to suggest we take our kids to a show at the Westwood Theater on the campus of UCLA. At that time, we each had one child. Our son, Sam, was about three-and-a-half years old, and their daughter, Hannah, was almost three. Wendy had read an intriguing review of a show in the L.A. Times for “Avner the Eccentric.” Avner Eisenberg was best known for his role in the film “The Jewel of the Nile,” the sequel to “Romancing the Stone,” the big hit starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner.
Avner had played the role of “The Jewel” in the title and was touring the country with a solo act that featured mime, juggling, acrobatics, magic, and general clowning. The reviewer remarked on how it would be “a good show for children.”
As first-time parents we were always on the lookout for activities that would get us out of the house and relieve some of the unrelenting intensity that comes with keeping a sentient hunk of protoplasm alive and thriving for three whole years. In that faintly desperate state of mind, we don’t always make the best choices. It seems every other mammal in the animal kingdom is a better, more instinctive parent than a homo sapiens. Meerkats, wolves, hedgehogs, sperm whales don’t have to take classes to learn how to mind their offspring. Humans are the only creatures who enter the program as amateurs, learning on the job. In our defense, we are taking care of an organism with a large, complex brain that needs many years to grow out of its helplessness. Over that span of time, we are bound to make mistakes, misjudgments, goofs.[*]
I began to feel this was one of those times on that Thursday evening in Westwood as soon as the four of us took our front row seats with our respective three-somethings. The theater was about half full. There were no other kids in the audience.
This foreboding was confirmed minutes before curtain when the stage manager ducked out from behind the stage, took a knee, and gently informed us that “even though the review said that children would enjoy the show, this is not a children’s show. Sometimes Avner elicits responses from the audience, but other times he needs quiet to concentrate. So if the kids are disruptive in any way, we’re going to have to ask you to leave.” He pointed to the nearest exit where we could deplane quickly and unobtrusively.
This tapped into my worst fear of being a bad audience. The stage manager was professional and diplomatic, but all I heard was, “One peep out of these little turd-droppers, and you have to get the fuck out.”
Idiots! We were stupid idiots! Of course, this was a terrible idea! It was a Thursday, eight o’clock at night. What were we thinking?! The show will run way over Sam’s and Hannah’s bedtime. A sperm whale would never make a dumb mistake like this.
Shelley, Wendy, Devin, and I huddled to discuss whether we should leave now to avoid suffering the indignity of being kicked out later. We studied the kids. They didn’t seem too tired or fidgety… yet. But we knew that plot could turn without warning. On the other hand, we had driven all the way across town for this. So we decided we’d hang for the time being but remain poised to bolt at the first sign of turbulence.
As the house lights went down, I felt a storm front of dread rolling toward what was supposed to have been a bright night of fun. The curtain opened to a sparse stage dressed with a couple of ladders, a chair, two posts from which dangled a thick rope, and not much else.
I should back up here to explain that our son, Sam, is deaf. That’s a whole other story, but I mention it because one of the things that drew us to this show was the fact that it was mime and therefore wordless. It was physical comedy, which is more accessible to little kids in general but especially to Sam, who would have had trouble deciphering anything spoken from a stage.
Soon, Avner, a tall, thin man dressed in oversized pants and a beat-up bowler hat and sporting a bright red ball for a nose, shuffled out from the back left of the stage pushing a broom. He wasn’t more than three steps into his act when Sam began… laughing. Or more precisely… chortling. Every move Avner made brought forth in Sam this gleeful giggle of bubbly delight that rang out in the half-empty theater.
At first, he was the only one, but soon others in the audience laughed every time Sam laughed. They were laughing at his laughing, enjoying his enjoying. As a comedic performer, you hope to find in every crowd just such a laugh leader, that one person who laughs so loud and consistently that it frees the rest of the audience from the bonds of self-consciousness. Sam’s laughter was exactly that kind of cue, a contagion that coursed row by row until the entire crowd was infected. When Hannah picked up on it, this school-night crowd, which I know from my own experience would have been a tough coconut to split open, was fully warmed up.
Shelley, Wendy, Devin, and I gushed with laughter ourselves, as much from relief as anything else. This just might work out after all. Maybe we’re not so dumb. Maybe we know a thing or two about our kids. And it only got better. Sam was attuned to every nuance of Avner’s performance, and it didn’t take long for Avner, a seasoned performer, to pick up on it and recognize the affect it was having on the audience.
In one gag, he was using a box of popcorn. He came down from the stage to hold out some to Sam. Enraptured, Sam gazed at him and extended his hand into which Avner popped a single piece of popcorn. Sam stuffed it into his mouth. Then Avner gave Sam another piece and opened his own mouth. Sam tossed it. Avner caught it in his mouth and bowed deeply. Sam, sitting on Shelley’s lap, returned the bow. The crowd was enthralled. As the show continued, I was sitting on the floor in front of Sam, who sometimes got so excited he’d grab me around the neck and squeeze so hard Shelley had to pull his arms away.
A short time later, Avner attempted to balance a large aluminum ladder on his chin. He had warmed up by doing the same trick with two smaller ladders. Just as he was about to let go, a flash went off. A lady in the seat directly behind us had snapped a picture. You don’t have to be a veteran theatergoer to know that flash photography during a performance is taboo. This was 1991, before the advent of the cell phone that made it necessary for theaters to issue a standard request before the start of each performance. Much like the safety briefing before a flight, few people pay attention. In this case, just plain common sense should tell you not to blind a man when he’s balancing thirty pounds of metal on his face. Nothing our kids could have done would have been more disruptive than what this grown-ass woman did. No sign of the stage manager pointing her to the emergency exit.
Avner handled the situation with professional aplomb, although I imagine he was probably seething underneath. He put the ladder down, located the lady and wordlessly coaxed the camera from her. Then he started taking pictures of the audience, using up a bunch of her film.[†] After that, he grabbed her purse and briefly examined its contents, which was good for a few more laughs. Finally, he placed the camera in a smaller pocketbook, buried that pocketbook deep inside her larger purse, wrapped the strap a few times around - just in case she didn’t get the hint – and handed it back to her. He managed to get his point across without unduly embarrassing the lady or making the audience feel uncomfortable.
At another point, Avner came down again and led Sam onstage, then directed him to stand on a particular spot. Avner grabbed a rose and tried to woo Hannah up also. Hannah, being younger and obviously not the hambone Sam was, shook her head, but what amazed me was how Sam patiently stood there waiting in his purple sweater, wearing fluorescent green earmolds and a big smile on his face. People behind us were whispering, “He’s so cute.”
Avner returned to Sam and motioned for him to sit. Then he raised Sam’s arms and stuck a newspaper in his hands. He placed his bowler hat upside down on the floor directly in front of Sam, then took up a position behind him. Sam turned back, but Avner gestured for Sam to face forward and hold the paper high. Sam did so; and in one graceful motion, Avner leapt over him, snatched the newspaper, somersaulted into the hat, and rolled into a sitting position reading the newspaper, bowler firmly fixed on his head. Sam sat there for a moment, his empty hands still raised; then he laughed and applauded with the rest of us.
Sam got to be a part of the show one final time. Avner set up for a tight-rope walk, although it was more of a loose-rope walk, as the thick rope hung limply between two posts only a couple of feet above the floor. He grabbed a kazoo and perched himself at one end of the rope only to drop the kazoo on the floor. By now, confident in his complete wordless communication with his toddler assistant, Avner remained on his perch and pointed to Sam. Sam needed no more instruction than that. He leapt off Shelley’s lap, scrambled onstage, picked up the kazoo, and threw an overhand strike to Avner. Again, what would have been an otherwise underwhelming, half-full Thursday night crowd exploded.
After the show, Avner came out to greet a few of us in the lobby. I commented on how he was able to communicate so well with Sam without words.
I said, “It seemed like you hypnotized him.”
“Oh, I did,” Avner replied.
To this day, I’m not sure whether he meant that literally or just as a figure of speech. Either way, Sam was mesmerized the moment Avner appeared onstage, and that bond between this particular audience member and that particular performer transformed a potential disaster into the most magical night in a theater I’ve ever experienced.
Sam, now in his mid-thirties, has no recollection of that evening. Not surprising. He was only three years old. It makes me a little sad he doesn’t remember. Though, I do hope the feeling, that sensation of pure delight still glimmers somewhere inside of him.
I wonder, too, if Avner remembers. Or maybe this kind of thing happened to him all the time, nothing special.
This is what I like to think: Avner went home that night, called his wife, and said, “Great show, honey. The house was only half full. I thought it was going to be dead. But you should have seen this little kid, so cute, purple sweater, blond hair… he really helped me.”
[*] I’ll never write a book on parenting, but if I did that would be the title: “Mistakes, Misjudgments, Goofs.”
[†] Pre-digital age
Skro, lotta compelling + real-life lessons to unpack in this one. Your evocative storytelling helps the world see your amazing and passionate son the way that you & Inspector Smarty-Pants always have.
Friend, I see a future for you, writing Hallmark Movies: Just when everything is going splendidly, the plot thickens… suddenly a potentially fatal event occurs, that might sink the ship! Both partners work it through, and they live happily ever-after!
Be sure to theme the stories around seasonal timelines, Christmas, Hanukkah, dare I say… St Patrick’s Day? Okay, You’re on-the-clock now Steve… two days to March 17th deadline! You work better under pressure, eliciting those responses from Good Audiences 👍😎😂