Comedy and audience

I was flipping through the channels looking for a comedy show, and I came across the Soup on E! The host, Joel McHale, has just done a show on the Notre Dame campus last weekend, so I decided to watch. There were a few notable differences between the show that he did here and the show on TV. I thought Beeman’s point about analyzing audience’s previous knowledge and culture and Bauman’s point about performing for the particular audience could be applied to both of McHale’s comic performances. At Notre Dame, McHale made a lot of jokes about football, especially about the other team, San Diego State. Everyone would boo when he mentioned San Diego State. Then he would tease the audience about our viewpoint that ND is the only school worth going to. His subject matter also included his family, celebrities, and other performances that he had done. On TV, he only made fun of celebrities. His audience on TV expects him to mock celebrities and not to talk about ND football. The station pays him to only talk about celebrities, TV shows, and mishaps in the media. He plays to a particular audience.

One interesting thing about the TV show is that I could not tell if he was performing in front of a live audience or if they were playing a laugh track on the TV. It seemed like there was an audience because he would pause to let them laugh where he expected them to laugh. He also made an unintentional mistaking, saying “beauty pageant explode children” and then corrected his statement to “exploit children.” The audience laughed at this error. Presumably, everyone in a live audience who came to see the show would know of the show and would want to be there. I thought things might have been a little different at ND. I heard quite a few people on the quad say that they did not know who the comedian was but decided to come anyway. I thought this made it more challenging for the comedian because he wasn’t necessarily playing to a fan-based audience as he normally is in the studio. There also seemed to be times when he mis-judged the audience. Some of his crude or political jokes were not well received by a majority of the audience. When this happened, he made a joke about himself or the audience such as “Okay, no more killing-baby-seals jokes, but lighten up, people.” He laughed off his own mistakes in humor and continued with the show.