Getting Your Crowd Work To Work
CROWD WORK 101
Crowd work is a huge part of performing for any comic and whether you regularly use it or not it’s definitely something you need to have in the back pocket to be a well rounded comedian.
That’s not to say you need to be amazing at it and completely improvising new shows each night but crowd work at its core is any interaction with the audience no matter how long or short, relevant or insignificant and every comic needs to have a basic grasp of how to handle said interactions.
The core of crowd work is play. Whether you’re finding out information from an audience, riffing new ideas or refocusing rowdy or heckling crowds it’s all really a game designed to push the show forward. We’re either working to settle an audience in, work them up before another act, as a setup to a punchline or re-positioning the way they are viewing you as the performer and the show on the whole.
Before you get to any audience interactions it’s important to understand the way in which crowd work should be approached. Overall I’ll always recommend acts approach crowd work with positivity. The vast majority of interactions are not heckles and are instigated by the comedian intentionally so it doesn’t make sense to invite audience members to participate only to shut them down after trusting you. The idea that all crowd work is comedians shutting down hecklers is not accurate at all. You want the audience to like you as you’ll all have a better time if you do. The most graceful examples I’ve seen of crowd work always involve inclusion and compassion to bring out the best responses and have the audience on side for your exchange.
If you go in with this attitude then all of your interactions will be noticeably better. When you speak with audience members and notice features about them they’ll be positive ones, which in turn lead to positive report and positive jokes. But this is a really hard idea to get your head around because our base state as performers is to get a joke out as quickly as possible. Those three seconds on stage where you were thinking of something to say feel like 10 but to the audience it’s only 1. This brings us to the second most important thing with crowd which is to be patient with yourself.
It’s unlikely you’ll get a quality joke or laugh from the first thing an audience member says when you start out. However we feel a pressure to try and make something of nothing straight away and from personal experience that pressure to come up with any gag quickly will result in haphazard and reflexive attempts to go for something that will usually be negative. When I began I found that I would instinctively go for a defensive jokes which result in insults to the person being talked to which is not ideal and will turn audiences off very quickly. The trick here is to let the conversation flow beyond just a preliminary question. When you’re struggling to come up with any joke you can quickly the time it takes feels like an eternity but just remember that as long as you are confident in your stage presence the audience will more than likely won’t notice. I find a lot of comics will get a response and try to come up with something off that and I’d strongly recommend following up to get to something you can work with rather than trying to come up with solid riffing from nothing. There’s an interview technique commonly used by late night talk show hosts called “hooking” which is the process of using a person’s answers to create follow up questions to allow for fluid conversation. If you ask a person what they do and they reply, use that response to create a more refined follow up question and keep doing so until you find something you can work with.
In this manner it’s not so much you searching through audiences responses for a joke you can say, rather it’s building something new and exciting with the audiences. The best crowd work I’ve seen always comes from the audience opening up and allowing for the creation of a state of play with the comic that the performer guides and pushes forward.
Finally when we look at developing your crowd work skills beyond basic questions remember that with crowd work anything is something. You don’t need responses, you are just looking for something to play off and in that sense you can turn anything into a joke.
You ask someone how long they’ve been together and if they answer too quick then that can say something very different unintentionally than if the audience member was to take take too long for instance. The logic being if they had to think then they’re unsure and if they are too confident then they are very invested in the other person. That’s a basic four joke plan of avenues to go down just from the way in which a person responded to a question let alone how they answered.
The real trick with crowd work is not coming up with answers on the cuff. It’s being confident enough in yourself to allow your natural style of comedy to not only come out,but also to connect with the audience. Just as much as audience often don’t want to be spoken to for fear of being made fun of, so to do we not want to reveal too much of who we really are for fear of it being rejected. In this regard giving yourself the time you need to come build a relationship with the audience is well worth it later on once you start putting together jokes for them out of things they’ve said and ideas you can bounce off.
That’s a basic overview of how I’d approach crowd work, with confidence, positivity and appreciation for the audience members participating. It’s always a risk to get on stage as a comic but it’s a risk you willingly take, however for audience members who are participating in crowd work it’s not something they’ve previously agreed to.The idea that people who sit in the front row are “asking for it” is completely counter productive to standup and only works to make the audience less likely to sit in the front row or to come to live standup at all. Show them gratefulness for even coming out and more often than not you’ll find that gratitude returned with better interactions to follow.
To recap..
-Approach crowd work with kindness, that means not inviting an audience member to participate only to shut them down
-relax the pressure you’re putting on yourself to come up with gags and focus instead on being confiden tin your stage presence and ask follow up questions
-be open to anything that comes forward within the interaction as a potential avenue for a joke
-be grateful to audience members for coming to see standup at all, let alone participating in any interactions
And for the love of god don't EVER close your set with crowd work.
If you can't make it work up top, it's not going to save your act at the end.