Feedback: The Audience

Pros

It’s an audience. It’s the real deal. The ultimate judge of what is funny and what is not.

Cons

Maybe your joke is great but just not to that audiences taste.

Stage time is hard to get.

You can’t ask them questions.

You can’t control your surroundings.

To get the most feedback out of an audience do the following things:

Tape every performance

Just put your smartphone down somewhere on stage, tape the audio and listen back to it. This will help you get the exact wording of something you improvised on stage, get you the exact moments the audience laughed and didn’t laugh and also keep you grounded.

If you bombed you will most likely discover that it was better than you think it was and if you came off stage feeling like a god it will show you that it wasn’t as good as you think it was.

A recording will provide you an honest assessment of your work and trust me:

Your memory won’t.

There is so much going on on stage at any given moment that you won’t be able and also shouldn’t try to memorize how the audience is responding to your jokes. Concentrate on performing and giving your jokes your best and only after that try to figure out how well you did.

Context

Listen to the Comedians before and after you. Compare your material and theirs and watch out for how the audience reacted. Maybe your jokes are fine but the audience just didn’t appreciate what you were trying to do.

The other comedians on the bill are crucial to understanding the context in which your material was received. Just don’t use the audience as an excuse for jokes that simply don’t work… yet.