Can One Be Funny When Stuck in a Room?
For better or worse, there was more audienceless comedy produced over the last two years than at any given point in recorded history. The pandemic forced late night hosts to do monologues in their living rooms, and later return to studios sans studio audience. When comedy clubs shuttered their doors in March 2020, comics experimented with putting on virtual shows via digital platforms like Instagram Live, Clubhouse, and Zoom. While the results were mixed and technology often imperfect, there was one offering that cemented itself as one of the defining artistic documents of the pandemic and showed what’s possible when performing comedy without a live audience.
At the beginning of Bo Burnham’s groundbreaking comedy special Inside he cautions, “It’s not gonna be a normal special because there’s no audience, and there’s no crew. It’s just me and my camera, and you and your screen…The way that our lord intended.” The special was written, edited, shot, and directed by Bo, and filmed entirely in a single room from March 2020 to May 2021. In the song “Look Who’s Inside Again” Bo rhetorically asks, “Can one be funny when stuck in a room?” This same question confronts Live Bash as we prepare to launch our first livestreaming stage in Chicago, one of the best comedy cities in the world.
Using Bo Burnham’s Inside as a jumping off point, I’d like to explore the value proposition of performing comedy without an audience. While this may at first seem like a self-serving piece of corporate propaganda that Bo himself would detest…well yeah it probably is.
Heralded as one of the first comedians to breakout from YouTube, Bo notes the irony that he rose to fame making witty songs alone in his room as a teenager and on the cusp of turning 30 is thrust back inside once more. Free from the burden of audience expectations, Bo is able to expertly embody and comment on the isolation of making and consuming content through satirizing social platforms and online trends. While Inside highlights the inherent loneliness of performing in a vacuum, Bo displays a level of audacious creative freedom that I don’t believe would have been possible to achieve in a live setting.
Ben Stiller interrogated this idea when he appeared on the Daily Show and asked Trevor Noah what it was like to do his show without a studio audience:
Ben Stiller: You’re doing comedy where you’re talking and making jokes and there’s nobody in the room, right? How could you tell if you were funny?
Trevor Noah: I couldn’t…I just became a crazy person. [Studio Audience Laughs]
Ben Stiller: But don’t you think it might have made you funnier because you kind of didn’t care?
Late Night host Seth Meyers acknowledged that filming his show without an audience, “brought us closer to our sensibility, comedically, our authenticity as people.” Though comedians traditionally depend on laughter, applause, groans, gasps, or walkouts to know what’s working and what’s not, audiences are not always the most reliable indicators of what’s funny. Drew Michael, whose self-titled 2018 HBO comedy special was also filmed without an audience, argued that crowds are highly susceptible to manipulation and therefore laughter cannot be considered the ultimate barometer: “Laughter isn’t the metric, because I have seen shit that I think is terrible murder.” The absence of feedback from a crowd emboldens performers to trust their intuition and explore areas they may have otherwise shied away from.
I’ve witnessed plenty of shows where a comic turns on the crowd when their material isn’t resonating. They’ll plead with them that they’re wrong and then eventually conclude that the audience was terrible. But if there’s no audience, there can be no bad audiences. No bombing! While that will of course eliminate crowd work, on the other hand, it will also eliminate crowd work! Better still, the lack of audience will provide comedians the opportunity to perform without worrying about their set being disrupted by inebriated hecklers or Will Smith.
Many comedians I’ve spoken to would welcome the opportunity to perform free of judgment and interruption in a less hostile environment. Bo Burnham previously advocated for the abolishment of comedy clubs altogether: “I hated those comedy clubs…Tear them down, they’re from the goddamn ‘80s.” Bob Odenkirk cites the combative nature of performing in front of an audience as the reason he quit stand-up: “A lot of times a stand-up show was a fight between the audience and the performer…and I was always of the feeling like I would get out there and I’d start my act and if they didn’t like it I was like ‘Okay see you bye’.” Larry David would famously walk on stage and if he didn’t like the look of the crowd immediately walk-off.
Which is to say nothing of people afraid to get up on stage in the first place due to acute performance anxiety. In a 2018 profile of Bo Burnham the author writes that, “Although [Bo] has been a working standup since his senior year of high school, he has suffered from abject stage fright.” In Inside, Bo addressed the topic head-on in his song “All Eyes On Me”: “Five years ago, I quit performing live comedy, because I was beginning to have severe panic attacks while on stage, which is not a great place to have them. So I quit. And I didn’t perform for five years…” Live Bash will offer those who may not be comfortable performing in front of a live audience, but who have something worthwhile to say, a home to share their material.
So can one be funny when stuck in a room? We think so, but you’ll have to tune in to find out for yourself. And if you’re a comedian in the Chicagoland area or will be passing through we’d love to have you perform on our stage!
