Silence Is a Powerful Measure of Engagement
How you can tell if your audience is paying attention
Yes, it’s ironic that a comedian looks at the quantum of silence as the indicator of success, but hear me out.
A Comedian’s Dilemma
One day I’m doing a college gig where the crowd is going insane. They are clapping after every joke, cheering, hooting, standing on chairs, and basically taking the roof off. The next day I’m doing an upper-middle-class audience in some fancy hotel ballroom. They have polite smiles on their faces, my inner critic on stage is telling me it’s going terribly and I’m just dying on my arse.
It’s the kind of gig where I want to leave the venue as soon as I finish the show because the last thing I want to do is to engage with anyone in the audience post-gig. Because me being absolutely terrible is always the elephant in the room. If I do engage, should I acknowledge it with a ‘Sorry you had to sit through that…it wasn’t my best night’?
Or worse, should I not say anything and take the risk of them mentioning that I was as popular as a Ku Klux Klan member at a Black Lives Matter rally? A thousand times worse than option one. That would make me want to dig an imaginary hole in the ground and bury myself right there.
