The+Role+of+Audience+in+Comic+Performance

=__The Role of Audience in Comic Performance__= Audience plays a critical role in any type of comic performance. As Freud (1999 ) explained, "An urge to tell the joke to someone is inextricably bound up with the joke - work ". In fact, when humor is performed in public, it requires the legitimation of laughter in order to be recognized as humor. Comic maintains that audiences essentially " vote" with their laughter, determining whether any given joke will " kill" or " die". And comic is a unique performative genre precisely because of its interactive nature. Although the comic's material is monologic, the audience can interrupt or be interrogated at any time; hence, a comic's act is always in process - the "rehearsal" becomes a "performance" only as it is legitimized by audience laughter.

In this way, comics create some of their material spontaneously onstage. A spontaneous, contextual respones to a heckler that works during a partcular performance may ultimately become part of the comic's act. One of the cardinal rules of comic, after all, is: Keep what works! Clearly, unlike its function in any other performative contexts, audience plays a crucial role in the creation and legitimation of public comic performance.

Taking a Bergsonian position, Merrill(2000) maintains that "humor always implies shared vales". This statement affirms Bergson's notion of a "secret freemasony, a complicity between laugh for the same reason. The double message inherent in much marginal humor, however, suggests that people in the same audience experiencing the same performance may laugh different reasons. Cultural values shape our responses to humor; it's as though our ability to laugh, like our ability to speak, is innate, but we learn our particular culture's way of doing it. In the context of marginal performance, this notion is particularly relevant to male and female cocultures. For instance, a male audience member may laugh at a female comic's self - deprecatory humor because his value are affirmed, whereas a female audience member at the same performance may laugh because her value are are equally affirmed. In order for an audience to laugh, some form of identification must occur. Whether an audience member identifies with the butt of a joke or with the comic as victim, some identification is made at the instant the joke is performed.

The tacit understanding of power of performed marginality among comics results in countless attempts at self - marginalization. For example, Todd Glass, a white male comic, begins his 1993 cable performance by commenting on his clean - cut appearance. Because there is nothing partcularly unattractive or anomalous about him, Class jokes that he is on the way to a fraternity party, receives only minimal audience response, and then comments on his bad haircut, noting that he looks like "the offspring of Fred Flintstone and Ollie North." Again, the audience is relatively unresponsive. Because Glass is not sociologically marginal in any way, his attempts to become rhetorically marginal result in humor that seems forced and therefore fails. The more "always already marginal" a comic is sociologically, then, the better chance he or she has of capitalizing on difference. Although their difference may result in discrimination on a daily basis for many marginalized individuals, this same "premarginalization," by some immutable, congenital feature, afford the marginal comic an edge on the competition. Comic always use what works. Hence, an african American female comic like Ellen Cleghorne foregrounds both race and gender in her act.

Comic Performance act as an entertainment because it brings people who enjoy laughter together. Sometimes when poeple make jokes it can hurt anothers feelings. Some comics will make fun of people because audience will enjoy that because of embarrassement. As long as it is not them then it is funny. For example the movie "The Nutty Proffesor" had a scene involving a comic performance where it was all fat jokes about the proffesor. It hurt his feelings and they end up leaving.

=Reference and Other link= Freud, S. 1999. Joke and their relation to the unconscious. London: Hogarth Press. Merrill, L.2000. Perspectives on comic. New York: Gordon and Breach. Bergson, H. 2000. Laughter. In Comedy. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books.

Graph http://images.google.ca/images?svnum=10&hl=en&lr=&q=comic http://www.didaskalia.net/issues/supplement1/garrison.html

http://www.jstor.org/view/00219347/dm992978/99p0058k/0

http://www.nique.net/issues/2005-04-01/entertainment/3

http://www.jstor.org/view/08919356/dm994375/99p0165a/0

http://scotsyett.com/anent/humour.htm