After a few months in comedy you learn that there are good crowds and bad crowds. Good crowds will make you feel on top of the world. Bad crowds will make you contemplate which method you will use for suicide.

But inside every bad crowd is a good crowd, you just have to bring it out of them. What is a crowd but a collection of people. People are people, there’s no goods and bads, in the comedy sense at least. A bad person can be a great crowd member. In fact bad people make amazing crowd members because they laugh at all the horrible sh*t you say. While good people may have too much of a conscience to laugh at your riskay bit. So a bad crowd is a collection of people, not necessarily good or bad, but for some reason their collective energy is not conducive for a great comedy show. Maybe there’s a critical mass of tired people in the crowd, so not enough ambition is there to create an applause break. Maybe there are too many self conscious people in the crowd, and when put next to each other, it becomes multiplied, and they don’t laugh much. Maybe their favorite sports team just lost, in which case, there’s nothing you can do.

But most of the time, the key to making a bad crowd good, is simply to tell them to be better. You then of course, have to follow up by actually being funny. I’ve seen crowds reprimanded for being bad, then the comic follows this lecture with bad comedy, and it’s just not right. So step one, make sure your comedy is good, or at least decent. This is not hard at all. Then step 2, confront the bad crowd, but do it nicely. Say guys, c’mon! Give it up! This is a show lets have fun, lets laugh! That kind of attitude. Not ‘you guys suck, I deserve better’, because you don’t. You really don’t.

If the crowd isn’t applauding, and you want applause breaks, tell them to start applauding, or suggest they should be doing it. Once they start, they’ll be trained to do it every time you make a strategic pause after something is funny, like Pavlov’s dogs. The crowd is your clay, mold it Michelangelo. This is your show. Even if you are a 5 minute guest spot. Even if the people in the crowd are meatheads that look like they can kick your ass, a crowd as a whole is generally a huge passive p*ssy, and you can tell it what to do. So try it out! But again, make sure you are funny. Because if you aren’t, you’re not just a bad person, even worse, you’re a bad comic ;/