Working with an audience is like being an animal trainer
Jay Leno: "If you’re a little bit nervous and your hand’s shaking, the animals sense it and they rip you apart."
Below: Advice that Jay Leno gave a young Judd Apatow from the book Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy. (And yes, Jay was really funny once upon a time.)
Good crowds are fun but you don’t learn much from them:
You don’t learn anything from the good jobs. When you go into a club and everybody’s happy to see you and you do your jokes, and the jokes that normally don’t work, work, you say, well, this is terrible. Give me a place that’s awful.
You don’t want a crappy audience but if they’re too hot, it’s like a layup. The ideal crowd (if you wanna get work done) is tough but fair.
Here’s Leno on how audiences can sense fear:
Working with an audience is like being an animal trainer. If you go in the ring and you’re a little bit nervous and your hand’s shaking, the animals sense it and they rip you apart. Same thing with audiences. If you get up there and go, "Well, hi everybody… ah, how you doing… ah, ah, ah…,” people go, “Get off the stage!” They’re not gonna laugh.
Delusional confidence is essential, especially when you’re starting out. (Just be sure not to buy your own BS if you wanna keep getting better.)
And here’s his take on being relatable:
The whole thing to do in comedy is finding a common bond with people in the audience. Everybody has a TV, so you talk about TV. If everybody had elephants, you’d talk about elephants. If you go right to television, old young, right away everybody understands where you’re coming from.
The trick is to find those relatable topics while bringing a fresh p.o.v. We don’t need more jokes about airplanes or dating apps…but if you can provide a take that no one’s heard before, that’s a whole different ballgame.
Here’s one of my fave ultrarelatable jokes. It’s Brian Regan’s “You too” bit. It’s something we’ve all experienced yet no one’s ever articulated it quite like Regan.