Why is it that every standup show lately has to begin with the emcee getting into the audience's shit? Basically picking on and embarrassing them? It's been that way at the last two shows I've been to, and in both cases it was at a paid-entry, drink-minimum kind of club. So the audience was paying for the abuse.
I hadn't been to a comedy club for quite a few years before I began my current plunge. So maybe this is the current state of the art. In the old days, there were always a couple of comics who made fun of the audience -- that was their shtick. And it was always a little risky to sit in the front row of any comedy performance. But this seems different. It's the tenor of the whole show. The host/hostess comes out and makes fun of the audience for ten excruciating minutes, singling out individuals and couples for interrogation and mockery, assigning each of them a stereotypical role, coming back out between sets to reinforce the narrative. The comics get in on the act too, in many cases continuing the story and adding their own twist to the grotesqueries created out of the people who simply came to watch them perform.
Perhaps the idea is to create a sense of fun and intimacy where boundaries are relaxed and everyone can laugh at themselves and thus at the comedians? But we don't get to laugh at the comedians in way they try to get us to laugh at one another. Do we get to say how ugly their shoes are, whether they're going to get lucky on their next date, whether their clothes come from Walmart or JC Penney's, the size of their genitalia, or the fact that their take on people is cliched and superficial? NO! They have the microphone, they have the stage, they have claimed the iron throne of comedy for their complacent asses.
Whatever the explanation, I think it's cheesy, a cop-out. A death by a thousand cuts for those without the ability to kill.
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