Emotional Distance

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Transcript:

Stand-up comedy is emotional.  What’s the emotional state of the room?  What kind of emotional rollercoaster ride are we gonna go on together.

It’s so frustrating when an audience isn’t vibing with you emotionally.  If you can’t get them to relate in any kind of way to the feelings you’re trying to convey, it’s over.  Doesn’t matter what you say.  Doesn’t matter what act outs you do or faces you make.  Give up.  You’re dead in the water.

There is nothing worse than being in one place emotionally and the audience is in another place emotionally and you can’t bridge the gap.

It’s awful.  Makes you wanna jump out a window.  Get hit by a train.  Terrible stuff.

If you’re happy and they’re angry, everything you try to talk about is going to pass through that filter and it’s gonna suck.  That’s never a good conversation.  Take the person who’s having the best day ever, and the person who hates everything that has happened in the last 24 hours - they’re not gonna have a fun time together.

Same thing if you’re sad and they’re not.  Or they’re bored, or annoyed.

If you’re both bored or both annoyed, that’s not necessarily a problem.  You can work with that …come up with some funny jokes.

It’s tricky though.  It’s tricky trying to finagle the emotional state of a room of people.  Sometimes audiences are super disinterested.  They can be grumpy.

People don’t always show up to comedy shows excited and ready to laugh.  Sometimes they are hella skeptical as to whether they made the right choice by coming to your little comedy skit.

So there’s the emotional state in the room.  That’s important in comedy.  You need to be tracking how your emotional state is interacting and influencing the emotional vibe of the audience.

Cuz that’s gonna play a role in what types a’ jokes you can do.  If an audience feels emotionally close to you, you’re going to have access to different jokes, better jokes, than if they feel emotionally distant.

That’s why sometimes the same joke crushes in one room and eats it harder than you could ever imagine in another room.  That room wasn’t primed for that joke.  You can’t do a cutesy joke for a crowd that’s bitter.  You can’t do a heinous joke for a crowd that’s cheerful and pleasant.  It just doesn’t work.

If they’re in the mood for a thriller and you give them a romantic comedy…the vibe is off.

They want a Hallmark Christmas movie, you give ‘em a horror film…right?

What’s their emotional proximity to you.

What’s your emotional proximity to the material.

What’s their emotional proximity to the material.

All of that is interacting.

You and the audience.  You and your material.  The audience and your material.

When it’s good, it’s so good.  It’s the best.  I could do this forever.

When it’s bad.  Boy, is it bad.  It’s the worst of the worst.  Please, kill me.  I wanna be dead, right now.  Thank you.

Emotional distance, it’s important to be gauging that between you and the audience.

But, emotional distance, also important when it comes to the material itself.

Your relationship to the material, emotionally.

The audience’s relationship to the material, emotionally.

That’s slightly different from your ongoing relationship with the audience.  You are not your material.

There’s this thought experiment called the trolley problem.  There’s a million variations of it.  But the basic idea is there’s a trolley on some tracks and it’s gonna run over 5 people.  And the only way to stop it is if you pull a lever to divert the trolley onto another set of tracks.  Sounds like an easy decision, right?

The catch is, when you pull the lever, the trolley still runs over one person on the other track.  So you saved a net total of 4 people.  But, you’re sort of responsible for the person on the other track dying.

Most people say they would pull the lever.

However, everything changes if you start switching up aspects of the trolley problem.  Another variation is that the trolley is headed toward 5 people and if you push one person off a cliff so that they land in front of the trolley it will mess up the track and stop the trolley from hitting the 5 people.

Again, you’re saving a net 4 people, but, you feel a little bit more like, definitely a murderer, this time.  It’s an ickier way to save the day, pushing someone off a cliff.

Most people say they wouldn’t do that.

Most people would pull the lever.  Most people would not push the person off the cliff.

Even though the end result is the same both times.

Why am I bringing this up?

The difference in those situations is emotional distance.  Different parts of your brain get activated depending on how close or far away from a situation you feel emotionally.  Pulling a lever, you feel much further away than you do when you physically touch and push someone.  So your brain is evaluating those two things very differently.

This happens with jokes too.  If someone feels super close to something emotionally, it affects what kind of jokes might make them laugh about that thing.

And everyone in the audience has different emotional makeups and life experiences, so stuff you bring up is gonna hit everyone in different ways.  

So you gotta pay attention to that.  There’s a lot of emotional filters sorting through your material as you present it.  You gotta try to suss out what’s going well and why, what’s not going well and why.

You’re hunting for that emotional distance to the material that is intimate enough for people to care, but not so intimate that they get overly protective.

You need to be far enough away that you’re not doing any real harm; you’re just being silly.  Cuz there is always a bit of a negative bent in comedy.

Comedy is poking at the unstable, broken, humbling aspects of life.  Comedy isn’t courageous and valiant.  It’s goofy.  It’s non-sense.  So you need to be very skilled in how you handle stuff that people are so emotionally close to.  If you’re writing jokes about what others hold precious, they’re going to struggle to give that material room to breathe and play.

Comedy does poke at people’s sacred cows, but you gotta figure out how to let people relax and not identify so completely with their sacred cow before you poke it.

They need some emotional distance from that sacred cow in order to be able to pull the lever that is going to let the trolley run over it.  

You’re never going to convince them to push their sacred cow off a cliff to fall in front of the trolley.  Give up on that.  Not gonna happen.

I was listening to this Script Notes Podcast with screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin, it was episode 472: Emotional States.  And they talked about how when you’re writing emotions for characters you have to consider why they are experiencing their emotional state.  You have to ask how far they are from the source of those emotions - how far both in time and space.  The closer in time and space - the more heightened the emotional state.

One of their points was: “Why is this character speaking in complete sentences with a knife to their throat?”  That doesn’t track emotionally.

So when you’re writing jokes, how are you handling the material, emotionally?  Are you representing an appropriate emotional distance?

Or, maybe you are closer or further away from the material emotionally than a given audience member, maybe your emotionally relationship to the material is very different from theirs.  That can be valid.

But does the way you’re behaving, does what you're saying, at a minimum, seem emotionally consistent?  Do they believe what you are showing and telling them – that these are your honest feelings?  People can respect feelings that are different from their own, as long as they are genuine.

The other thing they point out on that Script Notes episode: You should never try to make the audience feel the emotional state that the character is feeling.  You can’t make an audience sad by showing them a sad character.

Audiences are bringing all of their emotional baggage to the situation too.  You don’t control their reaction.  All you can do is write and perform authentically to the characters and the situation.  The audience takes interpretation and internalization of the events and characters from there.

All that advice applies to how I try to conduct myself on stage as a comic.  I can’t force the audience to think exactly how I think.  Honestly, that would be kind of weird.

It doesn’t make sense to want your audience in complete lock step with how you think.  You’d never be able to surprise or entertain them because they would already be completely onboard and unified in how they think about the thing.

You want some level of emotional resistance and dissonance to push up against.  Not so much that it turns into a conflict, but enough that it stays a game.

You can’t and shouldn’t want to get the audience thinking exactly how you think, and feeling exactly how you feel.

You can only be authentic, and then hope they’re close enough, at least in the same ballpark, that they can relate to some of what you’re conveying.

You bring your authentic emotional baggage to the situation; they bring their authentic emotional baggage to the situation, and you sort it out.  But you have to account for their baggage as much as your own.  Their baggage is also valid.  You can’t try to steamroll them with your baggage.

There’s a book called Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy.  It’s by a professor of film and television studies, Todd McGowan.  It’s an impressive book.  Todd knows his stuff.  He comes at comedy from an analytical, philosophical perspective.  If you like anything I’m doing with this podcast, you might find the book quite interesting.

Anyway, in Chapter 6, called Distance and Proximity, Professor McGowan talks about why comedy is so subjective.  Why people have different senses of humor.  His idea is that an audience member has to be capable of seeing the object of comedy - the sacred cow being poked fun at - they have to be able to see that sacred cow as both lacking and excessive.  The sacred cow has to have lacking traits and excessive traits.  Ways in which it is impressive and ways in which it is not so impressive.

If the audience only sees the object of the joke as purely lacking - they’ll view it as a victim and won’t laugh.  If the audience sees the object of the joke as purely excessive - they likewise won’t get the joke because they’ll see you as poking at a sacred cow that is unassailable – to them, you should be holding that excessive sacred cow in awe, not trying to make fun of it.

His theory is, if you can’t have a sense of humor about something, you either don’t have the proper emotional connection to it - you see it as a purely lacking victim or as an almighty unassailable God OR perhaps, you have no emotional connection to it at all.  You can’t laugh at something you have no feelings about whatsoever.

Comedy happens in a middle space where you notice both excessive and lacking features in the object of the joke.  Comedy has ups and downs.  It can’t be all down.  It can’t be all up.  And it can’t be detached.  The emotional balance and connection and distance has to be just right.

McGowan also talks about the role proximity in space and time plays in comedy.  Comedy relies on removing practical consequences.  It is a playful thought experiment everyone participates in only when there is not an effect in the real world.  Play involves disengaging from activities in the real world that have social utility and letting the play become the end in itself.  Play for play’s sake.  Play puts us at a distance in space and time away from the real world.

And the interesting thing about us as humans, we are often much more actively and enthusiastically engaged in activities of play than we are in daily activities that keep the real world running.

We recognize the need for real world daily activities, but we don’t like them as much.  Play for play’s sake is more interesting and engaging to us.  It activates our minds more. Gives us a spark.

Something to consider, I think.

We all have our day jobs that are necessary to keep the world turning, but none of that excites us as much as when we are communicating effectively on an emotional level.  That’s what great art does.  It resonates at some frequency emotionally that activates people.  And we like that more than anything.

We’ll do that like it’s crack or heroin, even when it serves no obvious purpose.  Play is fun.  Art is fun.  People like fun.