Audiences are interesting phenomena. How they react to your comedy depends completely on the people in them. The audiences that I’m in front of are all fairly similar, and I understand the type of thing that they’ll laugh at. When you start to expand, however, you have to keep a close eye on your audience, because you don’t know anything about them.

I recently had experience with this sudden audience change. Improv Abilities has recently begun performing on Wednesday nights at Famous Johnny’s in Overland Park. The audiences there are used to seeing stand-up comedians, and have never seen improv comedy before. The first show that IA performed there was very similar to the other shows IA performs other places… and it completely flummoxed the audience. They didn’t know what to think. The concept of audience volunteers was foreign. When the host asked them for an object to get the scene started, three different people handed him actual objects… like pencils, a glass, or piece of paper.

By the second performance, IA had tweaked the show to appeal more to a novice improv audience, but it really got me thinking about the differences. The main one that I’ve noticed is that this kind of audience loves the blue humor. There’s no faster way to get the crowd in your corner than to drop an F-bomb. To me, the difference in audience is the difference in the people who list Amelie as their favorite movie versus American Pie. The FJ crowd is the American Pie crowd.

For me as a performer, this means that my improv style is really different. I find myself going for the cheap laugh a lot more often on the FJ stage. My style is naturally cerebral, so that still comes through, but it’s peppered with a lot more locker room-type language. It’s like applying Darwin’s principles to the improv stage. Whatever gets the best response comes back, while the silence-inducing material is absorbed by the ether, never to return, no matter how clever you once thought it was.

I guess there’s improv out there for everyone… it is just up to the performers to figure out what their audience likes best, and give them mainly that… and expand to other things occasionally, just to keep yourself sane.