As someone who tells jokes, I’m always amazed when an audience member loses it—lashes out in confused frustration, tells the comic onstage to eat a dick, and then storms off angrily. But we’re just telling jokes up here, you think. We all sort of just agreed to come here tonight, voluntarily, to a comedy club.
At the same time, though, it’s the public. They don’t do comedy, they don’t think about comedy, and they’re not comics. Certainly I know that when in an art gallery, maybe the first thing to come to my mind is Oh right, I really do not understand art. But I don’t hold it against the artists, nor do I go around ruining the afternoons of those around me. I simply look at the ladies and I enjoy the big walls, because I am a member of society.
One night in Portland, though, about a year ago, it was a comic who didn’t understand what was going on. At least this person was a purported comic, or someone holding themselves out to be a comic, or something. Never had a set of mine led to a posting the next day on a show’s group or event page about redoubled efforts to book only feminists, not racists, no one homophobic, no one cruel, progressives, NICE PEOPLE…