After 8 years of living in New York, I’ve come to expect a certain type of behavior from an audience. New York audiences are, I think, respectful but rarely exuberant. A lot of people in New York criticize the fact that audiences don’t dance at concerts. I never really found this to be the case. A band just has to work a little bit harder to get New Yorkers to dance. I mean, I danced at concerts, so I guess I never really cared what other people were doing.
And then I moved to L.A. and I saw how people out here behave at entertainment events. The difference is dramatic. Last night, Sarah and I went to see A Light in the Piazza. I was not blown away, but it was fine. Good performances, some nice music, a script that only made me cringe a few times.
The rest of the audience, on the other hand … it was as though they had never seen another play before in their lives and they were astonished that such a thing as entertainment existed. Every joke met with uproarious laughter, every song brought the house down. Like the audience was filled with aliens from a planet that had not yet developed the concept of escapism and was astounded to see that a mode of living existed that was not work.
The exact same thing happened a few months ago, when we went to see Little Miss Sunshine. Now, I thought that movie was pretty good, but I would hardly call it hysterical. Wry, sure. Amusing, definitely. Even poignant. But this audience, it’s like someone slipped crack into the popcorn. People were rolling on the ground with laughter. The woman next to us came to the movie by herself. Totally normal looking woman. Nothing wrong with going to a movie by yourself, I do it all the time. But there is something slightly odd about going to the movie by yourself and then talking to the person next to you after every frigging joke! Ya’ know how some people repeat punchlines? Like, say the punchline is, “what about my wife?” and they’ll turn to you and laugh and repeat, “what about my wife?” Like somehow the joke doesn’t count unless they repeat it? This woman was doing that to us, to herself, to the people on the other side of her. And no one seemed to think it was weird except us. We were just all having a good time, marveling at the idea that people would be larger-than-life, doing things on a screen.
I swear, the reason why so many horrible movies get distributed is because they’re test-marketed in L.A., and people out here would laugh at a frigging funeral if it was followed by a rim shot.
Come to think of it, I might think that was pretty funny myself.
