How to Be a Live TV Audience

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Comedy Central’s two main franchise shows are both recorded in a part of New York City called “Hell’s Kitchen,” a section of Manhattan that extends about 25 blocks south and west of Central Park and west of Midtown over to the Hudson River. Most of the buildings in the neighborhood are former walk-ups and townhouses that are now offices for media companies; “The Colbert Report’s” studio looks like it was a house or storefront once upon a time.

The Thursday, September 18, 2014, broadcast of “The Colbert Report” was a very special one because I was in the audience, as I wrote yesterday, in “Four Minutes and 24 Years.” Terry Gilliam, the legendary film and theater director (the list is epic and includes: “Time Bandits,” “Brazil,” “The Fisher King,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “The Zero Theorem”) and Monty Python animator and cast member, was the guest.

The studio is on the same level as the street outside, but it takes a lifetime to get there. Sorry, that was a sentence from a television ad for a college course in broadcasting that I am working on. We should go back outside.

The tickets for live-on-tape broadcasts are free, because these shows need a full and loudly enthusiastic house for each and every show and the producers do not want people who feel that sense of hostile proprietorship that can come with a ticket purchase. (They do not want an audience of people with crossed arms and an attitude of, “Entertain me.”) A theatrical performance in front of an empty house could nonetheless be great but a television show performed to silence and a performer feeding off the silence could be horrifying to watch unfold. (Only Johnny Carson seemed to be able to work with a not-yet-impressed audience.)

The producers also do not want an audience of people off the street, happy to receive free things, but not aware of how to be an audience. Talk with a stage actor sometime. He or she will tell you stories of the weirdest things that have happened during performances: cell phones going off, of course, but also people taking the phone call; people walking across the stage (especially in theaters with the stage and seats on the same level) looking for a restroom; audience members yelling at or asking questions of the characters as if they are in their easy chair yelling at a TV screen; babies crying. The audience is supposed to be separate from the performance, with some exceptions. A live television show audience is not at a stage show; the audience is a part of the show: the audience is the soundtrack.

Thus, the audience is coached on this point by producers before the taping begins. And then re-coached. The performance at first felt like a pop quiz to gauge how well we had absorbed the coaching. It also felt like if we were insufficiently enthusiastic, we would be escorted back out to 54th Street.

The process of acquiring these free tickets varies from show to show but all of the shows use the method to establish that the audience is made up of fans. (Willing to be loud. Happy to pretend to not be faking enthusiasm.) Some shows use online trivia contests to winnow out the casual fans. My method was the easiest for me: I have a friend who has done this before (he attended “The Daily Show”) and wanted to do it again and invited me.

(Would that we had attended “The Daily Show” last Thursday; former President Clinton was there that day.)

The tickets one receives for registering online for a television taping are not tickets as one usually thinks of them. They do not guarantee a seat. They guarantee a spot on line, in a covered alleyway where one waits for the doors to open. We arrived early, chatted with the show assistants, and waited some more. The assistants are talented at a particular task: they quickly learn who is with whom, names, who has special needs. My friend’s wife sat with me at a coffeeshop for a few minutes while he held our group spot on line, then they traded: she went back and he sat with me. When he and I rejoined the line we found that we could not see her; one of the assistants got our attention (not vice versa, They. Ran. Us. Down), gave us our seat tickets, and ushered us into a room in the building, where she already was.

My thumb.

My thumb.

In that room, one goes through a security checkpoint and then waits. For over an hour. It is a square room, maybe 25 X 25 feet, extraordinarily air conditioned. Several monitors play old Colbert shows on a “Best of” loop. The walls are plastered with Colbert memorabilia. Over the next few minutes, the entire audience-to-be was herded into this room, which made clear the need for extreme air conditioning. Seeing I walk with a cane, one assistant walked me through the crowd to a bench.

Twice an assistant addressed the crowd. Both times the message was: “This is very special. Stephen is going to chat with you before the show, so have some questions ready.” (Perhaps he does this every show and they tell the audience it is special.) “When you’re watching the show at home, you only chuckle at the jokes because you’re thinking about your own life and you hear the audience in your TV laughing uproariously. You’re the audience in someone’s TV now. Whatever you’re going to laugh at, laugh loudly.”

The doors to the set were opened and people were ushered in by ticket number but in small groups; my group of four friends went in together. The bleachers do not have banisters, something which I was anxious about as a person with spinal muscular atrophy and thus almost no balance on stairs, even with a death grip on a railing. One of the assistants saw my cane and the four of us were thus seated in the front, over by the interview table. The stage manager and then the warm-up act coached us some more in the finer points of yelling our laughter. (Since all of you have heard my voice in an earlier post, you should be able to hear me clearly if you watch the show. Of course.)

Contrary to what I thought, the show is not taped in real time; Colbert made one verbal typo and they recorded a do-over, the commercial breaks were over ten minutes each, the interview with Terry Gilliam was over 15 minutes, of which about not quite 10 made the show. The affection between Colbert and his staff was obvious: at one point, while a hairdresser was combing his hair, he started pretending to comb hers. He indeed took questions before the show and again after. All told, we were in the studio for a bit over an hour for a 21-minute show.

The broadcast will be available for free on the website for the rest of this week, so here is the link: The Colbert Report with Terry Gilliam. And here is the 60 second edit:

It was a fun day and night in NYC, thanks to Gerry, Theresa, Ron, Bob and Kevin, and all of New York City. Even the panhandler on the train from Secaucus.

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The Gad About Town is on Facebook! Subscribe today. Daily facts (well, trivia) about literature and history plus links to other writers.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for April 9 asks, “If you could learn a trade—say carpentry, electrical work, roofing, landscaping, plumbing, flooring, drywall—you name it—what skill(s) would you love to have in your back pocket?” TV host. I am heading to NYC today with my one and only, Jen, to view tonight’s taping of “The Nightly Show,” starring Larry Wilmore. It is in the same theater as “The Colbert Report” was recorded each night. That is the reason for re-running this column from September. Tune in tonight at 11:30 EST on Comedy Central to see if you catch a glimpse of me and my love. Full updates tomorrow.

The Fish-Slapping Dance

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“If you had to come up with one question, the answer to which would determine whether or not you could be friends with a person you’ve just met, what would it be? What would the right answer be?”

“That’s a great question. Oddly comprehensive, yet a little intrusive at the same time.”

“I agree, but my usual ice breaker question is to ask people that I have just met what their ice breaker question is. So, what is it?”

“Did you want more coffee?”

“That’s your question?”

“No. Your cup is empty. Free refills, hon’.”

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The speed with which one can determine the depth or length of a friendship—somewhere between forever and not at all—is inequal to the facts of a friendship. How many reminiscence-conversations have you had with friends in which you have learned that either your memory of meeting a friend is faulty or that the friend did not like you on first encounter? I have had both types.

I hinted in a recent column, okay, I explicitly stated in a recent column that if you find the “Fish-Slapping Dance” funny, you and I will more than likely be friends for life.

It may be the Monty Python troupe’s quickest route to the biggest laugh. I wrote, “If you do not find the ‘Fish-Slapping Dance’ funny, it may be because you find the waste of intellectual effort offensive. Or perhaps fish jokes generally turn you right off. ‘How is this funny?’ becomes the same question as ‘Why is this funny?’ ‘Why is T H I S on my screen?’ The ‘Fish-Slapping Dance’ actually can be seen as a depiction of the ‘How is this funny?’ conversation. Michael Palin, the ‘little fishes,’ dances the question, and then John Cleese, the ‘big fish,’ delivers the only possible retort: ‘It is or it is not.’ Splash.”

I can over-intellectualize and explain how the bit does not work, but every attempt I make falters the moment Michael Palin hits the water, when I laugh, sometimes quietly and sometimes out loud, every time.

I knew approximately two things when I wrote this a couple of months ago: that my girlfriend, the closest friend I have, probably does not know much if any Monty Python material and that I do not know if we share a sense of humor, even though she and I laugh a lot at many of the same things and same comics. For instance, her response after listening to some recordings of my radio show was to say that it was nice hearing my voice and that I sounded like I was enjoying myself. It is a comedy show.

Thus, I was rather nervous when I posted the Monty Python video above, several weeks ago, as she might very well read what I wrote, view the classic bit of comedy, and then instant message a break-up with me. I did not know what I did not know, but I was going to learn sooner or later. Are we companions for life, based on one sixteen-second joke?

“I’ve been sitting in my office, laughing at that.” she wrote me that night. Thus, my belief that the Monty Python “Fish-Slapping Dance” is the litmus test of comedy, a proof of companionability, was sustained.

Kindergartners may have the most effective conversations for establishing a friendship: favorite color, up versus down, best food. Matters of eternal importance like those. I try to remember this and always keep track of what is important to me, just in case someone wants to know on the spot: Green, the number 4, the letter N, the word Yes.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 23 asks, “If you had to come up with one question, the answer to which would determine whether or not you could be friends with a person you’ve just met, what would it be? What would the right answer be?“

Daily Prompt: Four Minutes and 24 Years

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The benches in front of 1 Penn Plaza, along West 34th Street, are lively at lunchtime and look like they remain so long after lunch, as deliverymen pick up and drop off all day long and limo drivers waiting for their VIPs kibitz with one another and with passersby who want to know how famous the person about to become their next brush with fame is and whether he or she is worth pausing for on their way to their next New York City attraction.

There was no reason for me to be in front of the famous skyscraper to make this observation last Thursday afternoon. Five minutes before passing the limo drivers and their VIPs and the lunchtime crowd, I was finishing up being lost in Penn Station, the renowned train- and bus- and everything else station (flying saucers will someday land there because it is shaped like one). Ten minutes before that, frustrated that I could not find a sign directing me to exactly where I was going, many many blocks away, I reasoned that any door with sunlight coming through it and people’s shadows walking past must lead to the outside and a street, any street, and the possibility that, once there, I would be able to figure out where I am. In New York City, on the streets, I am (usually) okay, since it is one of the easiest cities to negotiate on foot. It’s a grid. (Mostly.)

That hunch led me up one staircase to plate glass doors that entered into Madison Square Garden. I headed back down that staircase.

Out on the street, I made my way back around MSG to the front of Penn Station and then onward, north along 8th Ave. to have coffee with a college classmate and then meet up with other friends to attend a taping of “The Colbert Report.”

The college classmate and I had not seen each other in almost 24 years, when I had thrown a post-graduation party he attended; thoughts and memories of this party were on my mind while I strolled up 8th. Cars were blocking the crosswalk, so instead of waiting to cross, I turned right and started over to 7th, where I would continue my northward stroll.

This is how small a moment any moment can truly be. Had the crossing been available, I would have continued on 8th. But sitting on a bench on 34th Street at that moment was another college classmate, in fact the co-host of that post-graduation party, someone I have not seen or spoken with in three years and who did not know I was in New York City. He has an office in 1 Penn Plaza and was on his lunch break, people-watching.

Had I walked past ten minutes earlier, I would have missed him, but I had just spent those ten minutes escaping from Penn Station.

“Is that … Kevin? Really?” I thought to myself. Can’t be. I was not going to say anything; I was going to walk past the person who I assumed was a merely a stranger with a familiar face, since how could it be that I would bump into a long-ago friend in this giant city; a hunch had just now almost gotten me lost in Madison Square Garden. I had better leave the hunching business to others, I thought.

“Mark?” That settled it; it was my old friend. With one friend waiting for me in a restaurant in midtown and about 20 more blocks to walk, I had about four minutes to bring my graduate school housemate up to date. He had the same four minutes to bring me up to date. What was I doing in the city. What was he doing on that bench. Our relationship statusi, our work situations, my physical condition. How long it had been since. How utterly baffling the fact of what we were experiencing right then was. Why I was not taking the subway instead of walking 20-plus blocks. We finally, after all these years, exchanged phone numbers.

“How long has it been?” That was my other friend’s first question as I walked in the restaurant, a few minutes later. I reminded him: 24 years. And an extra 10 minutes because I had run into someone. He, too, was on his lunch break, so we had limited time in which to reacquaint each other with each other. Relationships, work, life.

How much time does it really take to tell someone what you’ve done and seen? Maybe it only takes about four minutes to (re)establish who you are and the rest is elaboration with anecdotes.

Who am I? Someone who takes 10 minutes to get out of a wide-open train station but is happy at the social accident that was thus made possible.

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colbert ticket2

My thumb.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 22 asks, “You’re about to enter a room full of strangers, where you will have exactly four minutes to tell a story that would convey who you really are. What’s your story?”