Why Don't They Laugh?

There is a battle that rages in my head every now and again. It starts when a comedy I've carefully scripted and directed right to the cutting edge of brilliance goes "flop" and the audience misses it. On one side of the battle are the ne'er do wells of failure, ready to point out every possible mistake I could have made in directing the piece, every hackneyed joke, every moment where I might have been too cocky in my ability to pull off another hit. On the other side is the voice of reason, calm and gentle and preaching patience. I think this is God's voice.

When a comedy flops, it's a devastating shot to the gut of everyone involved in it. I would like to say it's never happened to me (and it hasn't as an actor), but directing a flop is one of those things that will happen to you eventually. When it does, do a postmortem to see what went wrong.

Sometimes audiences, especially church audiences, don't laugh out loud. While this usually happens in large houses when there isn't much audience, it can happen in a crowded house, too. Your first rule, after the flopped performance, should be to check with your house manager, your ushers, somebody who was in the house and could accurately gauge reaction. You may not have flopped at all, you may simply not have made them laugh out loud. But there may still be an issue.

A quiet audience in a comedy is a sign that your pacing is too brisk. They're holding their laughter in so that they won't miss anything. Don't forget that laughter comes in waves, and the waves get bigger if you give them time to build. Even though a piece is written joke-joke-joke, don't forget your rule of threes: little laugh, little laugh, BIG laugh, pause, and on to the next bit.
If the jokes are all stacked together you don't give the audience time to enjoy each one.

If your pacing is too slow, your comedy will flop on the other side. An audience may be enjoying the piece, but won't laugh out loud if the jokes are too widely spread. In that situation, the piece is no longer a comedy, but a drama with a couple of humorous moments.

We've found generational problems with some of our pieces. Our church does two services, one for the more traditional set, which tends to be older, and one for the progressive set, which tends to be younger. Pieces that just plain hit the older group flop in front of the youngsters and vice versa. It's a sad statement on the membership of churches, but we've found that pieces about community and teamwork flop in front of the younger set. Go to my website, www.reinharthouse.com, and click on the scripts page and take a look at I Fired My Boss. This piece was a huge hit with the progressives, but the traditionals were put off by it.

My comedies have flopped when my actors work too hard to make a joke. Audiences connect to real stories about real people. An actor that punches a joke too hard risks breaking the third wall and eliminating that sense of reality. The audience doesn't buy it, and doesn't laugh. If you directed your actors to do that, I highly recommend you cease doing that. If the actors did it in rehearsal, you're still at fault...not saying no means yes. If, however, the actor decided to mug his way through the performance on his own, you need to have a chat with him about teamwork.

There's a kind of blindness about what's funny that sets in when you work on a piece. Big time movies like Chicken Little and Shark Tales (you can tell I have a six year old at home) suffer from the same thing. In the case of Shark Tales, the movie is overall lackluster, and I didn't like it the first time through. But, as it is with little kids, I got to see the movie several times. Most of the scenes, when you go back and examine them, are absolutely hysterical. You can see why the producers of the film, who were all intimately involved in these hysterical parts of the film, would think that the overall film itself was great. It had to be...look at all these funny little parts! What gets missed, though, is an overall objective eye that makes sure that each piece makes sense. The movie didn't do very well in the box office...you might even say it flopped. The message for you? Get an objective eye to look at your piece before it plays...you might save yourself some grief!

Finally, unless your guys are booed of the stage, you didn't flop completely. The pieces we do all have a message in them. Regardless of whether we got laughs or not, the question is always the same...did we get the message through? Did the audience understand what we were trying to say?

Really, then, did we flop?