One handy thing about living in London, if you enjoy stand-up comedy, is that so many comedians test new material here in small venues – often playing “works in progress” to audiences of just a few dozen.
Stewart Lee famously iterates his show over many, many performances at the Leicester Square Theatre before he takes it on tour to bigger venues and has it recorded for TV and DVD.
Here’s the thing: comedy requires feedback. Immediate feedback. Not an aggregate report at the end of the show, but in-the-moment feedback about how a joke’s landing. In big theatres, audiences can become that faceless aggregate, but in 100-seater venues, every data point has a face.
And that matters. It matters when you can see the faces and hear the responses from your audience. Because now each one of them matters, and that’s a very different kind of feedback to being told that “27% thought that the routine about Prince Andrew went on a bit too long” after they’ve all gone home.
I hear developers all the time complaining that there are just too many users to get that kind of feedback-with-a-face. I say that’s a choice – like skipping the warm-up gigs at Old Rope at the Comedy Store and taking your show straight to the O2 Arena.
It’s worth cultivating small audiences to test new material on. Sure, you don’t get to see the aggregate trends – only big audiences can give you that. But you can see their faces, and you know immediately if the joke’s aren’t landing. And if you’re going to die on stage, it’s preferable not to do it in front of 20,000 paying punters.
One final thought: I’ve observed our industry morph from one where the data points had faces and individual users’ experiences mattered to one where we only play the proverbial stadiums, and we only see the trends, not the faces.
This, I suspect – while not a direct cause – has been an enabler of “enshittification”. It’s much easier to do that to a faceless aggregate.
Codemanship's Blog 