Know Your Audience

The cardinal rule of comedy is “know your audience”. As in don’t tell a joke to someone who is likely to not get it, or get it and take offense. But this rule extends to more than just comics. Here are a few examples.

Movies

A long time ago I worked in the film industry. My first job out of college was as a motion picture equipment rental tech at a local Panavision dealership. We rented everything anyone could need to shoot movies. Cameras, lenses, dollies, cranes, lights, generators, cables, you name it we rented it. When the TV show “Dallas” came to town, they got their gear from us.

One of the stranger perks of this job was, the staff was asked from time to time to attend preview screenings of movies. These were set up by the studio and after the show you would be given a large card with a lot of questions about what you liked, what you didn’t, what would you change, etc.

I remember two of these screenings quite clearly. The first was a movie called “Quest for Fire” in 1981. This starred Ron Pearlman before he became Hell Boy. The movie was set in prehistoric times when one tribe of cavemen wake to find their fire has blown out. This is bad news as it might mean the death of their tribe. So three of them set out to find some more. They can’t make fire so they have to either find naturally occurring fire (lightning strikes on trees) or someone else’s fire and grab some and carry it back home. There was a lot of walking in this movie. There was also a lot of sex, which struck me as odd.

One of the stars of the film was Rae Dawn Chong, daughter of Tommy Chong of “Cheech and Chong” comedy duo fame. This was one of the first movies she ever did. She was maybe 19 or 20 years old. She was also naked throughout the entire movie. She was painted in assorted body paints, but she was naked in every scene. At one point the lead fire hunter was attacked by a bear and was bitten in the crotch, no less. He now had a boo boo on his you know what. Chong’s character was a bit of a medicine woman and treats his wounds by licking them. As might be expected, this makes our hero feel much better and was probably secretly thanking that bear. I thought it was kind of ridiculous.

Later in the movie our cave dudes are invited into a camp where they are ‘asked’ to have sex with some of the more rotund of the females who, I guess, were having problems attracting any local males to do the deed. Up to the task, if not terribly excited about it, our guys position the women on their hands and knees and prepare to go about it via a rear-entry method. The ladies are somewhat chagrinned. What a bunch of goofs. These guys don’t know anything about sex, it seems. So they make them stop, roll one of the ladies over onto her back and proceed to educate these guys on the benefits of face to face sex and there was much rejoicing. I remember telling someone at the time they should rename the movie, “Quest for the Missionary Position”.

Overall I thought the movie was stupid. It was pretentious as hell with lots of effort being made to devise the fake languages and clothes (what there was of them) and locations. They tried like hell to make it as realistic as they could. Then they tossed in all sorts of really stupid sexual crud that took you out of the movie completely.

I wasn’t their target audience. But I had no idea who their target audience was. The film cost $12.5 million to make. It earned $21 million at the box office. Factoring marketing costs, it may have broken even. But I was a film buff. I loved movies, especially movies that tried to be something more than junk, and I still thought this one was stupid. Then I talked to one of the other guys I worked with. He was a bench technician in our repair shop. A true Texas redneck who I will call Bubba because I don’t remember his real name and he was a Bubba kind of guy.

He was at the screening too. He hated the movie. I thought he might. Much of the film that wasn’t stupid sex was highbrow examinations on the life and dangers of pre-historic man. But that wasn’t why he hated the film. As he put it in his amazingly Bubba way, “That was the first movie I’ve ever been to where there was a nekkid woman in most of it and I never once got a boner.”

There were so many things odd about that sentence. How many movies had he seen where there was a naked woman in most of them? This was probably the first time since I was in 5th grade that I had heard the word “boner”. If I wasn’t the right audience for this movie, THIS guy sure as hell wasn’t.

Let’s leave this little known movie and go to a movie many film goers might actually remember.

The other screening I went to was a film set in 1954. A bunch of High School guys were out and about trying to get one of them to lose his virginity. Along the way they spend a lot of time peeking through holes in the wall of the girls’ locker room shower. You have horny teachers, strippers, naked girls all over the place and crude humor. I was comparing the film to “Animal House”, which I still think is a comedy classic. This film was not “Animal House”. This film sucked. I thought this film was about as bad a movie as I had ever seen. It wasn’t funny. It certainly wasn’t sexy or titillating. It was juvenile and an insult to the intelligence to anyone with money to buy a ticket. I remember telling them so afterwards. It was 94 minutes of my life that I would never ever get back. I went home and told everyone that I expected that movie to flop like a dying fish.

The movie was “Porky’s” and it was the 5th highest grossing film of that year (behind E.T., Tootsie, An Officer and a Gentleman, and Rocky III). It cost $4 million to make and grossed $111 million in the US alone. This was the first film to gross over $1 million in Ireland. It was the highest grossing movie in Canada for 24 years. It was still a worthless piece of crap but someone liked it. One thing was clear though and that was that I was not their target audience.

Interesting trivia about “Porky’s”. The film was written and directed by Bob Clark. There was a little holiday film he wanted to make and nobody wanted to fund it. He thought he might be able to get funding for his holiday movie by making a killing on something else first. So he made “Porky’s” and was given permission to shoot the movie he wanted to make. That movie was “A Christmas Story”. Yeah, the movie we all love that gave us great lines like ‘You’ll shoot your eye out’ and taught us the greatness of a Red Ryder BB Gun, owes its existance to a horrible sexploitation comedy with lots of nekkid women.

Music

I make no bones about the fact that my musical tastes and those of the rest of my generation have seldom been in sync. I was into jazz in college. I was a fan of Progressive Rock bands like Yes and Emerson Lake & Palmer when the rest of the world saw them as pretentious blowhards. I liked the music that Genesis and Supertramp produced before they became popular and started making music I didn’t care for as much. I hated disco when disco was popular. I was at a party when some guys pulled out a record by a band they said was going to be huge. They put it on the stereo and I listened to it and thought, “Man, these guys really suck.” Not only that but they looked stupid as hell. The band was KISS and they did become popular despite the fact that they sucked and looked stupid as hell.

I guess it should not surprise anyone that there are popular musical acts out there that I just don’t get. Doesn’t mean someone else doesn’t. I mean someone has to like singers who write repetitive break-up songs tailored to their four note vocal range. How else do you explain Taylor Swift? Maybe if I was a 16-year old girl with no boyfriend, access to a country station, and limited singing ability, I might be their target audience.

Weirdness

When I was in High School I was part of the theater department and ran the lights for the auditorium. This meant that when the school rented out the auditorium, they needed someone to run the lights and that someone was often me. This would mean I would set up the stage lights and leave them on and then go up into the balcony and run the follow spot as needed. It was often boring and tiresome and as I recall I didn’t get paid for it. It was just part of being a responsible student. Well, that and I didn’t trust anyone else with my lights.

There was one memorable night when the auditorium was rented out by the producers of a “Junior Miss” Beauty Pageant. In case you are lucky enough to not know what one of these travesties is, this is a beauty pageant for children. Think little girls age three and up all dressed up like beauty queens with lots of makeup and hairspray. All dolled up like pre-pubescent sex objects and being herded around by over-attentive stage moms who were all living vicariously through their little darlings. They all looked like monsters to me. It was some foreign nightmare of a scene. It was disgusting.

But then it got worse.

There was a special guest that night. The reigning Miss Texas was there to entertain the crowd! I saw her prior to the show sitting on a chair backstage. She was in her 20’s and had that expression on her face that said, “Yeah, don’t even think of talking to me.” At the time I was 18 and in High School and I guess she had a lot of experience being hit on by guys and just wasn’t in the mood. She had no idea how not interested I was in her. She looked like a grown-up version of the little monsters that were cluttering up my stage. Too much makeup. Too much hair spray. Too much attitude. She wasn’t even smiling. She probably hated being there as much as I did. Here she was doing her one year stint as Miss Texas and instead of doing something that might actually get her some good media attention, she was about to perform for a bunch of stage mothers and their squirming trollop-shaped rug rats.

When her time came she got up, slapped on that award winning smile, and sang two songs. The first song was called, and I’m not making this up, “Let’s hear it for me!” It was all about how wonderful it was to be… her. I don’t remember what the name of her second song was but the lyrics told the story of how many people come up to her all the time and tell her that their little girl looks ‘just like you!’ when that just couldn’t be because their little girl was ugly! I was in shock. How full of yourself do you have to be to sing songs like that? How good looking do you think you are that singing a song about how everyone else’s daughters don’t measure up makes sense? But do you know what? The audience loved it. When she got to that point in the song about how she was so taken aback when she got a look at these girls that were supposed to look just like her only to discover that they were plain and homely, the audience roared in laughter and approval. They nodded their heads as if to say, “Yeah, that exact same thing happened to me once.” There were standing ovations. Miss Texas left the stage and headed out the door and got in a car to be carted off to her next appointment. I guess she had an assortment of songs at her disposal for whatever event she was at. Singing at a church probably meant a few religious songs. Singing at a military base meant a few patriotic songs. Singing for a bunch of mutant pageant monsters meant singing about how ugly everyone ‘out there’ was compared to everyone ‘in here’.

She was shallow and vile and horrible but by golly, she knew her audience.