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The power of silence
Quiet, not laughter, is the measure of a successful show, according to one of the funniest men in the country, Papa CJ
It’s ironic that a comedian looks at the quantum of silence as the indicator of a successful gig, but hear me out.
One day I’m doing a college gig where the crowd is going insane. They are clapping after every joke, cheering, hooting, standing on chairs and basically taking the roof off. The next day I’m doing an upper-middle class audience in some fancy hotel ballroom. They have polite smiles on their faces and my inner critic on stage is telling me that it’s going terribly and I’m just dying on my arse.
It’s the kind of gig where you want to leave the venue as soon as the show is done because the last thing you want to do is engage with anyone in the audience post-gig. Because you being absolutely terrible is always the elephant in the room. If you do engage, should you acknowledge it with a, ‘Sorry you had to sit through that. It wasn’t my best night’? Or worse, should you not say anything and take the risk of them mentioning that you were as popular as a Ku Klux Klan member at a Black Lives Matter rally, so you can dig an imaginary hole in the ground and bury yourself right there? A thousand times worse than option one.
Then there is the other situation where they feel obliged to say your performance was nice, so either you have to mention that it was subpar or graciously say thank you, in which case both of you realise the farce of it all and any witness to the exchange is thinking, ‘Seriously? Were they not in the same room as me? Could they not see how shit that was?’
Who’s listening?
The first time this happened to me was the night of 1 November, 2004. The night before I had done Kojo’s gig in central London in front of an urban audience largely of African descent. The audience banged their chairs in appreciation and hooted ‘Brraaap brraaap’.
However, on this night in Petersfield, at the lovely Chaz Collet’s gig, the bourgeois suburban white audience smiled politely. There was no running away post-performance either. The gig was in a small bar, so there was no way I could avoid bumping into audience members when I got off stage.
To my pleasant surprise, many people came up to me and told me how much they enjoyed the show. And they weren’t being patronising to the newbie foreign comic either. They had genuinely enjoyed my 10-minute set (which felt like 30 to me).
I learnt a valuable lesson that day. I learnt that different audiences enjoy things differently. Some are much more vocal in their response than others. So the true test of engagement is not the volume of laughter or applause, but when you pause, how much silence there is. You see, if you’re performing to an audience of a thousand and 20 people clap, you have applause. If 50 people laugh, you have laughter. But silence requires the participation of all one thousand. That’s when you know you have them hanging on to every word.
That’s why my favourite moment when telling a joke is exactly that split second before a punchline, when you can hear a pin drop. And then you give them what they’ve been waiting for and boom, the roof goes off.
Have you been heard?
So, I must ask. Do you feel the need to fill the silence even after making your point during a conversation, presentation, investor pitch or job interview? What is the ‘silence’ in your life or profession? How do you know when people are really engaged? How do you know when they really care? When you keep posting on social media, there may be tons of people who like and comment. That’s your laughter and applause. But when you stop posting, you pause and you’re silent, who are the people who are really listening? Who are people who pick up the phone to call and check if you are okay?
Papa CJ is a stand-up comedian, author, business consultant and executive coach. Find out more about him at www.papacj.com
From HT Brunch, May 23, 2021
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