Theory of The Audience Is Only a Bunch of Individuals
I don’t care if it’s a million people, a billion people, or 100 trillion, I never get nervous performing. And it’s not because I imagine people in their underwear, though I do that too. It’s because I subscribe to The Theory of The Audience Is Only A Bunch of Individuals, And Thus It’s No Different To Perform For Millions As It Is To Perform For One.
The theory is complicated to explain, but once you understand it, you may never fear public speaking again.
Do you get nervous performing for an audience of one? It’s just one dude out there. Not a big deal, right? Okay, then don’t stop feeling that way just because that one dude has now invited a million of his friends. Be rational. Even an audience of a billion is just a bunch of individual dudes out there, watching you only with their own eyes. It’s like you’re performing for that one dude, except you’re performing for him a million times simultaneously. It’s no different.
When you go to the ballet, are you watching the dance as yourself, or are you watching as the thousands of people in the audience? Just you, of course. Your perception doesn’t change just because you’re a part of a crowd. You’re still an individual, just like everyone around you. Yet a nervous performer is likely to see all these people as a big, intimidating mass.
As an audience member, you may see that other people don’t like the performance, and this could make you think, “Oh, wow, I was right, this really does suck.” So an individual’s dislike of a performance can be confirmed by those around them. But nobody is actually absorbing everyone else’s feelings and building upon them, creating a super-human mass of hatred.
The fact remains, this miserable speech or performance still only affects each person on an individual basis. The negative feelings of the audience are not combining into an exponentially larger, suffocating beast of hatred. It may look like a giant blob out there, but it’s actually nothing but individuals, each of whom has two eyes at most, each of whom can only experience things within their own minds.
Even if you’re performing for just one person, that one person could hate your performance just as much as the most hateful person in a crowd of people who are against the performance.
The only rational thing to worry about in performing for a teeming crowd is that because of the diversity of people, some individuals might react more badly than others. So if your material only works for a certain kind of individual, you can be sure that those who are left out will be bored, annoyed or offended.
So don’t tell racist jokes, because someone from that race might have sneaked in with the millions. You wouldn’t tell a joke making fun of African Americans if your only audience member were an African-American, would you? So why act differently because the one African-American is surrounded by a bunch of crackers? He’s still going to hear you and be just as upset.
But if you do piss off people anyway, remember, you’re really just pissing off one person. Maybe it’s many one persons that you’re pissing off, but ultimately your offense affects everyone individually, not as a group, so it isn’t magnified by millions. And there’s only so much you can affect an individual through performance.
Yes, there might be a critic out there who can write a bad review, a blogger who can post an entry about how you’re homophobic, and your mom might be there and think you’re a failure, but you are still only affecting each of these people on an individual level.
Even if you were performing only for the one critic or the one blogger, you’d get just as bad a write-up. And even if you performed only for your mom, she’d go home in disgrace, ashamed of what a talentless child she raised. You have to take these audience members on a case-by-case basis, not as the whole audience at once.
Besides, the diversity of opinion can be in your favor. In performing for one, that one person might hate it, then that’s all you get: nothing but a negative response. But if you perform for a million, there’s a good chance that some people will actually like what you’re doing. Even if the majority of the million hate it, some individuals might think it’s okay. So you’re better off than when it was just the one person who hated it.
Good luck!
3 years ago