Winning over the crowd

Text 1: An Evening at the Music Hall, by Lionel Prentice

An original essay written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

The audience of the music hall is the most exacting critic in London. It has paid its sixpence, it has its pint before it, and it does not intend to be bored. On the evening of my visit a young tenor in a velvet coat began a ballad about a dying mother, and within two verses the gallery was whistling, stamping, and inviting him to go home to her. He fled. The chairman struck his gavel and called for order in a voice that nobody heeded.

Then came a little stout man in a battered hat who sang of the miseries of moving house without paying the rent. By the second chorus the whole hall was singing with him, the factory girls and the dock labourers and the clerks, roaring the words they plainly knew already, and laughing at troubles that I fancy many of them had suffered that very quarter.

I came away persuaded that the music hall is no idle amusement. These are people who have spent ten hours at the loom or the crane, and for two hours they will laugh at the landlord, the bailiff and the foreman, and go home the lighter for it.

Text 2: My First Open Mic, by Jamal Ferreira

An original contemporary blog.

I did my first stand-up set last Thursday, in the back room of a pub, in front of about forty people and a broken fruit machine. The act before me was a man with a guitar doing a sad song about his ex. Two minutes in, someone at the back shouted “Is this the comedy night or a funeral?” and the room never recovered. He finished to total silence. I went on next with my legs shaking.

I had written jokes about space travel and philosophy, and they died. You could hear the fruit machine. So I gave up on the script and started talking about my job in a call centre: the scripts, the angry customers, the manager who times our toilet breaks. Suddenly people were laughing, properly laughing, and a woman near the front shouted “That’s my job!” By the end they were finishing my sentences.

I worked out that night that nobody had come for clever jokes. They had all had long weeks, most of them at jobs they did not love, and they wanted somebody to stand up and laugh at the stuff they had to put up with. That was the whole secret.

Both writers describe live comic entertainment.

What are the similarities between the writers’ ideas about the performers and their audiences?

Draw on evidence from both texts to support your answer.