In my last column I kicked off my series on crowd work, since it felt like magicians needed the help now more than ever.
(I also saw Rob Lake Magic on Broadway, where he pioneered what is essentially the opposite of crowd work: he asked the audience questions and then completely and mechanically ignored any answer he was given. Ironically, Mario the Maker’s show—just two blocks away from where Rob’s show closed after just four regular performances—was a resounding success, proving that audiences are much happier with a magician who has robots than a magician who is one.)
If you don’t remember what I said, here’s a quick summary: The key to crowd work is finding someone interesting and interested, then finding the “game” to play with the material the person offers through their responses, heightening and escalating as much as possible.
I promised to get into more detail about what those “games” might look like, since there are a bunch that come up more than most (and are worth having kicking around your brain while you perform).
As I began to work on this article, however, what was once a top three kept growing and growing, much like the opposite of Rob Lake’s Broadway audience, so here’s the first batch of crowd work games:
Looklikes
The simplest and most common game you might see “played” by a comedian doing crowd work is probably a “looklike,” in which the performer describes the audience member by their appearance. The key here is that it’s surprising (contrast) and not just a direct statement of what that person looks like. If someone is in a Halloween costume of Dora the Explorer and you say, “Oh look, it’s Dora the Explorer,” that’s not funny—it’s a statement of fact. If, however, it’s just a random girl with a bowl cut, purple shirt, and a backpack and you say, “Hey, Dora, are we going on an adventure today?” you’re now in comedy territory.