Why does the audience stand

BBC stated, at the time, that it is common practice to oversell the show in order to guarantee it is sold out and looking busy on TV, but this can lead to people being turned away and left disappointed. Over the years, Top Gear has become a worldwide phenomenon, creating some of the greatest moments in television history and it has easily become the greatest and most popular car-related TV show ever made. Because of this, Top Gear has grown a huge fanbase, which means there are a lot of people who want to go and attend the show's taping live, in order to meet the hosts, see the set, and possibly be on television for an episode.

With the sheer number of people around the world hoping to be in the audience, there has been an incredibly long waiting list that is rumored to be up to 21 years to simply get a ticket to attend the show. This is a fairly basic rule to kick start the list, but throughout the taping of every episode audience members are not allowed to go on their phones and they must all be on silent mode throughout the tapings.

This is for several reasons, with the first being that Top Gear doesn't want people in the background scrolling through social media; they want the audience to be focused solely on what is happening on the show. But most importantly, if someone's phone starts ringing or making any sort of loud noises, it will stop the proceedings and that means that Top Gear would need re-film everything again, wasting time and money. This is another fairly obvious rule for live television but it stands for Top Gear audiences, as well, with people being told that they cannot swear during the duration of the taping of the show.

Of course, the audience isn't expected to talk at all during the filming process, as the show is about what the hosts are saying, not strange background conversations between audience members, but swearing is a big no go. Top Gear never features swearing and because of that, any foul language from those in attendance would likely see them get removed from the taping, as it is not allowed. Photo: Digital Spy. Photo: Telegraph. Photo: YouTube. Photo: Radio Times. Photo: DailyMotion.

Photo: BBC. Photo: Imgur. Photo: PetrolBlog. Photo: Reddit. Photo: Gizmodo. Photo: The Sun. Photo: JOE. Search for:. Using Your Audience Analysis Learning Objectives Understand how you can use your audience analysis when you prepare a speech. Recognize how your audience analysis can help you alter your speech while speaking. Prepare Content with Your Audience in Mind The first thing a good audience analysis can do is help you focus your content for your specific audience.

Adjusting Your Speech Based on Your Analysis In addition to using audience analysis to help formulate speech content, we can also use our audience analysis to make adjustments during the actual speech. You can use your audience analysis to help you make adjustments to your speech in terms of both how you present the speech within a given environment and also how you adapt your content and delivery based on audience feedback during the speech.

Then write a different concrete thesis statement for each of six different audiences: students, military veterans, taxpayers, registered nurses, crime victims, and professional athletes, for instance.

Think of a controversial topic and list all the various perspectives about it that you can think of or discover. If people of various perspectives were in your audience, how might you acknowledge them during your introduction? Licenses and Attributions. Peters, Indo-Canadian, is accepted in making jokes about Mexicanness. My account of trust makes sense not only of both cases, but why we hold the intuitions that make these cases noteworthy.

Experiential expertise of group members creates a basic level of trust, and this trust is necessary for the joke to succeed. It is necessary to trust that the comedian has appropriately affiliative or disaffiliative intentions, and conceives of the relevant groups in acceptable terms. Trust, however, may be earned or lost. Miller, through his evil, loses trust.

Peters, through his skill, earns it. The Peters and Miller examples show the importance of power dynamics in cultivating trustworthiness. Specifically, their respective social positions affect the difficulties they face in meriting the audience's trust. When Peters talks about his upbringing as a racialized immigrant, he evinces his particular, marginalized status within Canadian society. This marginalized status helps the audience trust that he understands what it is like to be marginalized, and in turn that he has an appropriate conception of being marginalized.

So, a Canadian who would standardly be racialized as white would not be prohibited from making the same jokes that Peters does, but they would face a higher standard of difficulty. Understanding the relation between social position and trust also helps further appreciate the Hart and Mo'Nique examples. The worry that Hart could come across as condescending is informed by his being rich. His empowered social position puts distance between him and the audience.

Similarly, Mo'Nique has an empowered social position relative to her audience not just by virtue of her own success but also by her audience's status as prisoners. This distance creates an elevated level of difficulty, as both Hart and Mo'Nique need to have the audience accept their affiliative intentions. In Hart's case, the prologue to Laugh at My Pain can be understood as helping Hart make his intentions clear. Foregrounding his life experiences help show the life experiences that inform his intentions.

Similarly, when she discusses common experiences, part of what Mo'Nique is doing is making clear to the audience that she conceives of them not just as prisoners, but as people who are still women. Altogether, both Hart and Mo'Nique face the difficulty of the social distance between them and their audience, and overcome that difficulty by focusing on what they have in common with their audience, and through focusing on those commonalities making clear that they are capable of having the appropriate sorts of intentions.

I have given an account of how humor and comedy depend on building a trusting relationship between comedian and audience, and I have elaborated on the account's implications. Comedy depends on building a relationship between comedian and audience, and the best comedians are the best at building this relationship.

They demonstrate not only their competence in joke crafting, but in getting the audience to trust that they have the right sort of intentions, and that they are capable of having the right sort of intentions. What comedy demands, then, is the presentation not just of jokes but of a joke teller, a human being to which the audience can relate, and with whom they can participate. This conclusion suggests a further conclusion, but one which I want to deflate. If a comedian goes up on stage to garner the trust of the audience then, it follows, the comedian should be themselves.

Be authentic. If the comedian is to be trusted by the audience, she has to be herself, put herself out there so the audience can trust her. This is, however, inaccurate. As Yasmin Nair points out in her broadside against Hannah Gadsby's stand-up show Nanette , audiences have expectations for what counts as authentic Nair In the case of being a lesbian, Nair notes, that means being traumatized.

If the audience understands the essential experience of being a lesbian as being traumatized-as Nair makes the case-then earning the audience's trust requires incorporating that trauma into your show, authentic or not. Even authentic trauma has to be given an elevated place, so that it can define the comedian. The audience has a say in the trusting relationship, and their expectations determine how the comedian has to respond to earn that trust.

The comedian must be seen as authentic, but that is not the same as being authentic. This can leave the comedian in a precarious position: either their authentic self just so happens to line up with what the audience expects, or she is caught having to fabricate an inauthentic stage persona just to be accepted as authentic.

The question of authenticity in comedy is a large topic and deserves its own treatment, but discussing trust helps frame one dilemma clearly. For the purposes of this article it is too much to solve this dilemma; rather, I present its framing as an explanatory virtue of engaging comedy through the lens of trust.

The comedian, for her set to succeed to its fullest, must be trusted by the audience. To be trusted by the audience requires being seen as authentic. However, to be seen as authentic can mean meeting the audience's preconceptions, and those preconceptions deviate from the comedian's authentic self.

Accordingly, the comedian must act inauthentically to be perceived as authentic. Perhaps there is a rejoinder here: in the first section I wrote that I was considering humor normatively. It could be countered that the real audience, with their prejudices, is not giving a normatively sound reaction.

For real comedians in real contexts, authenticity is not enough. But for the analysis of humor and comedy, the normatively superior set is the one where the comedian gets up on stage and is themselves. I am willing to accept this point, but I think that Nair's analysis still holds and is the proper end point for this article.

Stand-up comedy is not just a practice but an industry, too. The industrial pressures on comedy-to be popular, to be successful, to be marketable-are understood by both comedian and audience. Such that they are understood by the audience, they are another challenge for the comedian to overcome in proving herself trustworthy: to give the impression that the audience is seeing the comedian's authentic self rather than a conspicuously false stage persona.

The variables multiply but the comedian's challenge remains the same: to win over the audience. Oxford University Press.

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Glenn , Phillip. Laughter in Interaction. Cambridge University Press. Grice , H. Paul Grice , 86 — Harvard University Press. Hart , Kevin. Hawley , Katherine. Hurley , Matthew M. Dennett , and Reginald B. Adams , Jr. MIT Press. Jones , Karen.

Morreall , John. Malden, MA : Wiley-Blackwell. Nair , Yasmin. Peters , Russell. Records , CDW It doesn't really matter how we make people think as long as we make them think. A little while back I was at an event, waiting my turn to present. The man on stage was doing a great job talking about the importance of treating people with kindness and respect and not letting the inconsequential things bother you. He departed to stage to a rousing applause, walked past me without acknowledging me and then set about abusing the audiovisual controller because he felt that his microphone wasn't loud enough.

He really let the poor fella have it - and as I was being clapped onto the stage I could actually hear the speaker starting to yell. The message here is that once you leave the stage, you still have a commitment to your audience and that is to live up to the expectation of who you were on the stage.

A lot of speakers forget this, and sadly they develop a reputation for being insincere, shallow and two faced. Live authentically, present authentically. Never give your audience a reason to be disappointed with you on the stage or off. Top Stories. Top Videos. Sponsored Business Content.