Why I Still Love Crowd Work After All These Years

I’ve been doing stand-up comedy for a long time, and one thing has never gotten old: talking to the audience.

Crowd work is the part of the show where anything can happen. I can walk onstage with a plan, but the person sitting in the front row may have a completely different plan for me.

That’s what I love about it.

What makes crowd work different from regular stand-up is that it only exists in that moment. You can’t completely rehearse it, because you don’t know who is going to be sitting in front of you or what they’re going to say.

Sometimes one simple question — “What do you do for a living?” — can take the show somewhere I never expected.

And when it works, the audience knows they’re watching something that will never happen exactly the same way again.

I’ve done crowd work in comedy clubs, theaters, on cruise ships, and while entertaining U.S. troops at military bases around the world.

The setting changes, but people are people. Everybody has a story, and sometimes the funniest part of the night comes from something nobody could have planned.

That’s also why I enjoy posting crowd work clips. They’re little snapshots of moments that happened once, with one particular audience, on one particular night.

The next night? We start all over again.

The Best Part Is Not Knowing

After all these years, that’s still what keeps crowd work fun for me. I never know exactly where the conversation is going, and neither does the audience.

Sometimes it becomes a great comedy clip. Sometimes it becomes a story I’ll tell for years. And sometimes it just belongs to the people who were in the room that night.

That’s live comedy. You had to be there.