Part I: Movie Audiences
Long ago, starting when I was in junior high school until I was almost 40-years old, I went to a tremendous number of movies – mostly alone. I have never been an easy laugher without truly strikingly funny material. I can actually remember laughing out loud at a really funny comedy if the audience around me was also laughing. I don’t think that the old Blake Edwards film “The Party,” with Peter Sellers, was the funniest film that I have seen – but I remember laughing out loud quite a lot. The Symphony Theater on Broadway and 95th Street was absolutely packed on a Friday night and the laughter practically reverberated off the walls. I would bet that I never laughed so easily, so loudly and so much at any other film.
In the 1980s, I watched quite a lot of movies at home – mostly alone – on HBO. I think the two funniest movies back then were “Victor, Victoria” (another Blake Edwards classic) and “Used Cars.” I think each of those two were actually a lot funnier than “The Party” – but no one around me facilitated my actually laughing out loud. So I hardly did laugh out loud.
That social immersion always has an effect on the individual – and always unconsciously and not just with me.
There are several famous stories of anti-Hitler Germans who found themselves in an audience at a Hitler speech with powerful resonance in the audience. The anti-Nazi literally felt their own body resonating along with the hysterical audience. Later on, they found themselves both shocked and ashamed at their own temporary feelings.
Part II: The Audible TV Studio Audience
Until sometime in my post-TV-watching years, studio audiences were just regular people exclusively present to be entertained. In George W. Bush’ second term, over-the-air TV signals went from analog to digital and I did not join them.
Back in the 1950s, I, practically speaking, grew up in front of the television. All kinds of studio audience tickets were available to the general public without any identifiable bias – political or otherwise.
Before Johnny Carson, host of the NBC Tonight Show (1962-1992), Jack Paar was a very successful host for several years. At different stages of my life, I was sometimes an avid viewer and other times not at all of these two hosts. (Many game shows during the day-time hours had normal people who acquired studio audience tickets and laughed like normal people.) I have no memory of anybody’s audience ever expressing hostility toward any person or group identified in stage talk by the host or guests during the chattering.
I stopped watching such late-night talk show stuff with an occasional exception after Johnny Carson retired. I saw some young Jay Leno and some young David Letterman but not very often. Taking sides in politics is not in the slightest part of my memory.
When Barbara Walters was a really big star in TV news for decades, she did pretty good, fair and unbiased interviews with world leaders. I most especially remember her momentous interview with Anwar Sadat, after HE initiated peace with Populist Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, via a direct telephone call that had to be routed via Europe for them to be connected. Even before the State Department perpetually riddled with Arabist anti-Semites (during the Carter Administration at this particular time) intruded to ‘control’ (with dual financial subsidies) both Egypt and Israel, Sadat flew to Tel Aviv and rode in a motorcade to Jerusalem to address the Israeli Knesset. Whether in Life Magazine or elsewhere, I marveled at the many pictures of millions of Israelis eagerly waiting along the roadway of his motorcade – just waiting their turn to cheer when he passed. (Most of the population was along that route.) During the Sadat interview, I can still visualize him sucking on his pipe and frequently addressing her as Bar-bar-a in three precisely pronounced syllables.
I know she is responsible for initiating today’s ABC (HL-MBA promoting) loud moron version of “The View.” I had never watched that show when the honest Barbara Walters was around. Unfortunately, for decades now, many doctors’ waiting rooms seem to feel obligated in inflicting this perversion on the captive audience members like me. Boy, oh Boy, has the TV talk show with studio audience world changed.
The screaming HATRED against POTUS Donald Trump and his supporters (like me) truly irritates me – but I have always been too embarrassed to request the termination of the TV broadcast – so I swallow my pride until I am finally called in to the doctor. Apparently there are a plethora of TV talk show hosts (who I only know by name) whose studio audiences are just as one-sided, ‘activist’ and viciously hate-motivated.
On Breitbart News, they show pictures of the Kimmels and Colberts and Stewarts, etc. in stories of some hysterical insulting performance that I never read. This has got me to wondering about the cultural, generational sea-change of Politics and Speech in these United States from the world I grew up in into the world of today.
(In a previous essay from July 2019, I refer to myself as a ‘stranger in a strange land’ without ever having left New York City.)
I do not remember Jay Leno taking sides politically. I know Letterman joined the Left-Wing Hate Chorus in his later years – but I never watched him then. On occasional observations of Jay Leno, I several times encountered a ‘bit’ that he did by playing a tape for the studio audience (to their great laughter) in which, on the street, he interviewed groups of young college-aged people asking very simple questions about our Country, our Constitution, etc. (The kind of questions NYC voters without a high school diploma were required to answer correctly to qualify as voters in the 1960s.) In the Jay Leno interviews, the ignorance was incomprehensible to someone born in America during WWII as I was.
The young ignoramuses were having a great time laughing at their own ignorance. The studio audiences, being normal, laughed harder at them.
Part III: Today’s Studio Audiences
I am left with two curious thoughts. Firstly, how are studio audiences for today’s HL-MBA TV talk shows selected? My sincere impression is that if a Trump supporter, with a red MAGA hat, was among them – by accident, of course – would he not be beaten (not quite to death) to defend their hate-motivated faith? And also, why are they always so overwhelmingly uniform finding every insult to Trump and his supporters like me so witty and appropriate? My other thought is were the young morons on the street interviewed by Jay Leno the members of or the parents of today’s TV talk show studio audiences?
At least that would explain the uniformity of fatuity and consequentially imbued hatred that motivates them.
