Steve Martin Responds to Interruption of Talk and Audience Refund | Hacker News Reader

Steve Martin Responds to Interruption of Talk and Audience Refund

nytimes.com

35 pointsmhb21 comments

Steve Martin is a class act.

This is all I need. This lamp and this remote control and this paddle-ball game. Oh - and this.

It would have been epic if he had walked off stage with that routine...

This is the problem with becoming successful in comedy. People expect everything you do to be funny. I bet the audience was laughing heartily at Steve's responses for the first ten minutes of the program. People are conditioned to laugh at what he says. But the moment he tries to be a multi-dimensional person, he gets slapped on the wrist!

</rant>

... and he hasn't been "that person" for over a decade. Shopgirl was, what, 2000?

Actually, his stand-up was a play on that conditioned response. His act had no clear punchlines, so there was no clear cue that told the audience "laugh here." This is a great essay about it - and how he got started in comedy in general, and the importance of practicing: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/funny-martin-2008...

Here's a response to the hullabaloo from an attendee of the interview:

http://emdashes.com/2010/12/more-on-martin-and-solomon-and.p...

It's not very flattering of Deborah Solomon.

Being that Martin has been an avid art collector for many years it seems a rare missed opportunity to really get some insight from a qualified source. It would seem by his own admission a discussion of his book may have been premature considering it had been out such a short while. Given that Solomon has a history and ability to interview it again seems a missed opportunity that she should have acknowledged gracefully

Even crowd-sourcing needs judgment on the part of the people using it. I think the show directors were the real problem here. They, metaphorically, panicked like Obama being surrounded by Tea Partiers and caved in to the vocal minority. Samh has the right idea. Steve should have sung a couple of choruses of Y.M.C.A and walked off stage. He quit stand-up when he was at the pinnacle so he doesn't lack for guts.

What I wasn’t told was that the viewers were going to be encouraged to send in e-mails during the discussion; what I didn’t expect was that the Y would take the temperature of those e-mailed reactions, and then respond to them by sending a staff member onstage, mid-conversation, with a note that said, "Discuss Steve’s career."

This is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem.

Just because technology enables something doesn't mean we should actually do it.

The audience did not like what it got. If you shut off communication, that does not change the audience and its feelings.

From what was posted, it would seem the audience was sampled too soon. Wouldn't this fall under the 90 second attention span problem?

Edit: expansion -

This reminds me of an experience related to me by a concert goer. Dan Hicks was scheduled to follow a classical performance artist (pianist?) - Very poor combination, musically. He played a couple of songs and the audience, presumably there to hear more classical, got quieter and quieter.

Before the next song, someone dropped coins and they slowly, audibly rolled down the sloped floor to the front of the stage. Mr. Hicks was reported to have said something along the lines of "I feel about the same," put away his instrument and left the stage.

If the audience is not a part of a performance, not giving any feedback, the artist has negative feedback, and I assume this is where the phrase "I died up there" came from (see George Carlin's little talk on violent terms for performance art for audiences).

Mr. Martin's complaint is that he was not given the time to react to the loss of audience, once the repartee was interrupted with the first audience-requested conversation topic. The continued interruptions prevented any reboot from happening.

I use similar feedback techniques when teaching high-tech knowledge to groups. Very dry stuff, and if not handled carefully, a great chance for a nap.

It stands to reason that a lot of the people watching the simulcast were probably more interested in Steve Martin the celebrity.

I think the only audience that should have been sampled, was the audience in the auditorium - after the event had run it's natural course.

Why do the others not count?

I'm assuming the core audience invested more in the event;

1) They paid money for the ticket.

2) They travelled to the auditorium.

3) They did so, with some prior knowledge of what the event was going to be about.

In my opinion, a smaller investment should equal less return. It's difficult, if not impossible - to please all of the people all of the time.

This answers my question in a satisfying way, thank you.

If I'm enjoying a show and have the opportunity to email the producers about it, I probably won't.

If I am really disliking a show and have the same opportunity, I might take it.

If 10% of people don't like the show they're watching and they all behave like me, then the producers get lots of emails from people who don't like the show, even though they are in the minority.

At least according to what I read in http://emdashes.com/2010/12/more-on-martin-and-solomon-and.p... (which ndaiger linked to earlier), the audience was really not happy about what they saw.

This does not mean that they should not improve their method of getting feedback from the audiences, of course. For example, they might have a staff person report how happy the audience seemed to be, and try to correct for the statistical effect that complainers are more vocal than happy people.

Assuming, of course, that it matters whether you have a happy audience. Maybe that is not the only objective, in which case, say, the artistic value should be also considered. But even then, it is important not to leave the audience dissatisfied.

This whole event (at the 92nd street Y, no less) sounds like a scene from a Woody Allen movie, in which the protagonist is trying to rise above the comedy genius that made him so famous and is genuinely, if perhaps misguidedly, befuddled when his audience is upset when he doesn't give them any laughs.

I don't find Steve Martin that funny. But I do enjoy his writings about his career. I know he works hard at his craft, and think he's a class act.

The Y gathered (and charged) the wrong audience for the talk – a task made easy by today's technology.

Not so different from when some small blog, writing to an audience of regulars, suddenly finds something it says put in a new context, broadcast and re-spun across the net, and a whole new slew of commenters without the common context show up (or viciously opine elsewhere).

tl;dr -> Martin got annoyed by having to unexpectedly answer viewer questions during an interview.

And if you understand that my first sentence was a joke, you understand the importance of what Steve had to say. It was a well done essay.

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