Following a recent after-dinner speaking engagement, I mentioned to a friend that the group (150 or so registered Maine guides) had been “a great audience.”

“Oh,” she said. “Are some audiences better than others?”

According to an old show biz adage, “There’s no such thing as a bad audience... only bad entertainers.”

But 40-plus years on stage has me drawing a different conclusion.

While I agree that it’s a lot easier to blame the audience than it is to take responsibility for your own shortcomings, experience has also taught me that some audiences are, in fact, significantly “better” than others.

To be successful in my line of work, you need to develop a knack for quickly and accurately reading the room. Once you’ve figured that out, you’ll have a much better shot at adapting your material and delivery to the specific personality of each new audience.

As odd as it may be to imagine hundreds of separate individuals sharing a single “personality,” from where I stand (behind the microphone), that’s exactly how it feels.

With that in mind, here are some of the audiences I’ve met over the years.

Go ahead, try to make me laugh

Fortunately an extremely rare animal, this audience can occasionally be found in a “super-hip” urban comedy club environment. Although, most folks would agree that the whole point of going out and listening to a comedian is to enjoy a few good laughs, that’s certainly not the case with this crowd.

They seem to take a perverse pride in their ability to sit sphinx-like through an entire evening of hilarious comedy without cracking a smile.

Almost exclusively young, frequently male and competitive to the point of being combative, I suspect that members of this audience would also qualify for inclusion in another microscopic demographic: people most likely to challenge Mike Tyson to a bar fight.

Not a fun bunch.

Oh, is there somebody onstage talking?

Like just about everybody in show business, the early years of my career were spent in venues where the patrons had at least 27 different reasons for being there, each of them far more important than listening to me.

Those reasons included getting drunk, meeting their drug dealer, getting drunk with their drug dealer, watching baseball, football, basketball etc. on the big screen TV, and of course, The Three P’s: Pinball, Pugilism and Procreation.

It’s likely that an audience of this type inspired the song lyric, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.”

The nervous Nellies

Self-consciousness and humor, like oil and water, are incapable of occupying the same space at the same time. One of them inevitably must displace the other.

A marvelous side effect of laughter, of course, is the spontaneous break it gives us from our daily grind (hence the phrase “comic relief.”) Laughter suddenly, almost magically, displaces the stress of day-to-day life, instantly filling the void with a pleasant wave of endorphins. Ahhh, that’s better.

Sadly, an audience composed of people unable or unwilling to relinquish their self-consciousness is an audience virtually incapable of laughter. If there’s a physical epicenter of all human self-consciousness, I’m betting it’s located in a high school somewhere. For many of us, high school was the high water mark of self-consciousness.

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that the toughest audience I ever encountered was made up entirely of recent high school graduates and their parents packed into a stuffy gym on a college campus during freshman orientation week. Brutal!

The co-worker cohort

This is, by far, my favorite corporate audience.

The secret is that the individual audience members are genuinely comfortable being around each other. Laughter, like crying, is an involuntary emotional response, so there’s a certain amount of trust and emotional vulnerability involved when laughing with others.

Since people in the “helping professions” like nurses, social workers, teachers, EMT’s and CNA’s inhabit a work environment where trust and emotional honesty are part of the job description, they make a fantastic audience, always happy to swap their job related stress for some laugh generated endorphins.

The true blue fans

This is every performer’s favorite audience. There’s only one reason they’re sitting out there waiting for the curtain to open. They came to see you!

I never feel the need to make this audience laugh. They came to laugh. They want to laugh. Give them half a chance and they’ll be rolling in the isles.

Getting this audience laughing is a lot like torching that big old bonfire on homecoming weekend. All I really have to do is set a match to it, step back and bask in the warm familiar glow.