No Applause Please

One thing I'm getting really tired of hearing is the constant applause of people in the United States whenever someone they agree with speaks, or whenever someone says something patriotic. Maybe I'm just watching the wrong kind of television, but it's starting to get really annoying.

My main example is the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. At the beginning of every show, and before and after commercial breaks, the crowd cheers. Once upon a time, people cheered with "Rah" or "Hooray". Also hurrah, huzzah. Today, people almost universally as far as I have heard, cheer with "Woo!" If the men are cheering, it's in falsetto. And every once in a while in the audience of a show like the Daily Show, there's one person who just screams or shrieks above the rest:

"aaaaaaaaaaa!" (deep breath) "breeyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"

Sometimes it sounds like the people in the audience are riding a roller coaster. Other times it sounds to me like the screams of the damned in hell. I get what the intent is, though, and that is that such a show is supposed to imitate a rock concert, in which the audience is intentionally whipped into a frenzy of emotion, and that's what people go to a rock concert to experience. But it's the screams of the damned that get to me, and I hope that people would start to imagine the tortured damned every time they hear a crowd screaming, and realize how ridiculous this is.

I've been emotional too, so I don't blame people for getting caught up in it. And when it's in a studio/arena setting, there's something thrilling about being in a mob, and all the time knowing that the environment is quite safe. What I don't really understand is why the content of the show should elicit such a response. Basically the audience of a rock concert or a television show are people with houses, families, and jobs, or at least they go to school. A rock concert becomes a mini-riot, the way these people are shrieking and carrying on, and they have no real reason to do it. The issues discussed on the Daily Show are not really worth freaking out so much about, and even if you do freak out in the audience, what are you really doing about the issue? Nothing. If anything, you're blowing off steam about real issues, and you leave that night with a feeling of accomplishment and catharsis. It is clearly and certainly artificial, but the psychological effect is that you feel as if you've done your part. And so you are less compelled to perform other acts in order to fix the things that you screamed about last night.

Of course, that is what the Daily Show is. It's part comedy, part rock concert, and just designed to make you feel good about yourself, so that you watch the advertisements and keep coming back for more. The issues discussed in the show are just designed to make you feel morally superior for watching this kind of show instead of something less edgy, whether it's news or entertainment.

But the problem is not just limited to the Daily Show, as I often see this kind of behavior in college or university settings, like when a school invites a celebrity pseudo-intellectual to speak or debate. Here the crowd is used to being entertained by rock stars, and then they're placed into this format where there's a serious debate going on. They act strangely, and they can either turn on the speaker or misconstrue his words in a strange, populist way.

In some ways, I'd prefer a crowd that says "Boo!" to a crowd that cheers. But the problem with that kind of crowd is that it contains no individuals. I guess what I want from a crowd is confusion. I want some people cheering, some people booing, and the majority thoughtfully contemplating. I guess that makes for a pretty boring performance.

It's such a strange phenomenon when someone goes against a crowd, so you hardly ever have a divided crowd that can simultaneously boo and cheer. When Lincoln said "a house divided against itself cannot stand," I imagine him saying it in the literal sense, in the sense of a theater house. I suppose there's an intentional irony in my using it in this sense, since Lincoln was killed in a theater.

A single heckler can disrupt the entire room; even if the whole room disagrees with him, chaos erupts, because other people might try to shout down the heckler. The entertainer has lots of tricks to drown out hecklers though, especially in a musical setting.