HERE’S THE THING: Can you really trust comedy critics?

Welcome to HERE’S THE THING, where I talk about comedy-related things in a very HERE’S THE THING-type way.

I got to see Norm Macdonald perform at the New York Comedy Festival last Saturday. I say “I got to see,” because the ticket was paid for by the wonderful Julie Seabaugh, a fellow comedy journo who’s launching a new stand-up review site in the near future. I was reviewing the show, see, and therefore the ticket was free, which I think might have tainted my opinion.

The “free” part isn’t revolutionary news or anything. It’s common knowledge that reviewers get free things—whether it’s access to movie screenings, retail copies of video games, or box sets shaped like a house that contain every episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. As a comedy critic for the last five years, I’ve seen countless free shows. Most of them are $5 UCB showcases or $14 Improvised Shakespeare Company evenings (easily the best use of $14 in all of Chicago—including two specials at Hot Dougs). It’s rare that I get to see something like a $60 Norm Macdonald show in a huge New York theater during the heart of the town’s biggest comedy festival.

The point is, I thought the show was just so-so. The girl next to me, who had paid big money for the tickets and was a die-hard Norm Macdonald fan, fuckin’ loved the show, even though there were long stretches where the entire audience was clearly iffy about what was happening, given their silence and polite chuckles. I know this because she giggled giddily to herself many times, and afterwards was gushing about it. She was way more forgiving than me, clearly. So would I have enjoyed the show more if I had financially invested in its success?

I think so. It’s a basic psychological principle that our brains will want to take more away from something we’ve put a lot of our resources into (to put it loosely). That’s why members of hazing fraternities claim to love their frats more so than members of non-hazing ones; your brain is gonna find a way to justify the shit you had to go through. My gut tells me that if I had put in my own money to be entertained, and that amount of money was not insignificant, I would probably be subconsciously seeking much more enjoyment from the show, and therefore like it more. To be fair, I didn’t dislike the show, not by a long shot. It was just okay, which is a wishy-washy reaction I think some other form of investment would have pushed me one way or the other.

There’s this notion of the critic in pop culture as someone who’s totally removed, casting judgment from his or her ivory tower (in my case that tower is made of tenuously patched plaster walls and cheap bagels from the bodega on my block). I’ve never liked that perception, so I’ve done everything I can to remain engaged. I’ve gotten to know comedians and studied the ways they work behind-the-scenes as well as on stage. I’ve performed myself, to get a better sense of the difficulties of the process. I think deeply about the state of modern comedy, and refuse to mock something or snark up a review just for a few self-serving yuks. Obviously it’s a process, and I’m still working on it, but the point is that I care an awful lot about getting my true opinion out on the page.

The financial thing is just par for the course I suppose. If it wasn’t for the free tickets, I’d literally go broke doing what I love, as opposed to going semi-broke. I just wonder how my experience at the Norm show would have been different had I paid for the ticket myself. Every time I mentally checked out even for a second (probably thinking about my Skyrim character—I settled on a Breton, BTW), would there have been something snapping me back to reality because I wanted to make the most of this bank-breaking experience? How many of my reviews have been even-so-slightly tainted because I’m lucky enough—and extremely grateful, too—to have the kind of job where my ideal form of entertainment is often comped?

I don’t really know. All I can do is write about my experience with the show, and hope that no matter what other psychological factors are at play, my opinion means something.