Caitlin Peluffo learned to find the miserable person in the crowd, not the smiling ones, and build her set around making them feel seen. The goal is turning discomfort into an inside joke that bonds the whole audience together.
She said, I had a knack for scanning a room full of faces and ignoring the happy smiling ones to locate the person having the worst time. Every other last audience member could be laughing, cheering, having the time of their life, but I'd hone in on the man or the woman who looked miserable, and then I spent the rest of my act delivering my material straight to them in some sort of twisted Mexican joke standoff.
I do that too. Yeah, I find the one person who's not having fun, and then I look and I go, "I'm gonna make you love me." How much of crowd work is the audience being seen and feeling a part of it? For me, it's so important. I always say that I want the crowd leaving with what— like an inside joke, you know, something that only happened in that moment, in that hour and a half that we decided to be together.
