The Lost Art of Making a Complete Ass of Yourself on Stage
There is a point in every live performance where a band has to decide what the audience is actually there to see.
Are they there to hear the songs exactly as recorded, only louder? Are they there to watch performers stand under tasteful lighting while playing with professional accuracy? Are they there to admire all of it and go home satisfied that everyone stayed in tune?
If so, then man, they are at the wrong concert.
We here at The Plastic Bastards Institute of Advanced Fuckery have always leaned toward another possibility: if people have gone through the trouble of leaving their houses, finding the venue, paying money, standing around, and voluntarily placing themselves in front of us, something stupid should probably happen.
Preferably several stupid somethings in a row. Continuously. For a long enough time that they actually become funny or we die trying.
This does not require fire, explosions, dancers (although at one point, we did have two Fly Girls), giant screens, or a production budget that needs its own accountant. Those things can help sometimes (especially the explosions), but mostly in our case it just gives us a reason to need insurance.
The real requirement is simpler. The people onstage should be willing to risk looking ridiculous.
That part, sadly, has become oddly uncommon.
There is a kind of sterile modern performance style built around looking completely comfortable, yet completely aware that every second may be photographed, recorded, clipped, reposted, and preserved forever. An interesting side effect of the modern era, so one can understand why giving a fuck makes you cautious. A bad facial expression used to disappear when the show ended. Now it can become somebody’s profile picture before you finish the next song. Live with it. Embrace it. Own it. Sell T-Shirts of it. (or at the very least, a nice hot cocoa mug)
If you give a fuck, the safest response is to look cool at all times.
This is terrible for entertainment.
Cool is useful in moderation, but it becomes suffocating if everyone is protecting it constantly. At some point somebody has to commit to something stupid. Somebody has to overdo it, say the wrong thing, make a face, wear something ridiculous, build a bit that could fail, or otherwise demonstrate that the evening is actually happening in real time rather than being performed by people terrified of being laughed at and not laughed with. Or in the modern age, terrified of becoming a meme.
The greatest live moments are usually not the ones where everything behaves exactly as planned. A performer screws up and turns it into part of the show. Somebody goes too far. A prop misbehaves with hilarious results. Then a joke that should have died immediately becomes the best thing in the room. There is risk in that, but fuck worrying about risk. Risk is the vibe-booster. Risk is the little-life that brings total improvisation. You must face the risk. Permit it to pass over you and through the audience. And when the risk has gone past the point of absurdity, you will turn to hindsight to see its value. Where the risk has gone, there will be random entertainment. Only a good time will remain.
This is part of what makes a live performance different from just listening to the music at home.
We would like to say that we figured this out early, but that suggests more strategy than was actually involved.
By 1990, we were incorporating prerecorded video into Plastic Bastards performances in a way that made the video part of the act itself. The people on the screen (played by us) could interact with the people onstage (with enough timing in-between for additional improv and tomfoolery), which meant timing rehearsals, the live performance, and technology all had to cooperate. We did this at a time before any of it was especially easy to do, which added another level of risk. If the equipment failed, there was no pretending the malfunction was somebody else’s problem. But that does not mean you can’t pretend anyway (once our video feed went down for a few minutes and we proudly announced to the audience that cable TV was performing a hostile takeover). It is the least stressful approach in a show where this many things can go wrong; you just have to live in that moment, live in the wrongness. Do not give a fuck.
It’s also much more interesting than simply standing there wondering what the hell went wrong.
The technology working mattered, but the point was never the machinery. The point was creating an atmosphere that existed in that particular room at that moment, for everyone involved. It is at this point everything becomes available to go right or terribly wrong, and if you play your cards right, it will be indistinguishable from the act people thought they were coming to see. Video can become out of sync. A mistake can become a joke. A stupid costume can suddenly make sense for three minutes, and then you have a wardrobe malfunction, and you can’t get the damn thing off, and it begins to look absurd, carrying into three more songs inappropriately. A prerecorded person can insult someone standing live onstage, but the person on stage reacts to it prematurely and now has to claim precognition to get out of the flub. The show stops being a recital and starts behaving like a situation.
Situations are dangerous.
This, of course, is excellent.
One of the problems with trying too hard is that overt seriousness has a very limited emotional range (unless you are going for Pagliacci (opens in a new tab), man, that shit hits). There are only so many ways to stare intensely into the middle distance before the audience starts wondering how high you are (and if you are high, do not do this anyway; always keep them guessing).
Performance can become much more interesting when you allow stupidity into the room. Nay, good people, not just ‘allow’, but indeed, invite!
This does not mean everything has to become comedy. The point is that the performer should be willing to commit fully enough that failure is possible and to live within it. That commitment is what makes something feel live.
If you are going to end up being ridiculous, be ridiculous.
Half-ridiculous looks embarrassed. Fully ridiculous looks intentional.
This is a useful rule that The Plastic Bastards Institute of Advanced Fuckery recommends following in both performance and in life. “The Lost Art of Making a Complete Ass of Yourself on Stage”
The fear of embarrassment ruins a lot of potentially good ideas. Fuck fear. If you start out with that anchor around your neck, you start second-guessing. You would think of something genuinely strange and then immediately begin reducing it to a socially acceptable version. Eventually, what survives is tasteful, safe, and completely forgettable.
Nobody has ever come out of a show saying, “The restraint was unforgettable.”
Well, somebody probably has said that.
We do not want to meet them.
Unless, of course, they came out of one of our shows saying that, because that would indicate these people obviously know where to get the good ganja.
There is also a difference between making an ass of yourself because you have lost control and doing it because you are willing to sacrifice dignity for the show (in our case, dignity was never on the menu (opens in a new tab)). The second option requires enough confidence to appear stupid without immediately trying to reassure everybody that you know you are being stupid.
Do not flinch. Do not smile at the audience as if asking permission. Do not do something strange and immediately signal that it was ironic.
Do not create a ridiculous moment, either deliberately or unintentionally, and stand outside it emotionally so nobody mistakes the bit for sincerity.
This is where fun goes to die.
If you are going to stand onstage looking absurd, at least have the decency to believe in it for the duration because the audience can tell.
We have always had a fairly high tolerance for being ridiculous, intentionally or otherwise. There is enough evidence to establish that dignity was never our most heavily protected asset.
That turns out to be helpful.
If you are not terrified of looking stupid, you can try more things. You can build stranger ideas. You can make the show bigger in ways that do not require money. You can let humor exist next to serious material without worrying that one invalidates the other. Mostly.
The other advantage is that making an ass of yourself creates permission for the audience to loosen up too. A room where the performers are desperately protecting their image can become stiff. Everybody watches carefully. Nobody wants to react too much because the band is clearly being ‘important’. And if they want that out of you, they are in the wrong place. Or you are. Figure it out.
But once someone onstage breaks that tension, the entire room can change. People laugh louder. They shout things. They become participants instead of witnesses. The distance between stage and audience becomes smaller.
This is always where live performance gets interesting.
There is a reason people remember strange shows longer than technically perfect ones. Perfect is impressive. Strange becomes a story.
Years later, people may not remember every song you played, but they remember the thing that happened, the stupid prop, something breaking. They remember somebody saying something that should probably not have been said. They remember the moment when the show went slightly off the rails, and everybody in the room realized they were watching something that could not be reproduced exactly.
That is the point.
A live show should contain some evidence that it was alive.
Technology has made it easier than ever to build performances that are perfectly synchronized, perfectly lit, perfectly tracked, and perfectly repeatable. That can be spectacular, and we are certainly not opposed to using technology. We were using the damn stuff when it was considerably more cumbersome and inconvenient.
But the technology should serve the show, not sterilize it.
If everything becomes so controlled that nobody can fail, nobody can surprise you either. And if nobody can surprise you, you might as well listen at home.
So yes, there is an art of making a complete ass of yourself onstage. It is the art of caring more about the moment than your dignity. It is the willingness to commit to something that could go wrong. It is understanding that looking stupid for thirty seconds can be worth it if those thirty seconds are the part everybody remembers. It is “The Lost Art of Making a Complete Ass of Yourself on Stage.”
The Plastic Bastards have spent years testing this theory.
The results are mixed.
Which is exactly why it works.