The Peanut Gallery

noisms at Monsters and Manuals answered me.  I'm not exactly sure why I'm wrong, but apparently the entire teaching profession is misguided.

In the days of vaudeville, the "peanut gallery" meant the cheapest seats in the theatre, usually in the upper deck, who would throw peanuts to show their disapproval of the acts.  As an aside, imagine peanuts being so cheap that poor people could afford to throw them.  Probably, they just threw the shells.

Gene Kelly in the middle with his four brothers and sisters,
as a member of the "Five Kellys" on vaudeville.

Vaudeville consisted of a series of acts, usually comedians, light hearted duos or trios, harmonizing quartets and quintets, mixed with torch singers, a bit of burlesque, a chorus line if the stage was large enough and occasionally a snooty toff who would come out and sing an aria.  The vaudeville audience consisted of ordinary folks using their one night a month spending money (in an age when people worked 6 days a week), a scattering of upper class persons, the performers themselves, men with their dates and, of course, the drunk rowdies in the peanut gallery.

It was difficult to match up the performer with the crowd ~ and even the best performers, many of whom went on to be famous movie stars in the 30s, 40s and 50s (the list is endless) had tortuous nights on a vaudeville stage when the audience did more than throw peanuts, they pitched rotten tomatoes.  They would bring bags of such in with them.

Just imagine a young Fred Astaire, all of 13, dodging tomatoes.  Stuff like that built character.

If the singer had talent and was beautiful, she might sing a song that made the gallery cheer while the well-to-do would turn up their noses; whereupon the rich would talk to the management and the management would listen.  The poor, not having that kind of clout, having to listen to some hack butcher Aida for half an hour, because it made the moneyed audience happy, protested the only way they could.  They made life as miserable as possible for the performer.

This is how a democracy works.

I don't have the money to pay noisms to shut up, or write better material.  He might not even take money.  But I do have peanuts to throw, and a few rotten tomatoes ... and while the occasional unctious critic in the mezzanine might protest that my cast was out of line, truth be told, many of the upper gallery approved.  So goes the internet.  Whatever anyone does, whatever I do, people will be pleased and people will be offended.  Everyone is loved on the internet and everyone is hated.  That's the first rule of blogging.

It's not about the personality of the target.  The would-be tenor may be a really nice guy; he may have struggled to perfect his aria for months; he may even be classically trained.  None of that matters.  The peanut gallery hates opera.  And while they might endure it for five minutes, as that stretches on and on, there's no answer but to start pitching.

Another part of this whole blogging thing, however, is that the vaudeville manager would push the opera singer out there, knowing and wanting the audience to throw peanuts.  For one thing, it made the comedian who followed seem funnier, it made the dance girls prettier and it made the ingenue singer more talented.  It's the mix that matters.

The audience throwing their ire at the stage goes back well
before Shakespeare.  The Greeks did it.

I write a post about rules I'm writing, then I write something about politics, then a prescriptive post about DMing, throw up a map if I have one, write an RPG 201 post for the front seats and then I gnash my teeth and spit fire to make the peanut gallery happy.  The Thursday Night TV line-up was invented on the vaudeville stage in the 19th century.

Occasionally I have people say, "I wish you'd just write the high-brow stuff," but then I do and it gets few, if any comments.  My page views falter, the post gets less attention than average; then I write two screeds about Zak getting kicked in the balls and my numbers soar, the commenters rush out, everyone has a good time, the audience roars with laughter and sure enough, an aloof fellow asks, "Why did you feel the need to write that post?"

While I am trying to raise the bar for how D&D and other RPGs are played (and I feel I'm doing very well, thank you), there's little sense to doing that in a bell jar.  I've got to get the audience riled up; I've got to get them watching.  I've got to give them a little bump-and-grind.  So I push the talentless monkey out on the stage and let the audience "boo!" for awhile.  While backstage I dust off the concert pianist who will make the toffs happy.

This is how a blog stays relevant for 11 years.