Cardi B Concertgoer Followed a Disturbing Trend From the 1800s

Those who believe that civilization as we know it is collapsing have been vindicated by an alarming trend: concertgoers throwing random things at performers on stage. Artists as different as Pink, Cardi B, Harry Styles and Kelsea Ballerini have been on the receiving end of drinks and other projectiles, including a bag with a dead woman’s ashes inside. Little wonder that superstar Adele unleashed a mid-show tirade about how “people are forgetting [expletive] show etiquette” recently during her Las Vegas residency.

The trend goes well beyond these isolated instances. Critics have noted that boorish behavior is spreading in live theater and even classical music, with audience members talking during plays and heckling opera singers. Why this is happening is unclear, though more than a few people have, somewhat predictably, blamed social media for eroding audience sensibilities.

Perhaps. But standards of etiquette change for all sorts of reasons, much as they have in the past. And as we confront what seems like a groundswell of audiences behaving badly, it’s helpful to remember that the behaviors we lament now were once quite common, even acceptable. That alone should make us skeptical of simplistic, moralizing explanations of the current spate of bad behavior.

Consider, for example, what awaited a typical performer in the US in the early 19th century.At the time, the kind of cultural hierarchies that we accept as normal didn’t exist. Classical music, theater and opera coexisted, cheek by jowl, with decidedly lowbrow entertainment. Shakespeare, the historian Lawrence Levine has observed, “was presented as part of the same milieu inhabited by magicians, dancers, singers, acrobats, minstrels, and comics.”

The audience was equally eclectic, encompassing everyone from elite members of society to prostitutes, working-class toughs and members of the middling classes.

Such radical egalitarianism thwarted any attempt to impose a single code of conduct on the audience. When rich and poor alike sat down to watch a show featuring everything from operatic arias and scenes from Macbeth to dancing poodles and minstrel shows, how could it be otherwise?

European visitors, many of whom had already retreated into class-segregated entertainment, took offense at both American entertainment and audiences. British writer Frances Trollope, who visited the US in the 1820s, lamented the “style and manner of the audience” with the righteous indignation of a veteran pearl-clutcher.

The men, she reported in horror, dressed poorly, rolling up their shirtsleeves to the shoulder. And rather than sit in their seats, they lolled on benches or sat on edge of the balcony with their rear ends facing the stage. Worse, “the spitting was incessant,” and the noises “were perpetual, and of the most unpleasant kind: the applause is expressed by cries and thumping of the feet, instead of clapping,” and the audience repeatedly interrupted performances by singing “Yankee Doodle.”

The audience routinely violated the boundary separating them from entertainers. They might join a singer in a performance, or even wander onto the stage during a theatrical performance in order to cheer on the protagonist. And that was when they approved of a performance.

If they disapproved, as audience members did at an opera staged in 1848, they unleashed what one eyewitness described as “screams, whistles, clapping of hands, hisses, trampling of feet, roaring, menacing outcries and gesticulations of every kind.” Just as often, they decided to go one step further and hurl things at performers who offended them.

The practice of using an egg “as a vehicle of dramatic criticism,” as one diarist dryly described it, became increasingly common in the opening decades of the 19th century. But why stop at an egg? One account of a performance in 1831 noted that the first missile aimed at the stage – “a large and heavy bottle of water” – was followed by a barrage of “oranges, penknives, turnips, keys, apples, potatoes,” and, of course, eggs.

And in an 1856 performance of Richard III, disgruntled audience members hit the lead with “a few carrots” in Act I, followed by subsequent barrages of vegetables, sacks of flour and soot, and a dead goose. Despite this, the actors continued performing until some thrown firecrackers brought the play to a halt.

Change came slowly. Over the remainder of the century, many elite audiences retreated into tightly regulated venues that waged war on unruly audiences. This went hand in hand with the creation of professional orchestras and other bastions of high culture, each of which began imposing strict rules on attendees.

That meant sitting straight up in your seat in total silence – no whispering or clapping, except at the very end – and otherwise appearing as docile and passive as possible.

In 1897, Harper’s Weekly captured the dramatic transformation in American audiences. “How much we endure unprotesting!” a writer bemoaned. “We sit patiently through bad singing and playing, through dozens of compositions that we don’t like. … We do not hiss or catcall. … We do not send cabbages and cats in parabolas if a manager’s good faith is not kept with us.”

The new code of conduct pioneered by elites eventually became the norm for most performances. Even working-class audiences internalized the belief that certain behaviors – interrupting performers, talking during performances, throwing dead animals – no longer had a place in popular entertainment.These codes of etiquette might not be written down, but audiences generally honored them. While social media is not blameless in the flouting of these unwritten rules nowadays, focusing only on it ignores an important fact: We’ve been here before. When audience members acted out, performers often refused to continue until the culprit was removed. To meet this moment, perhaps that’s a trend that needs to come back and go viral.