Writes Lloyd Evans, in "Three cheers for booing in the theatre" (Spectator).
The oldest meaning of the verb "boo" — going back to the 1500s — is "To low or bellow as a cow does" (OED): "The ungodlye colleges of priestes..that dayly boo and rore the holye scriptures" (a1555).
The familiar meaning, to make the sound "boo" to express disapproval or contempt, goes back only to the early 19th century: "The whole school raised a yell, booing, hissing, and scraping feet" (1833).
The familiar meaning, to make the sound "boo" to express disapproval or contempt, goes back only to the early 19th century: "The whole school raised a yell, booing, hissing, and scraping feet" (1833).
Why — of all the animal noises — did the sound of a cow come to dominate audience noisemaking? We use it — if we ever use it — without even knowing that it once was understood — at least in English — as the sound a cow makes.
I've got to wonder if the booing that went on in ancient Greece was the sound "boo" and whether it was imitative of a cow. Perhaps some other animal, more familiar to the Greeks. A goat? "Maaaaa." Of course, the animal sounds are represented by different letters in different languages.
And even within one language, the letters used to represent an animal's sound can change over time. Apparently, back in the 1500s, the cow said "boo."
And are you old enough to remember when the frog did not say "ribit"? Are you old and as up on pop culture as I am to know that "ribit" as the sound for a frog was a complete innovation that can be ascribed to a single comedy sketch that came on TV one night in 1968?
I was pleased to see that the OED corroborated my memory. Its entry for "ribit" has as its first quote:
c1968 in Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (annotated T.V. script for rebroadcast programme) No. 8. 62 That's right. Ribit! I am. I am a frog.
(The sketch is too long, so feel free to scroll to 5:30 to get to the "ribit" part.)
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What's most striking is that a mediocre comedy sketch was given over 9 minutes of precious broadcast time. And that was before taping and fast forward were an option.
Expressions of loud disapproval during a stage performance interfere with an artistic process the working out of which may just need a bit more time. It is almost always rude. It is asymmetrical, often cowardly, and often an attempt to gin up a wave of similar expressions of disapproval that can give a minority a heckler's veto.
As for the sounds people make to express disapproval, there are also whistling, hissing, stomping and catcalls.
I vividly recall the hissing that the lefties used in my law school to silence opinions that were "incorrect". It was like a vast leak from a collective lung. This was of course from the generation that is now in power. They have since learned to codify their views of correctness. They need not hiss any more.
Ribit... for her pleasure?
"Coughing is the commonest method.... Noisily turning the pages of the programme tells your neighbours that you’re unimpressed by the antics on stage. Fiddling with sweets or rattling your ice cubes has the same effect."
But most of those things are done by the obliviously clueless as well. The ladies who start rummaging in their purse in the first minute of a concert haven't heard enough to disapprove of.
All of those behaviors are rude. Getting up and leaving is effective.
Semantic triggers.
Semantic, audible triggers. In the modern model, high volatility speech is regulated to be rare, safe, and leveraged to normalize, benefit special and peculiar interests.
What kind of Philistine boos a live performance?
I've seen super-woke musicals and it never occurred to me.
Sporting events, on the other hand...
Historically, the composition of a theater audience was very different from today. Booing is absent from the modern theater because the audience has gone highbrow.
I bet Chris Rock would've preferred a boo.
While the Smother's Brothers may have popularized the term, Google ngrams shows that it has some currency before that. E.g.,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Tiny_Thumbelina/5Udrsw6N0LMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22ribbit%22&pg=PA14&printsec=frontcover
has a toad chorus using ribbit.
The date given is 1949.
Circa 1970, I went to movies on campus at the U of Michigan, and it was the standard practice to hiss at on-screen villains. Of course, theater is different because the actors hear you, and in any case, the hissing wasn't about the performance being bad. It was just old-fashioned, maybe partly ironic, outrage at the *character*. I remember thinking it was strange.
The sophisticated throw tomatoes.
Made me think of the preaching in black churches, and the way a congregation audibly responds. If they like what the preacher says, they'll say, "Praise God" and raise their hands. But if the preacher's message isn't going so well, they'll say "Help him, Jesus".
When they do the melodramas, in the Bird Cage theater at Knott's Berry Farm, they actively encourage the audience to boo the villain. Steve Martin actually said in his book that working in the Bird Cage was the happiest time in his life. And Steve Martin also worked on the Smothers Brothers show. (There are videos of some of the Knott's melodramas on Youtube.)
First and only time I heard hissing at a villain was when we put on HMS Pinafore in college in the early 2000s. It is apparently traditional to do that when Dick Deadeye appears.
That show was hilarious to begin with, having the audience add their part to the production just made it that more fun.
The first Star Wars movie had cheering and booing of actors because it was so easy to see who was good and evil.
I recall that Dylan encountered shuffling feet and grumbling/hissing from the audience in Britain when he introduced electric instruments. One distraught audience member even stood up before a song began to loudly proclaim Dylan as Judas. Dylan’s perfect answer was to tell the guy he didn’t believe him and he was a liar. Then he turned to the band and told them to play really f’in loud.
As a singer (mediocre) I suspect that the "boo" sound caught on because it facilitates a loud and sustainable noise. The building up of pressure behind the closed-lip "Buh" sound helps the sustained "bellows" effect in your lungs/diaphragm to really project that noise out there, without straining your vocal cords.
And so are visible down votes at youtube. Made Biden look so bad they changed the rules after Trump lost. Vocal affirmations verses boo's let's audience connect to what's being said.
Booing was common when live performances were the only form of entertainment there was. Now that there are other options, audiences are there because they want to support the art form, and booing is impolite.
It would be wrong to think booing was always spontaneous. There were organized claques who came and booed as a group. See New York's famous Hamlet war, the Astor Place Riot.
Give me Cyrano's death threats against the fat actor and romantic rival Montfleury, now that is cancel culture worth seeing on stage!
Circa 1970, I went to movies on campus at the U of Michigan, and it was the standard practice to hiss at on-screen villains.
Or just to hiss at what would now be called "politically incorrect" characters (who I suppose were the villains to them). I wonder if students still do that today, or if they still have movie night on the weekends.
Booing goes with being part of a community -- or cult -- with strict and severe standards of what is acceptable. Folk fans were like that and booed performers who weren't authentic or tradition enough for them. It didn't hurt that many of them were narrow and militant sectarians in their political views as well. Jazz fans and rock fans often had expectations that weren't always satisfied. I suspect you may hear booing at science fiction or comic book conventions.
Booing is also tied to a sense of place. If you go to a club every week to hear a certain kind of sound, you might not like it if what you hear is too different, and the people around you might not like it either. Theatergoers are more accepting, and often if they don't like what they see they think that might be their own problem.
If I was in the theatre the night the Rent cast member castigated Mike Pence in 2016, I would have stood up and booed, loudly and continually until the asshat, rude performers (not actors) shut their pieholes. Then I'd ask for a refund. Fools.
I presented a paper in Germany in 1996 that was met with table-rapping and thigh-slapping from the audience. Not the reaction I expected, but better than booing.
Turns out that's applause in that academic setting.
I rarely boo at movies though I have been known to walk out. My worst habit is to let out a low "faay-keee" at bad special effects. That, and an ability to throw my voice in the dark, saying "kneedeep . . . kneedeep." Like a frog.
I have been to the metropolitan opera in New York City a number of times. It has some reputation for booing, occasionally, not anything like some of the European houses. I have never heard a boo at the met.
mikee said...
"Give me Cyrano's death threats against the fat actor and romantic rival Montfleury, now that is cancel culture worth seeing on stage!"
Attend to me, fool moon. I clap my hands three times, thus. On the third, you will eclipse yourself.
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