Freakonomics Radio - 48. Boo…Who?

Episode Date: November 8, 2011

Is booing an act of verbal vandalism—or the last true expression of democracy?

I'm Ed Rendell, former governor of Pennsylvania, former mayor of Philadelphia, former a lot of things. And you know what we're here to talk about today, right? Absolutely. All right. Now, we've all heard, or some of us have heard at least, that Philadelphia is actually the capital of sports booing. Philadelphia fans are incredibly passionate. They're the best and most supportive fans in the world. But they will boo lack of effort. They will boo opposing players.

They will boo bad calls by the umpires. And yes, they'll boo Santa Claus. The Santa Claus thing actually did happen back in 1968 at a Philadelphia Eagles football game. It helped cement the belief that Philadelphia is the town that boos the most, the best, the worst. It was the last game of the year. It was right before Christmas. It was in Franklin Field, our old stadium. The Eagles had won two games that year, so the fans were just pissed off in general. And then the regular Santa Claus they were going to use for this halftime show got sick.

So they went into the stands to find guys in Santa Claus suits and see if they'd volunteer. And the only guy they found was this scrawny-looking, dirty suit guy. He was the worst-looking Santa Claus I ever saw. And they put him up on the sled, I guess they must have paid him something, and carted him around. And everyone, myself included, threw snowballs at Santa. From WNYC and APM American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. This week, boo who?

Here's your host, Stephen Dugner. Yeah, well, f*** you too. Anyway, let's get back to Philadelphia. Franklin Field, December 15th, 1968. Santa Claus getting booed. The scrawny-looking Santa who got dragged down from the stands that night was named Frank Olivo. He was a native Philadelphian. You know how you could tell?

Because here's what Olivo told the Philadelphia Daily News after he got booed and pelted by snowballs. He said, quote, you know, Philadelphia was the cradle of the political part of the revolution, at least. And if we didn't have a bunch of dissenters, we wouldn't have a country right now to start with. Sure. I mean, Thomas Paine was the very first boo-bird. He did it on his pamphlets, and they were remarkably effective in launching us on a new nation. Good morning. Good morning, sir. I'm Stephen Dubner from New York. Thomas Payne, sir. Very nice to meet you. I hope you're being wary of the loyalists up there in New York. At this time of year, the loyalists aren't much of a threat. Oh, well, that's very good.

In fact, I met up with a Thomas Paine impersonator in Philadelphia. I like to write in taverns, actually. So just like people write in Starbucks today, you would sit down in a tavern. Starbucks, I'm not familiar with that. Yeah, it's a coffee chain from the future. It's a coffee house, I see. In Thomas Paine's time, there was a tradition brought over from Europe called audience sovereignty.

Audiences were expected to react, to interact, huzzahs, boos, hisses. Well, it's just a hiss like a snake. And you get a number of people doing it and it can carry quite a weight. This was nothing new, of course. Here's Richard Butch. He's a sociologist at Rider University. From the ancient Greeks through the Elizabethan, Shakespearean era into the 19th century, the early 19th century in the U.S., what we find is that in all of those areas, as well as in non-Western areas, what you find is the audiences actually were typically fairly active. But today, booing lives on in sports, in some places at least,

but overall, there's been a real decline in booing. I mean, come on, tell me the truth. Don't you sometimes have the urge at the theater maybe or during a meeting with your thick-headed boss? I'm very conflicted about booing. On the one hand, I think it's a kind of verbal vandalism and I'm always kind of annoyed when people boo around me. On the other hand, it's kind of one of the last true expressions of democracy.

That's Robert Lipsight. He's a writer, spent a lot of his career covering sports for The New York Times, especially the racial and social and political angles of sport. Unlike most of his peers, he didn't come to this as a fan. His memoir is called An Accidental Sports Writer. He's also an opera buff. I saw the last few performances of Pavladi a couple of years ago before he died. The voice was gone. And with the voice gone, it was also really hard to now forgive the fact that he was of the school that was known as Park and Bark. You know, these kind of hefty opera singers, you know, who would just kind of stand there. Not a lot of acting.

Sing. Not a lot of acting. Not a lot of moving, Stephen. They would just park and bark. And he would do that. But in these final performances, it was even beyond. You know, the bark, the bark was gone. And the parking was almost ludicrous in the final scene where he was to die. I remember in Tosca, he was to die at a firing squad. You know, he was shot, you know, 20 times. And then he kind of lowered himself very slowly. He took a knee, as we say in football. And I remember, you know, thinking this is beyond feeling sorry for our hero or being pathetic. You know, this guy should not be doing this.

You know, if there was any justice, people would boo. If I had any courage, I would get up and boo. But of course, I'd say... So wait a second. So you're describing a scenario where, according to the rules and regulations and morals of public performance, that this guy should have been booed, right? And you're saying he wasn't? He wasn't. And you didn't? You were there?

You had the opportunity? I confess. Had you bought your ticket or was it a freebie? No, we're very expensive subscribers. Let me say this. I've known Bob Lipsight for quite a while and I like him a lot. I think he's a great writer. But the fact is, he's a grump, a grouch. If he won't boo something as bad as Pavarotti's Park and Bark, well, who is willing to cut loose? So they come out on stage and I go, boo! Terry Teachout is a theater critic for the Wall Street Journal.

It was at New York City Ballet a number of years ago, not under the present regime, when the orchestra was in a terrible state of disrepair. And they performed a very difficult score by Igor Stravinsky to a ballet by George Balanchine, and they butchered it. And I was furious. And at the end, I booed. It's the only time I've ever done it in my life. I think I was the only person in the theater who was doing it. And I doubt if anybody knew why I was doing it, to be perfectly honest with you. But I felt a lot better for having done it.

It should be said that Teach Up was at the ballet as a civilian that night, not as a critic. I've never heard a single boo on Broadway as long as I've been reviewing, which is going on nine years now. How on earth can that be? I often wonder myself, and the conclusion I've come to, other than some vague theory about how Americans are just basically nice people, which may or may not be true, is that tickets on Broadway cost an enormous amount. And so people feel, I think, obliged to vest themselves in the performance in a way that they might not if the ticket cost half as much. If you're putting out $125 for your seat, you want your show to be good.

And I think that there may be some built-in bias there that inclines you to enjoy what you see. Right. There is a phenomena that psychologists and economists talk about the endowment effect when something is yours and when you've attached value to it, you inflate the value of it because it is yours. Exactly right. And when you are endowing a performance with, assuming that you're bringing a date, $300 or more, a pop, not including the incidental costs of travel, of having dinner, of all the things that go into a night at the theater. You're talking about a fairly substantial investment. Yeah, and that makes sense. But let's entertain an alternate scenario.

Let's pretend that there was a lot of booing on Broadway. Then we might say, well, it's because the tickets are so expensive. And when you pay that much, you expect that the product will be satisfactory to you, and it's not. And yet, that doesn't happen. So maybe it's not about the money. Well, I can see a case for arguing that demand characteristics of the situation are shaping the way people respond on Broadway, except that people boo in opera houses in New York, and I've heard it. I've heard people absolutely tearing their hair and screaming with dislike, usually over productions. I've never heard an individual performer booed at the Met.

What they boo is a production of a standard opera that is extremely eccentric in some way that is not to their liking. So you think at root we should have more booing? I would be encouraged if I heard it once in a while. I would not want the kind of full-scale incivility that is common in Italian opera houses. I don't want to see people throwing tomatoes. And I actually suggested as a kind of thought experiment what I called the silent boo, which would be you would install in your lobby a pair of plexiglass bins into which people dropped their programs as they left. One marked cheers and the other marked cheers. Yeah. Now, I see the merit of that idea. But on the other hand, there's nothing remotely visceral about it. I mean, isn't that kind of the point of the boo? Is it reflects the audience's visceral reaction to an investment in the performer?

And that's a different kind of thing than checking a box on a customer survey and storming into the lobby and flinging your program into the jeers bin in full view of 100 other people. I think it's conceivable. And if somebody were to do it, I think that people would in fact see that as an outlet for expressing their feelings about the performance and also one that would not just cathartic, but might well supply useful information to the producers of the show. That said, I agree with you about booing. I think there's something really natural about booing. You know, sometimes when I see a really awful show, even though I didn't spend any money to see it, I'm furious. And you're getting paid to see it. So the dynamic is exactly the opposite, and yet it's still frustrating. Well, I've paid with time.

I've paid with part of my life that I can never get back. I take people to shows because they always give us two press seats. And sometimes on the way out, I'll say, another two hours closer to the grave. Coming up, where audience sovereignty and the boo are still alive and well. He had keys missing on his little keyboard thing, and he was singing Stevie Wonder. That's just something you don't do. I said boo, man. And what do you do when you get the boo? From WNYC and APM American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio.

I've never been booed, but I think that's a bad thing because I think in order to get booed, people actually have to have high expectations about you. That's Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author. And I don't think anyone's ever had high enough expectations about me to bother to want to boo at me. Like you think about baseball, it's never the number nine here, the sharks up who bats 220 who gets booed. I mean, everyone knows he's terrible. It's a guy like Reggie Jackson or David Ortiz, who's Barry Bonds, the guy who's supposed to be good and then disappoints you, who ends up getting booed. I get what Levitt's saying. If you've made the big time, if you're a

professional, well, booze kind of come with the territory. If you aren't getting booed, well, you probably haven't gotten where you want to go. Nobody boos a bad clown at a kid's birthday party, do they? They don't boo amateurs, do they? We visited the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem for Amateur Night. Brace yourself. Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready for Amateur Night? Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, the Jackson 5, they all played Amateur Night here. The place can be pretty unforgiving. Among the future stars who got booed, James Brown, Luther Vandross, and a 13-year-old Lauren Hill. On amateur night,

the emcee encourages the audience members to vote with their voices. Now, this is the only place where you get to show that you don't appreciate what you saw. So, if you don't like them, what you gonna do? And that will bring out the executioner, C.P. Lacey! Tonight, C.P. Lacey is wearing red. Red suit, red tie, red hat. He's worked here for nearly 25 years. I've been here for a minute.

He's the executioner, the guy that performers do not want to see. It is my job to rid the stage of any unwanted acts. In other words, well, okay, you're singing your song. Yada, yada, yada, da-da-da. Boo! Boo! The band starts playing a totally different song than the one you're singing, and I come out tapping.

And I'm telling them to get off the stage, and they don't even know what's happening because so much is going on. They're still singing their song. And then they kind of get the idea and say, I'm getting booed. Backstage, dancers are running through their acts. Singers are warming up. Here's Ellis Gage. I am 12 years old.

I'll be singing Ain't No Mountain High Enough. Now if you need me, call me. No matter where you are. No matter how far. Don't worry, baby. Just call out my name. I'll be there in a hurry. You don't have to worry.

Because, baby, there ain't no mountain high enough. Ain't no valley low enough. Ain't no river wide enough. To keep you and to keep me from letting you in. Ellis didn't get booed, in part because he was really, really good. But even if he weren't, he would have been spared. At the Apollo, you're not supposed to boo a kid. But this next guy, he wasn't a kid.

I need more energy for Mr. Joshua Winter. I don't think God's going to automatically try to be serious. I have no sympathy for God's glory. Give him a chance real quick. Give him like 30 more seconds. Oh, man. All right, 50 seconds. He's cheating. He's cheating. This is cheating. Singing gospel is cheating.

Nobody wants to boo him. I did. I did. I did. Thank you. Thank you. Boo! Boo!

Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! And I'm not scared to boo in the name of Jesus. We don't hold back. Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! That's life! Even my own friend!

As funny as it may seem All right, so let's see. You shouldn't boo kids, but it is okay to boo in the name of Jesus. Those are some of the rules of booing at the Apollo. Ed Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania, he's done a lot of thinking about the do's and don'ts of booing as well. He once wrote a newspaper column with the headline, Rendell's Rules for Booing. I wonder if we could walk through them quickly. You maybe give me an example of each one. Sure. You write that good-natured booing is always allowed. Explain. And I'd say

good-natured booing like say booing a popular politician. I remember once I got re-elected as mayor with 81 percent of the vote and the next night I went to a 76ers game. They made the mistake of introducing me and I got booed. But it was good natured. I would say probably 90 percent of the people in the stands voted for me. But that was good natured booing. All right. So you're right. Booing a politician is always acceptable. You obviously were a politician.

Any politician who ventures out on a field. You've had that experience a few times, right? You've thrown out your share of first balls and it doesn't go well, does it? It never goes well. I threw out the first ball at the opening of Harrisburg's new stadium and I gave the state through me, gave half of the money and I still got booed. Now, that doesn't seem fair, does it? Rendell gets booed at a stadium that he helped fund. But if you're a politician, you've got to learn to live with the boo. You've got to know what to do with the boo. I'm Steve Klayman, and I'm a professor of sociology at UCLA.

Klayman once wrote a paper about booing and applause in political speeches. He analyzed more than 40 hours of material, including some presidential debates. about Angola. Now we have a chance. Now, several Bostonians don't like it, but the rest of the country will understand. Now we have a chance. That was George Bush, the elder, in a Michael Dukakis debate in 1988. We don't actually hear Dukakis there. Talk to me about this one now. Yes, I thought it was an excellent example of the way a speaker can respond to a booing response when it happens. Bush had a comeback for the booing that turned out to be quite effective. So he's talking about foreign policy, and in the course of his remarks, in an embedded, indirect way, he makes a derisive remark about Bostonians. And that gets people in the audience to begin to boo. He says several Bostonians don't like it, but the rest of the country will understand.

This is a way, a method, if you will, for dealing with booing when it occurs. And the method he's using is to marginalize the booers. That is to characterize the people in the room who are doing the booing as not representing the majority, but rather a narrow, self-interested slice. So he managed to turn an episode of booing into a supportive episode of applause. Right. He turned the boos back on the boo. It was a boo meringue, I guess is what that was, right? That's right. In our attempt to understand the boo, we've got one more story to tell you. And if you ask me, this one is the story of the ultimate boomerang.

My name is Johnny LeMaster. I am a sporting goods store owner at this time. I own my own business and coach a little bit of baseball. And that's basically what I do. Johnny the Master is being a little bit humble. He left out the part about playing Major League Baseball for 12 seasons, mostly for the San Francisco Giants. Now, he was hardly the best baseball player that ever lived. In fact, he was a shortstop with a career batting average of about 220, the very kind of player that Steve Leavitt talked about who usually isn't targeted for booing. I'm just an ordinary person, but I've lived an extraordinary life, and that's all because of baseball. During this long career years with the Giants, there comes a time, I believe in 1979,

when the Giants fans there in San Francisco are in, I guess, a sour mood. The team is not doing as much winning as they'd like, and they got particularly unhappy with you. And that led to a situation. Can you walk me through that? Sure. As you say, the team wasn't playing real well. I wasn't playing real well. And the booing started. I guess I became the whipping post, per se, if you want to call it that. And it escalated and it started getting worse each game. Even when I just popped my head out of the dugout, it would be a boo or something of that nature. And what's it feel like from the athlete's perspective to be booed like that?

I assume that you're trying hard, right? I think that everybody knows there's a difference between booing for when someone doesn't put out effort and when they make a mistake. There's a big difference in those two things. They could have never booed me for a lack of effort or a lack of hustle. But an athlete wants to please his home crowd more than anything in the world. And it's a crushing, it's a thing that hurts so bad when your own fans boo you.

But I want my fans to be pleased with what I'm doing because they're the ones that pay my salary. They're the ones that come in and cheer us on. They're the ones that care about us the most because we have some diehard Giant fans. I'm still a Giant fan at heart, and I always will be. Now, why was it you? Why were you the guy that they started to boo? People are, I don't know how to say, fickle. Once it's something like that gets started, it just kind of snowballs.

And at that month, I guess I'd made a few errors at the wrong time and said a few things in the newspapers that I probably shouldn't have said at that time, being a young idiot kid. What kind of things had you said in the newspaper, Johnny? Well, I'd rather probably just keep that to myself. Was it about baseball or was it kind of off topic? It was off topic. It was more about some political things that were going on in San Francisco. Oh, that never works well, does it? No, it's a, I'm a very conservative person and that's more of the, more of the most liberal places that there is in the world. And some of the things I, I, I didn't say them to hurt anybody, but I said them to try to make people think. This is San Francisco. This wasn't

about homosexuality maybe, was it? It was. Okay. So, so you're in San Francisco and you say something that could be interpreted as a conservative view on homosexuality. That's not going to go over very well. And believe me, it didn't. The booze escalated. This went on for weeks. LeMaster was pretty unhappy about it. And finally, one night lying in bed with his wife, she had an idea for how he ought to handle the booze.

The next day, I went in and talked to our equipment manager. I said, make me a jersey up with my number on it, and instead of my name, LeMaster, I said, put boo on the back of it. And it hung in my locker for a couple of weeks, and then I finally got enough nerve to put it on and wear it in a game. But I only got to wear it for the top half of the first inning. After the game, there's a letter laying on my chair in front of my locker. My general manager would fine me $500 for being out of uniform. But here's the whole thing about it.

The fans loved it, and the media loved it. It got the fans off my back, and it got the media off my back. When you decided to wear the jersey, or I guess when you decided to make the jersey, what were you trying to say? Were you just trying to make fun of yourself? Were you trying to acknowledge that you heard the boos? Were you trying to boo the fans back? trying to make fun of yourself? Were you trying to acknowledge that you heard the boos? Were you trying to boo the fans back?

What was the kind of message you think? I was trying to give the fans a way, instead of booing Johnny LeMaster, that whenever they say they were going to boo, that they were actually cheering me because that was now my new name. But I had a good time with it, too, don't get me wrong. Here we are still talking about it 30 years later. But here's, I guess, what brings it all back to reality. The last year I played, I was with the Okanays.

I'm sure you've heard of Reggie Jackson. Sure have. Reggie was on that team. It was the last year he played also. But we were up in Seattle and I went down early for breakfast one morning and I was there by myself. About the time I got ready to order,

Reggie walked in. He says, anybody sitting with you? I said, no, Reggie, come on, sit down, man. We'll eat breakfast together. And he came over and sat down. We chit-chatting a little bit, and he looked over at me. He said, I hear you get booed every once in a while. I said, Reggie, I did.

And he looked at me across that table, just eyeball to eyeball. He said, let me tell you something. He said, people don't boo nobodies. Now, why he told me that, I don't know, but he made me feel like a million bucks. So what's it all add up to? I'm not sure. We never uncovered any grand unified theory of booing. We found no treasure trove of booing data. We just found stories of booers,

booees, boomerangs. I like the stories. Hope you did too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC, Thank you. Intern is Ian Chant, and David Herman is our engineer. Special thanks to Josh Barnett, Historic Philadelphia Incorporated, and Elliot Forrest at WQXR. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.