Playing to the Audiences: How Creative Producers Manage and Reconcile Different and Copresent Valuation Standards

Abstract

This study examines how individual creative producers navigate conflicting valuation standards when multiple audience types are copresent. Drawing on a multiyear participant-observation study of stand-up comedy in Los Angeles, I introduce practical annealing as a real-time, cue-driven competency through which performers reconcile heterogeneous standards across casual consumers, peers, and gatekeepers. Practical annealing unfolds through three situated practices: audience profiling (inferring likely sensibilities from contextual and interactional cues), audience orchestration (forging a workable collective from disparate evaluators), and audience triangulation (surfacing overlaps and selectively prioritizing standards to guide performance choices). I show that the latitude to anneal is not uniform. Permission structures rooted in demographic prototyping and status expand or restrict what moves are legible and sanctionable. Although enacted within moments on stage, repeated reconciliations aggregate into career orientations—toward broad malleability or niche grounding—with implications for bookings, visibility, and market position. Conceptually, the paper shifts attention from evaluators to the subjects of evaluation, specifying real-time practices for managing evaluative plurality under copresence and distinguishing it from sequential experimentation or improvisation. The framework clarifies when and for whom real-time reconciliation is feasible and how microinteractional skill scales into durable trajectories in cultural production and other audience-dependent work.