We came across an essay on a site called 2 Blowhards, “a group of graying eternal amateurs discuss their passions, interests and obsessions.” In it, “Michael Blowhard” (his name, not ours) kicks around the concept of “audience sense.”

What is it? An audience sense isn’t quite the same thing as moviemaking (or acting, or technical) talent. Instead, it’s an ability to sense how people are reacting to you and to what you’re doing. Instinct and imagination seem to be involved. So does empathy: How else can someone so involved in attracting and commanding attention spare a few watts for how the show is being experienced by others?

Are the people with the most acute audience sense– with the greatest ability to inhabit the moment from the inside while also observing it objectively and opportunistically from the outside — standup comedians? When a standup act is really rockin’, after all, the comedian can seem to be igniting firecrackers that are lying in wait in pockets of your brain and spirit.

The occasion for pondering the notion of audience sense is a recent viewing of Paul Schrader’s “Auto Focus.” Blowhard seems ambivalent about audience sense. On one hand, a director must have it and some of the greatest undeniably posses it. On the other hand, it’s “a cheap, low thing,” and the artist who calls upon it might just be utterly lacking in “art-purity.”

Which, of course, got us to talking about it with regard to standup. This discussion goes on all the time– in the pages of this publication and elsewhere– what differs is the vocabulary, the buzzwords. We’re inclined to believe that all comedians have (indeed, must have) this sense. We further believe that having it in spades doesn’t automatically mean that the artist is pandering or that, conversely, the artist that has no audience sense is somehow closer to the aforementioned “art-purity.” Conversely, it is rather ridiculous that a comic– any comic– would have no audience sense and that any comic who purports to have none is, in actuality, pandering– to the media, to critics, to his/her narrow sliver of audience. (But, to quote Dom Irrera, “We don’t mean that in a bad way.”)

We’re puzzled by the inexplicably popular notion that those who nakedly seek to elicit laughter are not true comedy artists. When did laughter acquire dirty-word status when it comes to standup? Can’t we all agree that we are the only group of artists that have a singular goal– in our case, to get laughs? And that, if your intent is not, ultimately, to make people laugh, you really can’t call yourself a comic? (Keep in mind the distinction between result and intent.)

How did we arrive at a place where, if you openly state that your goal is to make people laugh, you are somehow less of an artist? How did it come about that the comic who implies (or even, in some cases, explicitly states) that his ultimate goal is not to invoke laughter is regarded as the true artist? Welcome to the upside down world of standup comedy.

There are comedians who regularly claim that performers who are streamlined and rather forthright in their approach to standup are not “acting in strict accordance with expressive need, intellectual brilliance, or aesthetic theory” and are therefore automatically pandering. And that an oblique approach to the art is somehow more virtuous.

The plain fact is that there is (and should be) plenty of disagreement as to how to approach standup comedy. But there should be no disagreement as to the ultimate goal– to get laughs. Whenever we point this out, we get attacked by certain sectors who seem to think we’re motivated by jealousy or who attack personally, ascribing our actions and beliefs to the fact that we’re “failed middles” or megalomaniacal internet publishers, hellbent on laying down the comedy law.

We’ve heard every type of criticism. We express disgust with this statement or that project, we get an email that tells us we’re “too liberal.” We go off on a rant about this agency or that institution, we’re branded by some as having veered to the conservative side. The truth lies somewhere in between. We found a definition somewhere that said that libertarianism holds that “all persons are the absolute owners of their own lives, and should be free to do whatever they wish with their persons or property, provided they allow others the same liberty.” If you absolutely must label us, it would appear that we’re comedy libertarians.