Join the Club

I’ve never been much of a joiner. It always seemed that joining a group was a declaration of exclusion in relation to people who weren’t in the group. It also seemed a bit like signing up for a broad set of values could be a stitch-up. At school, for instance, if you decide to join in being a jock (because you love sport) are you then subscribing to all that being a jock in high school entails? If you’re a slightly nerdy jock and all the other jocks bully the nerds, to borrow a few stereotypes, does that mean you have to give yourself a wedgie?

Sports lovers, though, will tell you that the point is loyalty to the entire team. The point is we support each other and ask questions later.

These two positions are difficult to reconcile sometimes.

Public Service Announcement: humans can team together with constructive outcomes and unhelpful ones. Pick your teams carefully!

Did you know that during the run of a theatre show—whether it’s on for three nights or 18 months— the performers and the production team experience not just different versions of the show but different versions of the audience? Ask anybody who works in theatre, they’ll tell you: every audience is different. Audiences, made up of a group of mostly strangers, have a personality. There’s some predictability to it; the Friday night audiences are usually loud and happy and relaxed and responsive. Saturday night audiences tend to have their arms crossed; the performers need to earn their trust because these people left the house on the weekend and they have other things they could be doing. But it’s not always like this, and it blows my mind every time that some audiences can laugh hysterically and applaud everything, some can be backwards in coming forwards, and some sit together, poised, intent, listening, until the very end of the show when they rise as one in rousing appreciation. This is why comedians thank people for being ‘a lovely audience’. Having a great audience feels like flying. So be a great audience. Lean in. Listen. Applaud. Make a sound!

Being in a sports stadium for a music gig or a huge game can be wonderful in a way that completely undermines all my quibbles about being a joiner. This brings me to another thing that’s excellent about joining a team: so long as you support that team, you’re welcome. You can dress up in the colours in the most obnoxious or ludicrous ways. You can befriend someone you never would have seen coming because you spent the night next to them screaming in delight at Lizzo with matching spangled headbands. Go forth and be part of a crowd that does crowd things like stadium waves or impromptu singing or in-jokes you only get if you’re a die-hard fan.

Clubs do this too. It’s not too much of a stretch, I reckon, to suggest that the more obscure a club is (the less likely other people are to understand the desire to join it) the more its members will get from it, ergo the better the club will be.

Sometimes the phenomenon of great group behaviour happens because of leadership. One brave soul who sets forth and is joined in the pursuit of a shared goal by others. A small example of this is when someone pushing a pram is running to catch a train and the doors start to close. Not wishing to break the fourth wall of public transportation bored-face, a passenger with a blank expression - a brave leader - will stick one leg out and prevent the doors from closing. Another passenger, whose eyes have briefly met the first - will grab the bottom of the pram, joylessly, as though that’s what they were going to do anyway, and assist with bringing the pram onto the train. A seat, suddenly made available by a blank-faced third passenger who is pretending like they were probably going to stand up anyway, is presented to the person with the pram. The person with the pram, before settling into a performance of blank-faced public transport boredom, will thank everybody profusely and then, as though making it worthwhile, engage in a public pantomime with the child in the pram about what a big day they’ve had and how tired they are.

There are lots of clubs it’s not worth joining. Finding the good ones is worth the search.

An edited version of this column appeared in The Big Issue, which you should buy whenever you get the chance.