the audience that punishes by receiving too much
Close to two hundred people all punishing somebody by getting embarrassed for him, killing him by empathetically dying right there with him, for him, up there at the podium.
Context
The failure mode here is the inverse of the usual one: not a message that fails to land but a room so expert at Identification that it receives the performer's need to be liked more completely than he does, and the reception itself is the punishment. The signal that goes over is unslanted truth; the signal that dies is the calculated one, killed by an audience that empathizes it to death. Contact works so well it becomes a weapon. [sweep · shared-ground irony-sincerity]