Stand-up comedy is performed in front of an audience, a point both self-evident and critical. Comedians construct their material to best elicit the desired aesthetic responses, laughter being chief among them, from any given crowd that might be assembled before them, and the audience’s engagement is constitutive of the thing produced in that moment of performance. This chapter explores multiple senses of ‘audience’ – as the market for and tradition-bearers of stand-up, as the followers and fanbase of a specific comedian, and as those present at the moment of a performance – before demonstrating the nature of the creative collaboration in completing the prepared ‘text’, in allowing for more spontaneous displays of wit through crowdwork and handling hecklers, and in the breakdown of performance when expectations are breached and the audience withdraws its support.