I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but the comedy club that I work at just featured two nights where our headliner basically spent the entire set just asking the audience demographic questions.

"What's your name? Are you married? Who's next to you? Are you guys together? How long have you known each other? How'd you meet?"

It really pissed me off because there are people out there putting the reps in, day after day, tweaking the material, actually writing jokes-- and this particular comedian was given four shows on the weekend night to cosplay as a census worker in front of a live audience.

I think a lot of comedians don't realize that anyone who is out there doing fantastic crowd work is often just steering the audience to jokes they've already written. Yes, sometimes an on-the-spot zinger kills, but people who have paid good money to see you deserve more than an hour's worth of improvised material. It just feels disrespectful to me.

/rant

EDIT: Since this part didn't seem to be obvious... the entire set was about 90% questions, 10% "jokes," and most of the jokes got half-hearted laughs. It felt like the comedian in question maybe cracked one joke every five minutes. For a 45-60min set, it was painful.

Yes, crowd work can work, but to show up and improvise basically your entire set is disrespectful to an audience that paid to be there.