Advice for actors on how not to appeal to crowds:

And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them. For there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That’s villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.

Hamlet’s advice to the acting troupe may have some application to preaching, music and other aspects of life.  What say you?