Richard Norton on the comedy crunch...

As a 25-year-old who grew up in the boom years of the 1990s I have never really experienced a recession. Yes, it may have been going on but I was too young to understand it really. Watching films about the Eighties, it always seemed so distant. Now, it seems, in a few years we will be living a post-apocalyptic wasteland, huddled round campfires telling wistful tales of digital television to disbelieving young children.

While I have never been rich I always had disposable income. So, how will this credit crunch (although it is right to call it a recession I like the alliterative name) affect people going to see comedy gigs?

In honesty it is not the credit crunch but my going back to university which has changed my own financial fortunes. Usually I simply buy the tickets and damn the expense, using live shows as my own personal Louis XVI extravagances. In the future when historians look at my life, and they will, they will be amazed at the money I spent seeing comedians, especially when compared with money spent on clothes or food. I have been a fan of Robin Ince for several years, so it hurt to turn down the chance to see him. The £14 ticket plus the ancillary cost of getting there was just too much.

I have always thought of comedy as something that should be watched live. There is an atmosphere that enhances the experience, really good performers, like Ross Noble and Stewart Lee, are brilliant with a crowd. Daniel Kitson played charades with the audience when I last saw him. That could not be captured on a DVD. I do have a collection of live stand-up DVDs, often of shows I have already seen live, perhaps in an effort to recapture the magic of the event. However, if someone offered me tickets to a show or a DVD I would take the tickets every time. But it seems for the time being live comedy will be a very rare treat.

There is, however, the internet. There is a huge amount of clips of stand-up comedy, tracts of writing such as Richard Herring’s ongoing blog or Mark Steel’s Independent columns. The way I normally learn about new comedians is not from seeing them live, but from catching bits and pieces from Radio 4 or little things on television and the internet, so how much my lack of money will limit my exposure to new comedians is debatable.

But these ways of watching and listening to comedians do not involve me giving them any money. Being a comedian, for most of them anyway, does not seem to be a particularly well paying or glamorous career and I while I complain that I can’t see comedians, are comedians complaining they can no longer afford to be comedians.

Many of the funniest stand-ups do not get on television very often or play to huge audiences. By reducing the number of comedy shows I am seeing, am I contributing to the financial ruin of stand-up comedy? It would be safe to assume that other people will make similar decisions (although hopefully not all of them will decide to skip Robin Ince but spread this out over the whole plethora of comedy performers) and thus comedians will find it even harder to get by. Perhaps a bail-out from the government could be arranged? Maybe not.

Published: 11 Feb 2009