Nobody said it would be easy...

Ashley Frieze calls for new acts to take a reality check

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s hard to become a stand-up comedian. It requires learning performance and writing skills, and it also needs you to muscle in on a comedy scene, which has never heard of you, and will make you prove yourself time and time again until you are somehow established. Everyone progresses at their own rate, with regular failures and occasional moments of hope, pursuing a dream which can become horribly linked to their self-esteem. In the words of Coldplay, nobody said it was easy.

We should expect various people, just starting out in comedy, to feel like they’re not being given the space they need to spread their wings. Thus a man called Struan Logan, who cannot seem to get a gig for nearly four months in Scotland, a country about to play host to the world’s biggest comedy festival, wrote an article for Chortle that contained a series of assertions and recommendations concerning the business he intends to get into during his summer break from university. I wish Struan all the best in his endeavours, but would like to address his misconceptions about the world he’s entering.

So, why would it be a bad thing, to set up a new club in a venue not known for comedy to help make more room for new comedians? The answer is simple. Comedians don’t just need venues, they need audiences, good audiences who will treat what they do with respect. Audiences don’t need new comedians, they need a good night out. How do the two come together? In general, you establish a good night out where new comedians can be included.

This takes a unique combination of good venue, good clientele, excellent promotion, and suitable acts to mix into an evening’s entertainment. Comedians also need to learn the ropes by participating in an event where they can see an experienced act show how it’s done. Just sticking a microphone in the corner and hoping for the best isn’t going to help anyone. To answer the question, we build comedy audiences in venues that will work for comedy, and then good things happen, so it MIGHT be a bad thing to set up a new club in a new venue, if you did it badly.

Our correspondent also feels dejected by the number of ignored emails. This is normal. People ignore my emails all the time. Promoters receive hundreds of emails and can’t always reply to every one. Phone calls are harder to ignore, and chatting to promoters at existing gigs is even more convincing. In short, this is a very competitive business, and you have to work your way in, with all the tricks of social networking you can muster, including doing it in person.

Did Michael McIntyre really fail to get the breaks he deserved? Is his highly popular TV programme a new talent night that just happens to be on the telly? No. Whatever you think of McIntyre, he’s a master of his craft who worked hard, and did very well in established comedy clubs before his TV break. Being on the TV is not every comedian’s dream, and not all live comedy can work either on TV or on those crazy arena tours that the big name comedians find themselves with.

McIntyre’s show has helped to build audiences for a few acts, but hasn’t changed the face of British comedy. The likes of Kevin Bridges, Sarah Millican and Mick Ferry, for example, had already proved themselves in regular comedy clubs and could have been considered successful before their TV appearance.

I always worry when a new act mentions Bill Hicks as a role model, especially when that act thinks that the internet is the only way to find out about him. I guess Mr Hicks’ CDs, which were prevalent during his lifetime, in a way that the internet was not, passed our correspondent by. I suppose the surreal, observational, polemic, and just plain uplifting aspects of over a hundred of our top UK comedians also failed to hit the radar of this newbie who believes he discovered through Hicks alone that there’s more to comedy than just jokes. Let’s hope that his ‘good, clever and original ten minutes’ of untried material is also, at least to some extent, funny.

I’m fascinated by the contradictory assertions that ‘with the internet, raw talent is always easier to find’ and ‘capitalism will find a way to suppress these people’. One of the beauties of the internet is that anyone can publish themselves and find their audience. I’m sure Bo Burnham has no regrets about his efforts to become a YouTube phenomenon, especially given that this led to a commercial success.

Capitalism can enhance comedy with the right promotion, but is, by its nature, selective. This probably means that a lot of great comedy is being lost in the melee of things which are not being promoted, which means that finding it on the internet is actually not as easy as all that. If I had a pound for every time I’ve seen an amazing YouTube clip from an independent comedy group, with only a handful of views, I’d spend those pounds on publicising my own ignored YouTube clips. In short, this is a fickle business which doesn’t give out popularity on request.

I don’t think I’ve met many new comedians whose goals are to do comedy by numbers, emulate a well-known act, and then count the cash. Comedy is, for most of its new practitioners, a vocation, a chance to share a comic vision and a world vision, and something of great importance. Sure, people often start out with fairly ham-fisted techniques for raising a laugh, but please, to quote the article I’ve been dissecting, let’s give the newbies a chance, people.

However, I can’t disagree strongly enough with the parting words of our correspondent. ‘If we’re lucky comedy might come into more bars throughout the UK and give a chance for many more people to dabble into it.’ I’m not sure whose good fortune it would be if we built a comedy business full of dabblers. The UK comedy audience would benefit most from a diverse range of comic offerings, and would be sustained by well-run venues with excellent line-ups that both showcase new talent and give newbies a chance to see how it’s done by the pros.

It’s tough to get into stand-up. It’s tougher still to stick your head above the parapet before you’re established. Good luck Struan and good luck to anyone considering getting into this business. Be strong, be committed, but please don’t dabble.