Don't turn into Keith Chegwin!

Dave Cohen suggests that stand-ups should learn to feckin' write...

Stand-up comedy is probably the country’s fastest growth industry – maybe the only growth job at the moment apart from bailiff, census taker and unemployment officer. It’s been popular for 20 years or more but in recent years the rise has been exponential. Possibly dating from the arrival of Peter Kay as a stadium-filling TV star, the stand-up circuit has grown into something closer to rock music in the 70s than the vaudeville, folk and working men’s club traditions where it originated.

There are now dozens of courses teaching wannabes how to become stand-ups. This is not surprising, since there are now hundreds more wannabe stand-ups. People have seen posters of John Bishop and Michael McIntyre and Russell Howard smiling down at them from billboards and bus stops, and have been wondering ‘how difficult can it be’?

Stand-up courses have been around for ages. They serve a valuable purpose for people who genuinely want to give it a try, offering them a supportive environment in which to prepare for their first gigs. In my newly revived performing career I spent a lot of time at the just-starting-out end of the circuit, and am constantly impressed at the confidence, warmth and energy of performers who’ve only been going for a few weeks or months.

What soon becomes clear though is the dearth of original material. This is not too surprising – however skilled you may be as a performer, it can take years to find a comic voice, and the material to suit it. Strong material is probably the least important requirement for someone starting out.

The London Comedy Writers Festival takes place next month. If you’re a comedian reading this, you may notice there’s hardly anything about stand-up on the timetable, and conclude that the festival is not for you.

Well, you’re wrong. If you want to enjoy a long career in comedy you’d better learn to bloody well write, right? You may be able to bring an audience to its knees merely by reciting the telephone directory but you won’t get much further than Abbot before you’re going to have to find some material or move to Yellow Pages (where, coincidentally, you may also only get so far as Abbot).

For many performers, once they have a decent 20 minute set and a career, they lose the impetus to create new material. Especially as these days there are more people out there writing good stuff, and it’s getting harder to nail the gag-snatchers. Cheggers and his light-fingered apologist mates have not been dissuaded from joke stealing by a few angry words from stand-ups. And aspiring sitcom performer will have noted that every gag spoken on Mrs Brown’s Boys pre-dates the 21st century.

Recently I spoke to Jane Berthoud, the head of in-house radio comedy at the BBC, and she passionately felt that many stand-ups simply aren’t generating enough material to appear regularly on radio.

Stand-ups are understandably protective of their own material, especially in the current climate of blatant thievery. I’ve written here before that as long as the copyright laws fail to cover one-liners, unfortunately the only way to protect your material is to keep writing more. But It’s amazing how easily one forgets the basics, or at least shoves them to one side, when working day-to-day at the comedy coal face.

There are various books which can help you write more, most recently former stand-up Sally Holloway’s Serious Guide To Joke Writing. I take issue with the review of that book on this website: yes it’s not always hilarious all the way through, books and articles about writing comedy rarely are, but I thought it was extremely informative, and after trying out some of Sally’s methods I instantly came up with a few more jokes on a subject which I thought I’d exhausted.

You may, as a stand-up, have already become aware of how difficult it is to create new material that you can effortlessly put into your set. But there are plenty of comedy writers out there willing to work with you, and help you create more material.

There’s an occasional feeling of mistrust between writers and performers, and the relationship between writer and performer can be complex. In shows I have worked on where the jobs were separate, the writers tended to bitch about the performers refusing to do their brilliant jokes. What writers don’t always understand is that even if you have a brilliant joke, it might take three or four attempts to make it work properly on stage, and in an audience sitcom or sketch show the performer only gets one go.

Similarly performers can be very distrustful of writers – how can writers know a joke is funny if they’ve never performed in front of an audience? Sometimes as a comic you have to trust that the writer has enough experience to have a rough idea of which gags may work better than others.

But there really is no shame for stand-ups in working with writers. If that was the case why else would even the prolific writer-performers like Jack Dee, Lee Mack and Harry Hill be completely at ease about employing them on their TV shows?

You may be happy simply doing stand-up. You may never want to do any other kind of comedy. You may feel you can build a TV or radio comedy persona around your stand-up alone. Even then, I suggest you look at the Comedy Writers Festival programme and see what interests and inspires you. You may still decide there’s nothing of interest there. In which case, you may as well sign up for Professor Chegwin’s School For Comedy Writing.