All 89 entries tagged Comedy

Show Me The Funny review

I wrote about episode one over here, and now in the spirit of Edinburgh, a preview of my second piece on the show. The real article will go up on the same site I just linked to on Monday, where it will cost twice as much. If it gets enough hits, you’ll be able to see the article on tour in the Autumn, either as an extended version or with a support act.

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I should admit that the reason I’m reviewing two episodes at once of ITV’s X-Factor-for-stand-up-comics show, is that I spent most of last week half delirious in bed with man-flu, barely able to string together a coherent thought, let alone a coherent sentence. Of course, that was less painful than having to sit through an episode of Show Me The Funny. Boom. Nailed it. Except… well after the atrocious first show I was all set to give the next few episodes a good slagging off, but ended up quite enjoying them.

Yes, episodes two and three of Show Me The Funny were interesting and entertaining. You’ll note I picked two very specific adjectives there. Interesting and entertaining. I didn’t, for example, use the word ‘funny’. Because they’re really, really not.

But we’ll get to that – like the show itself, I’m contractually obliged to spend the first half of this review on the tasks that the teams have to perform. While in the first episode they were doing completely random stuff around Liverpool, these two are more focused. Their audiences are an armed forces regiment, and 12-14 year-old school kids. The tasks are doing a bunch of ‘army stuff’ and creating and teaching a school lesson. The army stuff is basically making them suffer through physical exhaustion for our amusement. Which is fun enough, and it’s nice that the most unfit team eventually win, with everyone else having given up. The school lessons are less entertaining but interesting in a ‘fish-out-of-water’ sort of way.

And then to the stand-up. I criticised the show hugely in the first episode for not showing more of the actual routines. In that episode they were performing to a bunch of Liverpool women, who may be a bit scary, but are essentially regular people, just like the rest of us. We, the viewing public, should have found those routines funny.

But when you’re performing to a bunch of soldiers that have been drinking since 6pm… well you need a different approach. Because what is funny to a bunch of aggressive people on their eighth pint isn’t going to be funny to your average sober guy watching it on TV on a Monday night. That goes even more-so for the school-kids. The point of the show is for the comics to read the room and the crowd and write material that will suit that gig. And that generally won’t line up with the desires of the audience at home. So I get why we’re not being shown more of the sets. Because even in short clips, nine comics performing filthy jokes to a room of pissed-up people isn’t funny. You have to be there. And drunk.

So ironically we have a show called Show Me The Funny that isn’t funny. Not because the comics are rubbish, but because the format is genuinely not designed to be. But it’s interesting in that it demonstrates the process, it shows how material is developed, how different sort of rooms react to different things and so on. Seeing the army gig get increasingly raucous and scary as the night went on was genuinely interesting. As a documentary on the process of comedy, it’s quite good. It’d probably be even better if ITV acknowledged that’s what it is and edited it around that concept.

So what happens? Some people do well, others do badly, Rudi is more scared of school-kids than the army, and Prince Abdi and Cole Parker get sent home for not being very funny. And I get quite annoyed because a second person gets sent home for “not showing us who you are” when the entire concept of the show is to adapt and write new material to cater to a specific environment. I’m fairly sure all the comics have a good solid opening routine that sets up who they are and where they’re coming from, but they’re not allowed to use it.

Kate Copstick is also happy to describe Cole Parker as “shit” based on only having seen him do three five-minute bits of new material. Which gets me thinking that the whole concept of the show is backwards: they should have given the acts a normal gig, doing their best five minute routine at a comedy club, in week 1, then progressed to the more out-there gigs where they do new stuff. It’s a hugely unbalanced contest, because some comics can just write more quickly than others. Some are really good at riffing with a room and some aren’t. But equally, the slower writers often produce better material, and the ones that can’t riff can craft and refine exquisitely scripted routines over time. Which is fine, because it’s just a reality show and it’s never going to be balanced. But to describe someone as a “shit” comic in front of a huge TV audience when you haven’t even see their actual act is grossly unfair. I’d say it’s a horrible reputation for him to be straddled with, but frankly I think I’m the only person still watching this and I’d probably still book him.

Meanwhile, Rudi Lickwood is still somehow in the competition, despite being told-off in week 2 for doing old material when he’s meant to be doing new stuff, and then bottling it in week 3 and leaving the stage after only doing three of his five minutes. He’s another great comic that’s just entirely unsuited to this competition, but at least the others are trying.

Next week they’re doing a medical conference. This makes me happy, as it’s the first time they’re playing to a, shall we say, ‘sophisticated’ audience. Hopefully it’ll finally be a chance for the talented gag-writers to shine. Maybe there will even be some actual jokes.

Dean Love : 03 Aug 2011 21:15 |  Tags: Comedy TV |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Funny Women

Dean has been waiting to get home all day to play Portal 2, but it’s decrypting right now, which gives him a chance to rant briefly about something fucking awful

The Funny Woman comedy competition started taking entries today. And is charging £15 for the privilege.

Now. Pay-to-play is bad. It happens a lot in the US, but over here any attempts to bring it in have been swiftly rebuffed. I’m not going to go in to details, as I’d recommend Pear Shaped’s wonderful illustrated guide as background reading that explains exactly why it’s bad for the comic, the punter, and the industry as a whole. But when I first read about the entry charge for Funny Women I wasn’t too bothered. £15 wasn’t a huge amount, it’d maybe filter out the people that aren’t really serious about a comedy career and just want five minutes on stage to try it, it’ll help pay for a decent prize fund, and it’ll let them keep ticket prices low. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t like it, I could just see the argument in favour. I appreciate the competition does a lot to showcase quality female stand-ups in a world where they’re very much discriminated against, so if it’s necessary to charge a small fee to entrants to keep the competition going, I wasn’t going to get all that mad about it.

Some more details emerged today, that, frankly, threw a whole new light on the situation.

Detail number one: there is no prize fund. The winning prize is a management deal and tour, a DVD of your gig and a website. Taken one by one: if you win you’re supposedly the best new female comic in the country, so the management deal and tour should actually be profitable for the people providing it; making a DVD is a piece of piss and anyone with a digital camera and Windows Movie Maker can do it; and for the website, they don’t say which website you win, but it’s probably not a good one like bbc.co.uk or even a decent has-been like MySpace (more seriously, even getting a website done professionally shouldn’t cost more than a hundred quid or so). Basically, the whole thing can be done in-house so there’s no real expense on the prize fund. So where is the money going?

Detail number two: tickets for the shows cost around £10-£12. Now let’s all stop and have a chuckle at the fact that this means going to see a Funny Women heat costs £12, and for an extra £3 you can get up and do five minutes. Done? Okay, so that’s £12 then. For that you, as a punter, get to see a whole bunch of unpaid acts, with the whole thing held together by a paid professional MC. Some quick maths: assuming a conservative 50 tickets sold at £12, that’s £600 on the door. Now these MCs are pros, they’re good, but from what I’ve seen of the names so far, they’re not exactly £600 good.

A punter can, of course, for £12 can go see a full line up of three or four professional acts at the weekend. Said punter can get the same line-up mid-week for half of that. Our mythical punter, for a sixth of that price, can come to Reckless Comedy in Leamington Spa on a Monday night and also see a bunch of unpaid acts with a paid, professional headliner. Basically, if you’re charging £12 for a gig full of unpaid open spots and one professional, you’re already running something of a racket. I can only assume the logic goes that if you’re going to rip-off the punters, you should probably rip-off the acts by charging them to play too.

I’d say that if this really is all above board, just let us know exactly where the money is all going. Show your working. I’d love to know.

So that’s me wearing my promoter hat and explaining why that bit pisses me off, but from the perspective of just a regular comedy fan it’s really, really frustrating me.

“Women aren’t generally that funny” – I hear that a lot from friends that consider themselves comedy fans, from friends I know don’t have a sexist bone in their body, from female and male friends. It annoys me but I understand where it comes from: they went to a comedy night, there was one women on, she wasn’t as good as the men, and so a prejudice is formed. Why that happens is an entire other blog entry, but the only way to convince them otherwise is to take them to see some really funny female comics.

Cut to the Funny Women competition. They charge you £15, and guarantee you the chance to perform in a heat. Stop and think about that: anyone willing to pay can get stage time. There’s no filtering based on experience, or requests for references. So sure, you’ll get a lot of good female open spots that hate the idea of paying but see it as a necessary evil to enter such a high profile competition. But then you also get people that have never done comedy before, perhaps don’t even know that there are plenty of gigs out there that will give a new act a shot and not charge them for the privilege. Maybe they’ve always secretly wanted to be a comic, or maybe they just see £15 as a reasonable figure for a fun new experience and night out. Either way, as with so many things in life, you’re rarely that good your first time.

So here we have a promoter charging an audience £12 to come and see one professional act, and a bunch of people whose only guaranteed comedy credentials are that they had £15 in their wallet. Some of them will be good. Some of them will be shit. The majority of them will be so-so. At £12, a punter expects more than 3 or 4 good acts out of 12. They’ll feel ripped off. And they’ll leave the gig, perhaps a bit annoyed. But they won’t be thinking “wow, that promoter is rubbish, remind me never to go see shows that they put on again”. They’ll be thinking “wow, women comics are shit, remind me not to go see female comics again.”

Which is undermining the whole supposed point of Funny Women as an organisation.

Postscript: If you are about to turn your comedy competition in to a pay-to-play setup, and you want a sympathetic reaction, it’s probably best not to write an article called Turn Your Passion in to Profit a few months before. Just saying.

If anyone is reading this and thinking “yes, but it’s so hard to get stage time any other way” then e-mail me and I might be able to help you out.

Dean Love : 19 Apr 2011 21:03 |  Tags: Comedy |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

How to ruin a brilliant idea

Or: Why you should think it through

The Camden Crawl is an ace idea. Yes, it’s one of those two-day arts and music festivals lots of places have, where lots of different venues put on lots of different shows. But what it does differently is get one of the core components of a festival right: you pay once, £40 for a day ticket, and you see as much as you want. It takes all the pressure off, you feel like you’re part of a proper festival and not an unconnected series of events. Bloody brilliant.

Now one thing about it is, it runs a whole bunch of varied arty fringe stuff during the day. Theatre, comedy, dance, quizzes, all that stuff. But come 7pm this ends and the focus shifts over to music, and it’s also when the big-names acts are on. That’s fine, it’s a system that works, and in isolation it’s brilliant.

But someone spotted a gap in the market, and so this year The Comedy Crawl launches. It offers a whole bunch of brilliant comedy in the same area over seven venues from 7pm until midnight for a one-off fee. £20 gets you 5 hours of comedy, rather than the 2 hours you’d get for the same money from Jongleurs. And you can pick and choose your gigs. Again, in isolation, this is bloody brilliant.

The problem is, they’re two different events. Now were they competing events, that would make sense. But they’re quite hapilly cross-promoting each other and seem pretty friendly. Still, no problem, one can choose from an evening of great comedy, or a more expensive full day of great comedy and music.

Well maybe I just want the moon on a stick.

But I don’t live in London, and while it’s not far away, the money and time cost of the journey mean I want to get the most of out any trip. And as you probably know, I like me some comedy. I’d love to spend all day hanging around Camden watching live comedy in loads of different places. That’d be brilliant. It’d be like Edinburgh except a bit more conceited and a lot less expensive.

The problem is, to do that, it looks like I have to buy myself a Camden Crawl ticket, spend the day watching their comedy, then buy myself a Comedy Crawl ticket, and spend the evening watching their comedy, while basically throwing away the whole latter half of the Camden Crawl ticket. And that’s being optimistic, as with all the ‘big names’ of music on later in the evening, I’m sure a lot more than half the ticket price goes towards paying acts on during the night rather than their less famous friends on during the day.

I’d happily pay the full Camden Crawl ticket price, not see any bands, and just watch comedy all day. But I resent the idea that I’d have to pay £20 more than everyone else just to do that.

And it’s basically put me off going to either. By trying to do something extra for comedy fans, they’ve basically ruined it for comedy fans.

My solution? I’d have stuck a fiver on the Comedy Crawl ticket price and given that to the Camden Crawl folk in exchange for a Comedy Crawl wristband granting access to any Camden Crawl venue prior to 7pm. Then maybe have the Camden Crawl folk offer a combined ticket at a £5 premium over their price that gives access to the Comedy Crawl venues too.

Basically, I’d have thought it through from the perspective of someone who likes live comedy more than live music. But then I suppose there aren’t that many of them in and around Camden with it’s six million comedy clubs are there?

Dean Love : 29 Mar 2011 18:47 |  Tags: Comedy Festival Music |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

30–day Song Challenge – Day 1: Your Favourite Song

So this meme has been doing the rounds on Facebook, and while I don’t normally do this sort of thing, I figure I should as a) I’ve been slacking off on writing far too much of late, and b) I still need to better at writing about music.

Still, it’s taken about a month to finally get started, am slightly confused at who thought having “your favourite song” as the first one would be an easy one to start with. It’s like asking you to pick your favourite child. Or most hot woman. It varies based on mood, and I’d always feel guilty picking one song over all the rest.

So I cheated and looked at the most played song on my iPod, and it’s this:

Frank Turner – Love Ire & Song

It’s actually sort of appropriate as that one song, while I wouldn’t say it’s my ‘favourite’ per se, sums up a lot of what I love about music. Musically, it starts with a solo singer-songwriter on guitar playing a nice little folky melody, before bringing in the piano, then the drums, and the bass, and the electric guitar, until it’s a full on sing-along rock track. My musical tastes do generally swing between those two extremes: solo singer-songwriters to full on guitar-based rock. To get them both in one song is handy.

I also love the sheer usefulness of that when the song is performed live. When Frank Turner plays with a band, he’ll always do a solo section in the middle, where the band leave, and then you have the awkward pause as they come back on for the rest of the set. Not with this song! Now they slowly sneak back on throughout the track and it all flows together seamlessly. For some reason, I really like that.

Finally, the lyrics. It’s an angry song, but one about hope. It’s about trying to make a difference in the face of adversity, as what’s the worst that can happen if you try? It mixes a certain cynicism that I can certainly relate to with an optimism that I aspire to. It says that you can still be a cantankerous old bastard and try and make a difference without being a hypocrite. It appeals to two different sides of my personality, and offers a way to unify them. Which is handy.

Dean Love : 27 Mar 2011 19:41 |  Tags: Comedy Video |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Frankie Boyle, Doug Stanhope, Down's Syndrome, and the story that won't die.

First blog in ages, and rather than warm up with something easy, I am jumping right in the deep end to finally tackle offensiveness in comedy, Frankie Boyle, Doug Stanhope and will try and use a specific thing to make a general point. I hope it works.

Let’s start with putting the cards on the table. I think Frankie Boyle is alright. He’s funny and writes good jokes, though the quality of those jokes has been dropping the past few years and I’d argue he’s somewhat like the Coldplay of comedy: pretty good, but nowhere near as good as his popularity would suggest. Doug Stanhope is brilliant, a bonafide comedy legend, but live he can be awfully hit and miss. But on form you’ll rarely see anyone better.

So at some point last year, Frankie Boyle had an altercation with an audience member whose son had Down’s Syndrome. The whole thing is reported here and is well worth a read to get the background on this. The story ran and ran, Mark Watson offered a remarkably even handed look at it and eventually Doug Stanhope picked it up last week. I broadly agree with everything Stanhope says in that piece, with the exception of his ire being directed towards the woman in the audience.

Here’s the thing. You don’t have a right not to be offended. That applies to life in general, but for comedy shows in particular it has an interesting corollary. An audience member does not have the right to not be offended by a comedian. So it follows that a comedian does not have the right to expect audience members not to be offended. It’s important to point out that in this case, the woman didn’t heckle and didn’t complain about the joke at all initially. She got a bit uncomfortable but just sat there. Her husband asked if she was okay. Talking during a comedy show is bad, but a few words are not going to ruin it for everyone else. Nevertheless, Boyle descended on them to ask what was going on.

The situation: you’re doing jokes about Down’s Syndrome, a woman at the front is not laughing and looking increasingly upset. Her husband asks if she’s okay. If you take a second to consider that, you’ll figure out pretty quickly what is going on and leave it the fuck alone. Carry on with the set, get on with the show, you’ll be off that topic in a minute and she’ll be back to laughing like a drain. Frankie’s reaction was interesting. He seemed to realise it was an error of judgement to engage the woman, and he tries at first to get her back on side: “Ahh, but its all true isn’t it?” When that doesn’t work, he realises it’s better to lose one woman than the whole room and resorts back to “It’s my last tour, I don’t give a fuck.”

The crucial takeaway here: this was a situation that Boyle created. He could have just got on with it, he was the one that opted to make it an issue by drawing attention to it. And if the woman, after the show and having been mocked by Frankie, wanted to make her point more calmly and eloquently in a blog post, and at the same time comment on what she thought of the jokes then she is perfectly entitled to do so. That sort of debate is okay. It’s fine. It should be encouraged. If the papers pick it up, that’s also fine (necessity of accurate reporting notwithstanding). This is how it should work. She doesn’t have the right not to be offended. She doesn’t want that right. But Frankie Boyle doesn’t have the right to not have people point out why they don’t find some stuff funny. Someone heckling, someone actively disturbing the show because they are offended, that’s different. They’re trying to censor the comic, to say he’s not allowed to say what he’s saying, and to literally get him to stop. Someone taking quiet offense and explaining why they don’t find a joke funny when asked – perfectly fine.

The people that complained about Frankie Boyle’s Tramadol Nights TV show are different. The purpose of complaining about a TV show is to say “I don’t think this should be on TV”. Again, if you just want to post on your blog that it’s unfunny and offensive and say why, that’s fine. The minute you write to Channel 4 or OFCOM and say “you shouldn’t commission stuff like this” or “this sort of thing should be banned” you’re promoting censorship based on your personal take on what is and isn’t offensive. That’s not okay.

Having the debate is fine, trying to quash the debate is not.

And so to the wider point. Stanhope points out that most comedy is going to be offensive to someone, so you can’t plan your material around not offending people. I used to agree with this, but am not so sure now. I’d say instead that most comedy will upset someone. To a greater or lesser level, but I think a lot of what is labelled offense is actually upset.

There’s an argument often made in this debate that context matters. I’ve made it myself. It generally goes that it’s okay to joke about rape, as long as either the rapist or the comic on stage are the ‘victim’ of the joke. What isn’t okay is a joke where the rape victim is also the victim of the joke. It’s a fair moral argument when you’re discussing general values and being a good person and all that. I’m not sure it has any place in the reality of a comedy club.

I’ve never been raped. I was never sexually abused as a child. If I had been, I don’t think I’d find any joke about those topic funny, no matter who the victim was. Not because I’d be offended, but because the minute you mentioned that topic I’d be taken from enjoying a fun night out at a comedy club to recalling the worst and most harrowing moment of my life. That can’t be fun.

That’s not taking offense. It’s just a function of human psychology. Even if it’s the best written gag in the world, a rape victim isn’t going to laugh at a rape gag. They’re not prudes, they’re not offended, they just don’t want to fucking think about it. That, to me, seems perfectly reasonable.

It also raises the interesting question of what comics should do. It’s a scary, somewhat crippling idea to consider that doing that hilarious joke you wrote about rape might ruin someone’s night. And maybe context does come in to it. Not in terms of who the victim is or isn’t, but in terms of pure length. A one-liner about rape can be forgotten about as soon as the next gag starts. A one-minute long story is trickier, although if rape is only used in the punchline, and you move right on to something else then maybe it works. An extended five-minute routine about rape… well you’re definitely going to lose them. All speculation of course, and I realise I’m already on dodgy ground trying to speak for rape victims, but it’s an interesting thing to think about.

So to the final part of this thesis. Some things do actually offend, rather than upset people. But the opposite of funny is unfunny. The opposite of offensive is inoffensive. The opposite of funny is not offensive. Jokes can be offensive and funny at the same time. If you laugh at something you consider offensive then that’s okay. It’s because it was a well-written joke, not because you’re secretly a bigot.

There is of course, also an interesting flip-side to this for comics too. Just because people are laughing doesn’t mean what you said isn’t offensive. If Stanhope is right an there will always be someone that is offended, regardless of how funny a joke is, I’d counter that there will always be someone that will laugh, regardless of how offensive a joke is. “The rest of the audience laughed so it can’t be offensive” does not constitute a full defence. “It’s just a joke” is not a sufficient defence.

Comedy will upset people. Comedy will offend people. And comics need to own that idea. The one thing that drives me mad is comics that bill themselves as offensive, challenging and edgy, but then get all upset when someone actually gets offended, and say that they shouldn’t because they’re all just jokes. You can’t have it both ways.

For this debate to go anywhere we need to accept that some people get offended, and that this can’t be prevented, and instead of focusing on the odd individual case of a single person taking offense, actually consider the wider affects of the material. There will always be people that get upset or offended, let them have their say. But I think what is far more damaging is the more inoffensive stuff that casually re-enforces damaging and untrue stereotypes.

And so we come back to the original case of Frankie Boyle and Down’s Syndrome. See, what the mother in question was angry and upset about wasn’t that Frankie was poking fun at the sort of things her child did. It was that he was poking fun at the sort of things she didn’t do.

“Ahh, but its all true isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t.”

And so on that one night of the tour, the audience heard that in fact the basis of Boyle’s Down’s Syndrome jokes were faulty, that Down’s kids didn’t act like that, and in fact many led relatively normal lives in mainstream schools. But were you at any other show on that tour, you’d have no idea. The man on the stage tells you that’s how things are and you believe it.

That, to me, is where the danger is. Not in stuff made deliberately to offend, but that made to deliberately (or even accidentally out of ignorance) mislead. To quote and re-enforce untrue and damaging stereotypes just because they serve a gag.

But you’ll never read about that, of course, because Frankie Boyle just mocked the kid of a TV star.

Dean Love : 09 Feb 2011 23:03 |  Tags: Comedy |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Pissed off with Tim Minchin

I’m pretty shocked and upset to see that Tim Minchin’s song, White Wine in the Sun is to be featured on the Spirit of Christmas CD, with the proceeds going to The Salvation Army, a group with a strong Christian ethos.

That Minchin, one of our top skeptics and rationalists, would align himself with such an organisation is frankly sickening. People fought and died to protect his right to free speech, and he wastes it with this awful, soppy, conciliatory ballad. Minchin could have written a biting piano-rock satire on the modern-day commercialisation of Christmas, an RnB track that attacked those that only attended Church at Christmas (the twist is they’re still better than those that do it every week), or a beat-poem picking apart the entire story of Mary, Joseph and Jesus.

Instead Minchin tells us he’s looking forward to Christmas, despite it being all about God and stuff. He even uses the name Christmas instead of acting like a true skeptic and calling it Winterville. It’s here Minchin’s true hidden religious beliefs are outed, as far more words rhyme with Winterville than do with Christmas – this wasn’t a choice made out of rhymical necessity, but a sinister decision to embrace the birth of Christ.

Later in the song, Minchin talks about churches, claiming the hymns that they sing have nice chords. Perhaps they do, but only because those chords are used to brainwash the innocent and the ambivalent in to becoming full on God-squadders. In much the same way as the chords to Killing In The Name were exploited last Christmas to brainwash the people of the UK in to voting Tory (the original release of Killing In The Name was in 1992, the same year the Tories won a shocking and surprising victory in the polls. Proof).

Only a for a single three lines does Minchin bother to show his claimed skepticism, and they’re brushed under the carpet as he tells us instead how much he likes Christmas songs. Like this one. A cynical and subliminal attempt to get listeners of this album to buy more copies of its Christian-filled nonsense for their friends and family.

And to top it all off, the name of the song itself, and the main line of the chorus, Drinking White Wine in the Sun – Minchin may try and hide his theism under a veneer of white wine, but we all know he’s talking about Holy Communion and the consumption of wine that has been transubstantiated in to Jesus’ blood. He thinks we’re too dumb to notice, a clear sign of man who holds his fans in contempt.

This is frankly the biggest blow to the skepticism movement since Ben Goldacre announced he liked to eat christmas cake, and Minchin should be ashamed of himself. By associating himself with this CD he’s making a mockery of all of us proud, God-baiting fundamentalist atheists across the world.

I for one will be selling my tickets for his winter arena tour on Ebay, as now it looks like it’ll basically be him, an organ and hymns all night. No thanks grandad!

(Context )

Dean Love : 22 Nov 2010 18:29 |  Tags: Comedy |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

On comedy reviews

I was going to send this in to Chortle, but wasn’t happy with it and never got around to fixing it up. Too many ideas clashing together and I couldn’t find a solid argument to frame them around. Anyway, since the moment has past, I figured I’d stick it up here for the curious

Ed O’Meara wrote a fantastic and thought provoking article on critics in comedy, but I can’t help but think his ire was somewhat misdirected. The problems he highlights are genuine, but they’re not caused by the fact that we have comedy reviewers. They’re caused by the fact that we don’t have enough of them.

I was going to start this piece with something trite like: “If you think it’s tough making a living as a professional comic, spare a thought for the professional comedy critics”, but then I realised: there are none. Granted, there is work available in that field, especially in August, but I’d wager there’s not a single person making a living in this country from comedy reviewing alone. Sure, you can be an ‘arts’ writer for a national paper and cover comedy as part of that. You can do a bit of freelance for the local papers and the few websites that will actually pay for content. You can run your own comedy blog and try and make a few pennies off the ads. You could even set up and run your own comedy news, reviews and listings website, though someone else may have beaten you to it. But no-one is making a living purely from writing about comedy.

That alone cuts the quality of your average critic. Why spend years honing your knowledge and critical appreciation of comedy when the rewards are so tiny?

And a lack of reviewers inevitably leads to a lack of reviews. There are so few places that actually review comics at the club level that a single bad review, written on an off-night, can have dire consequences. It can be on the front page of Google results for the next five years. But that’s why we need more critics, so that review has another review right next to it, and hopefully another one too. The more reviews, the less chance of them all covering a brilliant comic on a bad night. Or a bad comic having a momentary flash of brilliance. The world without critics isn’t any better, incidentally. With the reliable sources gone, all the punter has to rely on is a badly worded rant someone posted on a comedy forum after they saw a 30-second YouTube video of the act.

Ed makes the great point that some of the best analysis of an act can come from more experienced comics. I’d agree entirely, it’s probably the best way for new comics to get constructive feedback. Unfortunately what works one-on-one won’t work for the punter. I wish there was a way to harness the immense critical faculties of our top comics. Alas this is still a fairly tight-knit industry, and for a comic to start posting his own reviews of other comics is pretty much tantamount to career suicide. That’s also, incidentally, why you won’t see many critics ‘showing the comedians how it’s done’.

A professional comedy review isn’t just an opinion, it’s an informed opinion. This means that sometimes the audience reaction is not the be-all and end-all for judging a performance. Most comics would agree that part of a critic’s job is to look past the conditions on the night. If the audience are being unduly disruptive, if not many people turned up, if there are tech problems, and so on. It’s perfectly possible to get a good review while having a bad gig, if the critic can see that the material and performance has merit. It’s a fairly common occurrence. The flip-side, of course, is that just because you ‘stormed it’ by doing 20 minutes of cock gags to an audience of stag and hen parties does not guarantee you a good write-up. In both cases it is a factor: how you succeed or fail in working a room and reacting to the unexpected matters, but it’s far from the only criteria on which a critic will judge.

Still, it would be nice to see punters place a bit less emphasis on reviews and star-ratings. Turn them in to a guiding hand rather than the make-or-break of a show. One way to do that is to offer more and varied reviews, but another might be for shows to stop shouting quite so loudly on their publicity the second they get a four or five star review.

Dean Love : 21 Nov 2010 16:20 |  Tags: Comedy |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

On Jenny Eclair and responsibility

Some things annoy me disproportionately.

A few weeks ago a I had a really shit weekend. And on the Monday, I had a comedy show to run and MC. The last thing I wanted to do was get up on stage and be all nice and jolly and try and make a room of people laugh. I contemplated pulling the gig. For about three seconds. Then realised that would make me a cunt.

‘The show must go on’. It’s old cliche, but for some reason it’s one I believe in with a level of fervour. Perhaps it’s just general politeness. If you advertise a show and then pull it, you’re inconveniencing a bunch of people who had planned to go to that show. You’re ruined their plans for the night. If nothing else it’s rude. In my case it was probably just thirty or so people, most of whom wouldn’t have really minded. But still, the principle of the thing stands. Especially if you’re then going to go and ask them to come to future shows.

It’s a principle that I feel I apply fairly. Yes, I used it to mock Oasis when Liam cancelled gigs because he felt like being a dick. But I also dragged my favourite band, James, over the coals when they cancelled a show due to the singer having hurt his back and being told he couldn’t dance. Everyone else seemed to think that was perfectly reasonable. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t just get him a chair. In that case the crowd would have been robbed of the delight of singer Tim Booth’s insane dance moves, but when it comes down to it, he’s not Bez. His job is to sing, not to dance, and he was perfectly capable of doing that.

Still, that was a borderline case. And obviously there are circumstances where pulling the show is the only option: if the performer is genuinely too ill to perform then not much can be done about it. Unless you’re Frank Turner when you just perform anyway before running backstage, throwing up and fainting two songs before the end, then apologise profusely and try and sort out free tickets for a future gig for people.

Some cases though, aren’t borderline at all. If you’ve been avoiding it (good for you) you won’t be aware that Jenny Eclair has joined the cast of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. Even if you are, there’s a good chance that what you don’t know is that she cancelled 11 tour dates, including one on the afternoon of the gig itself, in order to get on the show. So what happened? It’s hard to say exactly as none of what she’s said about it makes any sense, but it seems she was on a list of eight reserves, who were flown over to Australia as potential replacements.

Now while I’m no fan of the show, I can see why she’d want to do it. It’s a big profile booster. It’ll help her sell more tickets for the rest of the tour. But the show is about two weeks long. Even if you’re a reserve, it can’t be hard to just avoid booking anything else in on those weeks. She basically knew there was a chance she couldn’t do the shows, but let the promoters and her audience continue to think she would until the day of the first show. Which frankly is hugely unprofessional and shows a disgusting level of contempt for her fans and the venues that booked her.

Still, I’d have let it pass. I’d have shut up because other people do this sort of thing all the time and why make a big deal of it. Then I read the official statement her spokesperson gave: “Jenny apologises profusely to all her followers and ticket holders who will be were planning to see her. She has never cancelled a live show before in over 20 years of performing and hopes her fans appreciate these are very exceptional, unexpected circumstances and looks forward to seeing everyone again very soon.” Sounds fairly reasonable, let’s just re-read a bit of that “exceptional, unexpected circumstances”... oh no, my mistake, it’s a bare-faced lie. If you’re booked as a reserve on a reality TV show, it’s not ‘unexpected’ if you’re then asked to go on it. It’s… what’s the word? “expected”. That’s it. Lovely of them to just insult the intelligence of her fans there.

My advice? If you’re a theatre comedy booker, and thinking of booking Jenny Eclair, check that the date doesn’t clash with any celebrity reality TV shows, as there’s a good chance that the producers of said show won’t actually want her to be on it but might end up asking her to do it if someone more famous drops out.

Dean would also like to point out that no, he didn’t have tickets for one of the cancelled shows, and you’re wrong, he really does rate Jenny Eclair as a comic

Dean Love : 18 Nov 2010 20:41 |  Tags: Comedy TV |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Frisky and Mannish, Warwick Arts Centre, 31st October

They lost me in the first ten minutes.

There’s something in comedy you have to do when playing clubs, or even the smaller rooms in Edinburgh. I call it establishing audience “buy-in”. Basically, you need to move the minds of the crowd from being a passive observer, asking themselves “will they be funny” to someone invested in the performance, by establishing rapport, getting them involved and re-framing their mindset so they’re thinking “this is funny, I’ll enjoy it”.

Frisky and Mannish have established a pretty good way of doing this: they do a bit of light audience interaction, some light mocking (which also establishes authority, important for managing more unruly crowds) and then they get everyone standing up and dancing. It’s good technique. Alas what works in other contexts is entirely inappropriate for dealing with a small, mostly sober crowd on a Sunday night in an arts centre.

See, when you’re playing a venue off the beaten track (Warwick University campus) you can be fairly sure that everyone their made the conscious decision to go and see you. It’s hugely unlikely to have been a spur of the moment thing, they’ve probably done some research, figured it’s something they’ll like, and so gone along. They’ve bought in already. Or at least they had, until you made them get up and dance.

Since the preceding opening number was decent but not brilliant, in the first ten minutes Frisky and Mannish basically throw out all the good will the audience came in to the show with. It’s to their credit, then, that by the end of the first half they’ve already won us all back around, to the point that one can’t help but wonder if they’re bored by everyone loving them and tanked the start on purpose to make it more interesting.

That overly rambling introduction hides the fact that Frisky and Mannish are a very difficult act to describe, and even more difficult to analyse. There are generally two types of musical comedy: the one where you write your own original comedy songs, and the type where you parody existing songs, generally by changing the lyrics. Except there’s barely a single original song in the whole show, nor do they ever change any lyrics to existing ones. Instead they draw comedy out from the music itself, playing with styles and forms to create something hilarious. The only comparison that I can think of is Bill Bailey. And that’s a ridiculous comparison as they’re nothing alike: Bailey’s deer-in-headlights confused-hippy performance style couldn’t be further from Frisky and Mannish’s assured self-confident delivery. But at a very high level, that notion of finding humour in music, rather than just ‘being funny with music’ is something they have in common.

And so they offer a wonderful couple of hours of musical manipulation. Noel Coward and Lily Allen sing each others songs. They explain how horror is the over-riding genre in pop music by showing just how sinister some songs become when done in a minor key. They entirely deconstruct Florence from Florence and the Machine beautifully. And when you least expect it, they’ll do a dance routine to B*Witched.

I can’t urge people to go and see this show enough really. It’s not for everyone. Indeed, watching it I was consciously aware that I had certain friends who would enjoy it a lot more than I did. But that’s down to my lack of knowledge of most music from the past ten years. Indeed, one could argue that musos would probably get more out of it than your average comedy fan. But for that average comedy fan it’s also a revelation, as it shows a due doing something that feels original, which is such a rarity in today’s comedy scene that it should be embraced whole-heartedly.

Dean Love : 15 Nov 2010 02:13 |  Tags: Comedy Music |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

On comedy promoters

Sometimes you read something that just makes you angry. So it was with Wend Smith’s amazing article on Chortle last week.

When I read the opening I thought that this was going to be one of those pieces that both annoyed me and made me feel a bit guilty. I like to think I’m something of a feminist, but I’m not the sort that will deny their own sexuality just to prove it. Obviously someone physically grabbing a woman at a club or on public transport is wrong. Equally it’s pretty bad shout sexual remarks at a woman you don’t know in public. But then some people always take the argument too far and start saying that even checking out a woman wearing a low-cut top in public is just as bad as the rest. And while you can’t argue the point that being looked at in that way makes some women uncomfortable, at some point one’s right to wear what they want has to be measured against one’s right to look in whatever direction they want.

So I thought it would be with this article. I imagined that it’d highlight the shocking truth that some promoters book female acts based on their looks, and after doing so they flirt with them. Obviously a promoter shouldn’t be book acts based on anything other than comedic ability, but to assume it doesn’t happen is naive.

Luckily the one night I run has a pretty open booking policy, with a mandate to find stage time for anyone that wants a chance, regardless of level. So it’s never been a call I’ve had to make. But yes, lots of promoters are sad lonely men approaching middle-age (I count myself in that) and might well book a young female comic based on her looks in the pathetic hope they might get lucky. I’d like to think it’s not something I’d ever do, but I can certainly imagine not living up to that hope. So I expected to mostly be made to feel uncomfortable by the article and find myself disagreeing with it in parts. Then I read through it.

Bloody hell.

Go read it, but if you can’t be bothered, a few quotes:

“receiving communication from a middle-aged man using unsavoury language based entirely on my appearance, my gender and my sexuality is somewhat hard to swallow.”

“I have been told by one promoter that he ‘must be in love with [me] as [he] is willing to offer more work’.”

I’ve talked before about the backwards relationship between promotors and open spots. Specifically that, as far as I’m concerned, the open spots are doing me a favour by performing at my gig, and I feel awful that most of the time I don’t have the budget to even buy them a drink. Hell, I feel too guilty to even accept drinks from open spots when they offer.

So the idea that a promoter wouldn’t just book an act based on her looks, but then proceed to pretty much tell her this and make a point of it just boggles my mind. In an ideal world, it shouldn’t happen in the first place. Gender and appearance shouldn’t be part of a booking policy. We don’t live in an ideal world, but we do live in a world where a degree of basic human decency is expected, which surely should include not sexually harassing your open spots.

In an industry that’s worked hard to shed the aggressive, laddish image that’s been built up around it, it’s depressing to see that parts of it are stuck in the 1940s.

Dean Love : 14 Nov 2010 18:03 |  Tags: Comedy |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem