About

Notes on small-room comedy, written from the promoter's side as much as the performer's.

Empty theatre seats — The room before anyone arrives — where most of the decisions get made.

There is a lot of advice available about how to be funny and very little about the conditions in which being funny is possible. These pages are about the conditions: rooms, running orders, recordings and the slow process of turning an idea into five minutes that work anywhere.

The perspective is local and small-scale — pub rooms, arts centres, nights run by people with day jobs. Anyone working at club or festival level will find some of this beside the point.

Nothing here is sponsored, no venue is promoted and no course is being sold. Corrections and disagreements from people running their own nights are the main reason these pages have changed.

Several of these pages have been rewritten after nights that went badly, which is the only reliable way any of it gets learned. Where the advice sounds firm, it is firm because the alternative was tried first.