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The online presence for Scenes from Communal Living (improv show) is up and running.

It should be hard

Kate Smurfwaite, a friend who is a good, smart and passionate comic, maintains that success in comedy is worthwhile because it is takes application and passion and even then not everyone will succeed.

I'm reminded of the first year lecture in logic that discussed necessary and sufficient conditions. Adapting the basic idea to my argument: -

'Talent' is a necessary condition for success in this field but it certainly isn't sufficient on its own; you also need 'dogged determination'

The reverse statement is equally true: -

'Dogged determination' is a necessary condition for success in this field but it certainly isn't sufficient on its own; you also need 'talent'

Every successful person I know would understand this instinctively. My quarrel is with those who argue that 'luck' is a necessary condition for success. How can you genuinely pursue a goal if you have a heartfelt belief that success will require some entirely random, external event to occur some time in the future?

Noses pressed up against the glass

The UK comedy scene is much exercised by a slanging match on chortle.co.uk (the industry website). The nub of the issue is that a comic, who I would describe as no further than midway up the food chain, has taken issue with the Edinburgh Free Fringe.

His criticism is little more than a rehashing of the reasoning that if a market is flooded by cheap (or in this case free) product then the consumer gets dangerously confused as price no longer functions as an indicator of quality. The argument is a sort of weird take on Gresham's Law; that cheap / bad comedy will drive the good stuff out of circulation.

There is no shortage of responses accusing the writer of a badly disguised ulterior motive: he is somehow promoting his ticketed show. I don't really understand this accusation as (a) he's only talking to the industry, but also (b) he's just pissing everyone off anyway.

This year I'm directly involved in two Free Fringe shows and two ticketed shows so obviously I think that there is a place and a role for both. The genuine and incontrovertible benefit of the Free Fringe is that it affords Edinburgh locals easy access to the festival that takes over their city for a month every year. Tickets for a nighttime show start at £8 for a one hour performance. A couple seeing three hours of comedy is paying at least £50 before they've even made it to the bar.

The Edinburgh Festival is one of the truly great events on the British cultural calendar. It's fun and funny and wonderful and sexy and cool. To have it go on around you in your home town but to feel uninvited would be terrible.

Earning the right...

Because every comedy circuit in the world is already heavily populated by comics of exactly his background, every new white middle class male comic with a degree in the Humanities has the same concern: how to stand out from the crowd?

I think that the reason why newer (usually younger and always male) comics make extreme on-stage choices is the belief that a stand-up comedy career is not so much a craft as a lottery. There is a sense that 'minority' acts (women, non-whites, comics with disabilities and so on) receive additional attention and therefore are afforded opportunities that the white male comics in question are denied. The logic goes something like this: -

Of course I've got what it takes to make it as a comic. My real problem is that because I'm new I'm not getting to perform in the big 'comedy literate' rooms where they'll get my stuff. Female and ethnic acts with much less talent than me get to play those rooms just because they're female / ethnic.

What angle will get me there?

In the four or so years that I've been on the UK circuit I've seen new comics transcend the imagined gamut of responses to this challenge with hypnotic yet predictably disastrous results. Through the cracks of my fingers I've watched everything from highly offensive, over-the-top racism to cod interpretative dance and from truly tragic costuming to deep expositions of vaguely traumatic personal histories without so much as a hint of a punchline in five long minutes of material.

Of course this is nothing more than the old marketing issue of Unique Selling Proposition (USP) writ large. But marketers know (or at least they should) that the USP is only the beginning of the conversation. As well as being seen as 'different', the market still has to see you as 'worthwhile' and that's where the craft comes in. Any comic who watches Roy Chubby Brown and sees only the swearing or who uses the fact that Eddie Izzard frocks up as the explanation for his success is in willful denial about the craft that all good comics bring to the stage every night.

We have to earn the right to take up the audience's time.

A perfect fit

Last night I had an excited call from a friend who is diving headlong into a business opportunity that she claims is 'a perfect fit'.

What she can offer in time and skills is exactly what her prospective partner needs and there is a quid pro quo in terms of opportunity and lifestyle. The plan involves her relocating to the country, which is great because she's looking for a 'sea change' and she's already found someone to rent her house. She wants to believe that nothing could be simpler.

And that's the problem: there are few 'perfect fits' in life.

No adult should believe that such synchronicity is a naturally occurring phenomenon any more than we should believe that the machine will work right out of the box.

Meetings 2

The meeting as existential crisis

Commit publicly

There are all sorts of sites on the web that focus on the broad subject of Getting Things Done ('GTD').

Some have a technological bias whilst others are more philosophical but somewhere in each of them will be a section on goal-setting and the need to 'commit publicly'. There's no more to this than the observation that we 're more likely to reach a goal once we've announced it to the world. Stand-up comedy requires a radical public commitment. If it's just some scribbled notes hidden away in a desk drawer then it's yet to exist. Like most worthwhile things in life you can really only learn how to do it after you've started.

There's a quote I love from the English jazz musician George Melly. A friend had been offered the position of restaurant reviewer for a London newspaper but worried that as he knew nothing whatsoever about food he was grossly unqualified. Melly's reply: -

By the time they find out that you know nothing about it, you will know something about it.

A brand by any other name...

The results of recent elections for UK local government and European Parliament have been announced and, as expected, Gordon Brown's Labour Party has done dreadfully. This morning the commentariat has been banging on about: -

What this means for the Labour Party brand

Of course what they really mean is: -

What this means for the Labour Party

The inclusion of the word adds nothing to the sentence and is therefore rendered meaningless.

I'm going to have to stop using 'brand' as a coverall term for 'positive presence' in a marketplace / psychological space / whatever.

Meetings

One of the advantages of the Headcount: 1 model is that because I charge what I like for my time I don't get invited to many meetings. At least not to many that I don't want to go to.

In a recent post Seth Godin describes meetings as functioning as a 'pressure release valve' in joint venture scenarios. This is a perfect description of how things worked when I had a business partner. Although we didn't even live in the same city we'd still both store up all our frustrations until we were alone in the meeting room and then we'd just let rip. We were even self-aware enough to recognise that the angst we each felt ahead of these meetings was making us needlessly unhappy yet for years we persisted in having them.

Years ago I read a piece about David Geffen in which he insisted that no face-to-face meeting go longer than 23 minutes*. There was an extensive rationale behind this that I remember seeing as sound if a little extreme. Nowadays I couldn't agree more. 23 minutes is about right for any meeting other than scriptwriting**.

* Can anyone can refer me to this? I can't track it down anywhere

** Training sessions, marketing workshops and rehearsals aren't 'meetings' per se. They have a specific purpose and should be run by a single trainer, facilitator or theatrical director

Dreaming spires

Last night I ran a workshop for the Oxford Imps, the university's improv troupe. The session was held at beautiful Magdalen College and the guided tour of the grounds beforehand was an unquantifiable bonus.

A theatrical 'workshop' is a strange beast; not quite a rehearsal and not a part of a progression of classes. It should not be positioned as remedial and neither should it seek to alter the artistic DNA of the group in question. I find that such sessions work best by piquing the interest of the individual performer rather than speaking to the wider group. Anything more usually falls prey to overreach.

The session turned out to be a strange confluence of my two worlds. Whilst the content was obviously 'comedy', as the Artistic Director invited me seemingly with no more than partial consultation with the wider group, the context was decidedly 'corporate'.

I've wandered into enough corporate training rooms in enough places to know the unspoken question forming in the collective mind: -

Why exactly am I here?

Neither the 'arty' nature of the subject or the youth and relative inexperience of the participants absolved me of the need to answer this. Throughout the session I found we lost impetus unless I kept restating that our aim was personal development and not a wholesale, group-wide step change.

So no different in attitude from how I would approach any sales or marketing team training.

Collaborations v. Partnerships

I no longer have a business partner in any true sense of the term.

The IP on which my consulting work is based is shared with my ex-partner in New Zealand. And right now I have a number of collaborators in both spheres of my world (consulting and comedy), especially in comedy in the lead-up to the Edinburgh Fringe.

The truism is that a functioning commercial partnership is like a marriage. It takes communication and shared values and an acceptance that at different times partners will make different contributions to the enterprise but also require different things from it. It's all about managing each other over the long-haul.

My collaborations work best when they are focused and finite. X project will be completed by Y date for Z reward. I find that enthusiasm and commitment to the cause are more important than any broader alignment of personal goals: -

We don't all have to get the same thing out of the project, just as long as each of us get what we wanted

At the conclusion to a successful project there's often a temptation to morph the relationship into a partnership. At 42 I'd rather have a sequence of wonderful collaborations where nothing is assumed at the beginning of each new adventure.

Headcount: 1

Monday's post prompted a response questioning the wisdom of ever going into business with friends and I couldn't agree more.

I would make a distinction between short-term collaborations and open-ended partnerships. Twice I've been in serious partnerships with friends and neither ended well. In one we consciously downgraded the friendship to keep the business going. In the other case neither business nor friendship survived.

Hence the title of this Blog.

Degrees of difficulty

Most small businesses fail because they should.

We spent the Bank Holiday Weekend with a couple who live outside London. She had recently invested in an (existing) online fashion business owned by a friend. That was a few months ago. Money is unaccounted for. Cheques remain at best uncashed at worst deposited in the 'wrong' place. Accountants unmet. No clear understanding of roles, responsibilities or even equity stakes. That sinking feeling that this is all going to end in tears.

Most small businesses fail because they should.

A three-step plan

I was asked about life plans. Put simply, mine has three steps: -

1. Make money
2. Tell stories
3. Make money telling stories

In Toronto

I am in Toronto for a few day's consulting work. I've visited about half a dozen times over the last few years and I've always enjoyed coming here. A big part of that enjoyment is due to knowing people on the local improv scene.

When I travel I make an effort to gig wherever I can. Not only is it good for the bragging rights, it makes me question the 'comedy assumptions' that naturally build up when you only perform to one sort of audience, even if that audience is as vibrant and varied as London.

I didn't get on stage this trip but instead hung out with improvisers, some of whom I've known for years and some I was meeting for the first time. I gave myself the minor goal of checking out small theatres to see if I might stage a Canadian iteration of Scenes from Communal Living in 2010 but really it was as much about hanging out as anything else.

A commonplace observation that I've made before is that because improv is a necessarily collaborative craft, improvisers tend to have more social skills than stand-ups. I doubt that the Toronto stand-up comedy tribe would be anywhere near as welcoming of a foreign producer in town to set up a show.

Five quid comedy

A couple of posts ago I aluded to the comedy staple of drawing attention to the (low) cost of a show as a way for a compeer (MC) to get a cheap laugh. Typically the exchange goes as follows: -

MC: So mate, you're here with your girlfriend?
Punter: That's right
MC: Been going out long?
Punter: About a year*
MC: Well, you're really keeping the romance alive if your idea of a Friday night out is a five quid comedy night in a dingy room above a pub

(cue: audience laugh)

Obviously the joke is damaging to the night's 'brand' as it forces everyone in the audience to ask just why they are where they are on a Friday night. This means that the comics have to work that much harder to remove the question from the collective mind.

The above exchange occurred verbatim at last Friday night's gig in Soho. But the acts proved to be worth much more than £5 and the audience went away happy.

On Saturday night I did an improv set as part of the amazing Midnight Matinee series at the Tristan Bates Theater.

The two gigs are no more than 200m apart and both were £5 entry.

Saturday night's compeer made the audience complicit in the night's proceedings. Here we were in the middle of Soho starting a show at midnight; just when everyone else is closing up shop. Your five pounds didn't just just get you the promise of entertainment, it got you one-night-only membership of a very exclusive club.

Pricing is only a signal in the marketplace until the punter takes his seat.

* This response can be anything from "This is our first date" to "Ten years" and the joke still 'works' (from the MC's perspective)

Balancing act

Yesterday I drove to Brighton to do an unpaid ten-minute spot. It was about a five hour round trip with the justification that I can now add performed at the Brighton Fringe Festival to my biog.

All seven acts on the bill were men aged between 21 and 45. The gender imbalance in stand-up comedy is an endless debate that got a recent refueling by Germaine Greer's tremendous exercise in hole-digging.

All of this is preamble to an industry-specific joke that came to me on the drive home: -

What do you call a comedy night with three or more women in the line-up?

A benefit night for breast cancer

Boom. Tish.

What it says on the tin

I wrote a post a few days ago arguing of the need for a seller of services (in this case drama classes) to manage the expectation of the buyer. Suzie, who blogs about cooking but knows about many things, disagreed in comments.

The essence of her argument was caveat emptor ('let the buyer beware') and in a strict legal sense she is 100% correct. The marketer in me despairs.

To build a brand you have to do what you say you do

Any recourse to caveat emptor is a brand damaged. Every comic who grabs a cheap laugh with a line like "What did you expect for five quid?" weakens his own brand and that of the entire night.

So much has been written about 'delighting customers' and 'exceeding expectations' and so on but at the heart of it is this: -

If you sell me X and I get X+Y then I should be delighted

If you sell me X but give me Y then let's hope you get lucky

Cut-through

In the career of every successful comic there is a tipping point after which the inclusion of his name on a bill creates additional demand for the show. From a paying customer's perspective the logic jumps from: -

I'd like to see some comedy tonight. The local club is advertising some somewhat familiar names with some cool quotes from reviews from well-known papers and magazines to assuage my doubts*

To: -

Eddie Izzard is touring. Let's get tickets!

The vast majority of (very decent) acts will always operate under the first dynamic and much of the art of promoting is understanding this.

Comedy promoters must keep their 'aficionados' happy because these guys are the bread and butter. They need a good reason not to turn up to a night because they're so passionate about comedy. They're hanging out for the chance to say that they saw so-and-so do ten minutes in a tiny room about five years before she got that hit TV show.

The problem is that most promoters are also aficionados** and their passion for The Next Big thing can blind them to the actual cut-through amongst non-aficionados. Wishful thinking prevails and money gets lost.

Last night I compered an out-of-town gig where the promoter misread the dynamic. The headline act is an astonishingly good comic with a well-earned reputation on the touring and festival circuit. He'd been paid over the odds with the expectation he'd put more bums on seats than an average night. As the audience was the usual size and the breakeven point had shifted the promoter recouped little, if anything, from the additional investment.

The alternative would have been a one-off price hike, a dangerous thing to do in these straitened times. And a price hike strategy is an admission that the act's brand is stronger than the club's own brand.

An audience rarely gets its money back. This is why branding is a such a core dynamic in live comedy.

* There is a dark art to 'pulling' usable grabs for promotional purposes from even the least sympathetic reviews

** Every promoter is full of stories of the famous names they booked way back when. The classier acts who 'make it' are gracious enough to always acknowledge this

So, how many Facebook friends do you have?

During the auditions for Scenes from Communal Living I joked that the six spots in the cast would go to the people with the most Facebook friends.

The truth wasn't that far different. As is the case with most small theatre shows a big chunk of the total audience were friends and family of the cast and crew. This was accelerated by a two-for-one offer for any member of our Facebook group.

Reflecting on Seth Godin's latest piece I recognise that we treated audience members we knew ('friends') differently to those that we didn't ('strangers'); at least in a post-show context.

Few performers I know come off a stage with the inclination, let alone the grace and energy, to chat to the punters. But those that can and do so will create a fan base that means that their every new show opens to a full house.