You want to be a comic? You do what?

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Occasionally, people ask me for advice.

Proof, if proof were needed, that people are not always sensible.

This morning, I got a message from someone I know who has been engaged in various big projects for a while.

He told me:

Now I finally have the time to work on my own comedy material. Do you think this is worth doing? I don’t mind spending money to invest in my career. Do you think this comedy course is worth doing?

He named a particular course. I am dubious about the effectiveness of all comedy courses, especially this one, but suggested another which I had heard good things about.

The late Malcolm Hardee always said he thought mime was a tragic waste of time and juggling was a skill not a talent. I tend to agree with him.

Mime is almost always a tragic waste of time.

And juggling is a skill.

Almost anyone with normal abilities could practise five hours a day every day for five years and become a competent or good juggler.

But someone who practised being a comedian five hours a day every day for five years would not necessarily become a competent or good comedian.

Because performing comedy is not a skill; it is a talent. You do need skill and you can learn that but you also vitally need a certain almost indefinable something to become good at it. Hard work is not enough (though it can help if you have the basic talent).

But, even if you become a good comedian, you may not succeed. My advice this morning was:

The truth is that there are hundreds of perfectly good, competent comedians playing the circuit – all equally good, all equally effective at their job. But standing out amid this throng is another matter.

Find a USP, a Unique Selling Proposition. It will perk up audiences and bookers.

I cannot begin to tell you how much my soul has been sapped by the endless shows I have sat through with a bill of five competent 20-something white men talking about wanking and/or watching pornography.

Even if they were talking about something else and one was a West Indian Swede with a beard and a tattoo on his left elbow, it is just the same thing visually over and over again with an entirely competent performer delivering an entirely competent act while standing at a microphone.

Pacing backwards and forwards can make it worse.

Also, never create an act that involves having to carry a heavy prop or instrument around. A comic tuba player would get booked but would die from exhaustion carrying it to and from gigs. How Jim Tavaré ever succeeded with his double bass without having a heart attack is beyond me.

The reaction to my advice this morning was:

I cannot contain my desire to improvise and do voices so it would always be different. I’m gonna try to suss out where best to make my first tentative and anonymous steps into the world. My not very original idea being to see what works and what doesn’t in a live context. I also wanna see as much live comedy by unknowns such as me to size up the scene. It’s a new world for me but now I can throw myself into it fully.

He is charismatic and talented and has some savings in the bank. I just hope that is enough.

Comedian Paul B.Edwards on the UK’s crisis in comedy and The Helsinki Bus Station Theory of how to build a career

Paul B.Edwards in Borehamwood yesterday

Tomorrow, Paul B.Edwards’ Last Minute Comedy Club in Hitchin celebrates its 20th anniversary. He also runs comedy clubs in Letchworth, Luton and Baldock.

“People have been complaining about a ‘crisis’ in comedy,” I said to him yesterday, “with people not going to live clubs.”

“Well, my clubs are part of a huge squeezed middle,” he told me. “People at the very top are doing very well with their tours on the back of TV appearances. Michael McIntyre made more money than the Rolling Stones last year touring. But TV is making famous other people who aren’t ready.

“If people go and see ‘the funniest bloke they’ve ever seen on the telly’ live in a theatre and he actually isn’t very funny and he’s ‘the funniest person’ they’ve ever seen, what is the point of them going to a comedy club where they’ve never heard of anybody? It’s stopped new people coming to see live stand-up comedy.

“My single biggest problem is the falling number of people under the age of 30. Audiences are getting older, certainly in the sort of provincial clubs I’ve got.

“The comedy circuits are diverging. There’s a whole young Daniel Sloss audience who have never heard of Ian Cognito and vice versa. You’ve got kids going to see shows performed by kids. And adults seeing shows with adults in. And party types going to see Jongleurs-style shows. And people who really believe in stand-up comedy going to see shows in rooms in the back of pubs, like it always was and is supposed to be.

“You have five or six diverging circuits and very few people can work on all of them, which means all of our audiences have gone down as the number of clubs has expanded. There are more and more clubs around, but there are less and less people suitable for each type of club.

“Add to that an economic recession when existing audiences have tightened their belts and, instead of coming once-a-month or once-a-week, they come once-every-other-month or once-a-fortnight… You’ve halved the audience straight away and you’re not getting new people.

“It used to be that, when I got an article in the local Hitchin Comet newspaper, I would get 30 extra people at my club. Now it make no difference whatsoever unless the photograph is of someone people have seen on the telly.”

“So you have been affected by the economic recession?” I asked.

“My Hitchin show halved in numbers,” said Paul, “but I didn’t really know why. The audiences had always been great to the point they’d queue out into the car park to get in. Suddenly it was down to just over 100 people and I didn’t know why.”

“Did this happen in 2008 with the economic recession?” I asked.

“It took a little while to drop – maybe 2009,” replied Paul. “But now, to the current recession, you have to add the ‘Michael McIntyre’ effect, the big arena tours, the TV panel game effect. I think any one of those the comedy circuit would have survived but the fact they all happened at the same time halved audiences. Clubs shut. Anyone who says they didn’t suffer or aren’t suffering is a fucking liar.

“Every time one audience member doesn’t go to a comedy club, they may save themselves £10 but, collectively, if 100 people save themselves £10, the club loses £1,000.

“I didn’t know what to do until Peppa Pig showed up.”

“Peppa Pig?” I asked.

No… Not that Peppa Pig… The one with a computer database

“Peppa Pig is this girl who came to my show in Letchworth. The audience there used to be 120; but it had dropped to 80. That was alright. I figured it was a newer club and a smaller drop – though still a 33% drop.

“At all my clubs, I always go down to the the pub afterwards with the audience – from the minute they get to the gig, I’m their mate as well as their host. She came up to me afterwards and we got talking. Peppa Pig said: Is there anything I can do to help? I market local events for people putting things on. At the weekend, she gets dressed up as Peppa Pig and goes round children’s parties. She works in schools, all sorts of things.

“I asked What do you want? She said: I don’t want anything at all. I want the club to keep going and I can help.

“I had no idea what she could do to help. But she has a database that I’ve never heard of and they’ve never heard of me – namely young parents… Young people who had not been to my comedy clubs, who don’t get out very often but who plan a babysitter for once a month and go out. She told them: Come to comedy.

“Overnight, Letchworth was sold out, Hitchin was selling out… This was in January.”

“Last year?” I asked.

“This year,” Paul said. “It’s only just happened. The numbers had dropped virtually overnight. Now they recovered virtually overnight – simply by someone reaching a group of people I couldn’t reach. Full houses. Paul’s happy again.”

And now Paul has expanded into Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

Paul has been expanding into Scandinavia

He has opened comedy clubs in Oslo, Gothenburg and, as of next month, Copenhagen.

“I take two comics out there,” Paul told me yesterday. “It’s 100% English-speaking-as-a-first-language at the moment, but that may change as there are quite a lot of local comics who want to do comedy in English. At the moment, there’s quite an exciting comedy scene in Oslo of people who can’t get booked because the main club there has made themselves a sort-of closed shop. So there’s all these new comics coming through who have hit a glass ceiling and have nowhere to play.”

“Much the same thing happened in Scotland,” I said. “But making a career out of comedy has never been easy.”

“Do you know the Helsinki Bus Station Theory?” Paul asked me.

“No,” I said, mystified.

“If you want a successful creative career,” explained Paul, “you have to understand the timetabling and bus routes of Helsinki Bus Station.

“Helsinki Bus Station has about 25 or 26 different routes going to 25 or 26 different destinations, but there’s only one road into Helsinki Bus Station and only one road out. For the first kilometre, all the buses are on the same road.

“When you first start off, you start off thinking you’re having creatively original ideas, but you’re not having creatively original ideas because you don’t realise everyone’s having the same ideas as you. If you look out of the window, there are 25 other buses going along exactly the same road.

“But, after one kilometre, the buses start to move off in different directions. The the only way you can have a successful career is to Stay on the fucking bus. The longer you stay on the bus, the more likely you are to eventually reach that unique place that only you are going to.

“Other people are getting off the bus too early until, eventually, there’s only you and the driver.

“Stay on the fucking bus – That’s the Helsinki Bus Station Theory.

“As a stand-up comic, I’m not famous yet and I may never be famous, but I’m staying on the fucking bus.”

Career prospects if you have not worked for several years

This morning, I was talking to a friend who has not worked for several years. She is over forty. She has not worked in one specific job area. She has bummed-around a bit between jobs.

We were discussing what she could do.

“There are pros and cons for you,” I suggested. “The downside is that, in almost any business at the moment, there are loads of unemployed people with lots of experience in that one specific business area looking for work. They have much more specific experience than you… Also, you are not computer literate. You don’t know Microsoft Word or spreadsheets or data storage systems. That’s a drawback…

“On the other hand,” I said, “the upside is actually your age. If you were a 30 year-old who had not worked for several years, they’d think you were flighty and unreliable and a risk. But, because you are of ‘a certain age’ they will look on you as being more reliable and responsible, just returning to full-time work after taking some years off.”

“But the trouble,” she told me, “is that I don’t really like people. I’ve become very bitter and I would like to go round shooting a lot of people.”

“You could consider the police as a career,” I suggested. “You have the perfect psychological profile and, although I don’t recommend shooting people, it would be an option.”

My friend is still considering her options.

Comedy notoriety: good or bad?… or “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it…”

Being nominated for this year’s main Malcolm Hardee Award for comic originality AND winning the Malcolm Hardee Cunning Stunt Award for best publicity stunt at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe would be good for your career you might think.

Well, you might think that…

Except Bob Slayer won both those prestigious comedy industry accolades two weeks ago and yesterday he told me:

“Ever since I was nominated as the OTT comedian, no club seems to want to book me…

“To be fair, I have a full-on Edinburgh hang-over and I haven’t spoken to that many – but it would be nice if they would speak to me! They should know that I would not get my knob out in polite company… I did not get it out at any children’s gigs and I would not in a golf club, for example!”

It is not all gloom and doom in Bob’s award-winning household, though:

“There are some nice things lining up,” he tells me. “Like touring my show in the UK and Ireland and supporting other tours. So there are some folks more than happy to embrace the mayhem… Maybe it will all be OK?”

Let’s hope so.

When Malcolm Hardee managed a young Jerry Sadowitz in the 1980s, he succeeded in getting him noticed by playing up (with good reason) the outrageousness of the act and that Jerry was so OTT he was untransmittable on TV. The result, both Malcolm and Jerry came to realise in retrospect, was that TV producers never even considered Jerry for TV because they ‘knew’ he would be untransmittable. This was perhaps not helped by the Gobshite audio album which was withdrawn over fears it might be libellous to Jimmy Saville.

I produced a one-hour TV show for BSB in 1990 titled The Last Laugh with Jerry Sadowitz in which Jerry performed live to an audience at the Astoria Theatre in London. From memory (which might be faulty) I think I told him he could  have a handul of “fuck”s and to try to keep the “cunt”s to maybe two at most.

BSB’s guidelines to comedy producers at that time were that you could not have casual ‘conversational’ fucks or cunts in a sentence – you could not, for example, include “I was walking along the fucking road” – but the words were allowed if they were an integral part of the joke and if removing them would weaken the routine. I told Jerry something like: “Try not to say “fuck” or “cunt” at all and, that way, a few will inevitably come out but it will be OK over the course of an hour.”

He did the entire hour-long show with neither a “fuck” nor a “cunt”. Not a single one. I was amazed. I had thought the swearing was so much a part of the rhythm of his sentences – delivered at breakneck speed – that he would not be able to avoid using the words without screwing up his flow.

A couple of years later, he quite rightly got a late-night BBC TV comedy series The Pall Bearer’s Revue.

With Bob Slayer, far less controversial than Jerry, the problem is not so much swearing as ad-libbed physical anarchy – having people throw (real, genuine) darts at him or suddenly decide to have five people hit him on his back and on his head with folded-up metal audience seating – but he can tone that down appropriate to the situation and is amazingly good with audience members.

Oddly, I think he is, in television terms, a gameshow host. Kept under control, he is Michael Barrymore without the swimming pool. Barrymore was genuinely good with real people and equally at his best going off-script – provided he had a producer with the self-confidence to let him improvise within certain format and time restrictions.

Bob Slayer fronting a personality-led real-people game show would breathe novelty, energy and fresh air into a tired TV format. And, after all, as well as winning the Malcolm Hardee Cunning Stunt Award, Bob was also nominated, for the second consecutive year, for the main Malcolm Hardee Award for comic originality.

One to watch.