Comedy Competitions Were A Mistake

Comedy competitions are silly things to take seriously, but sometimes you see an injustice so egregious it makes you wonder if David Cameron’s meritocracy was a scam after all.

Someone more cynical than me would decry the Brighton New Comedy Award as a thinly-veiled marketing campaign for the Jill Edwards stand-up comedy course. At the semi-final heat I attended (Tuesday 27th January – there are no quarter finals), three of the eight acts, including the winner on the night, were graduates of said course.

Last year’s winner was, amazingly, not a graduate of the Jill Edwards comedy course. 2024’s winner was – and this will shock you – a graduate of the Jill Edwards comedy course. 2023’s winner was, and you’re not going to believe this, a graduate of the Jill Edwards comedy course. 

The winner of the Brighton New Comedy Award in association with Comic Boom and Victoria Nangle [1] gets a one-off spot at Comic Boom, a monthly Komedia comedy night run by… Jill Edwards.

And where does Edwards put on her £425pp comedy courses?

You can probably guess.

I get it, I really do.

I don’t begrudge anyone doing a stand-up course. It can be extremely liberating to get up on stage and make people laugh. If you’ve got issues or anxieties around public speaking or holding space, I can see why you’d be interested in signing up for one.

I also don’t begrudge Edwards selling the dream of stand-up stardom, as at least *someone* is making money out of the arts.

What I did find galling, though, based on this semi-final heat, was how obviously this competition seems set up to ensure one of Edwards’ acts wins.

Even this wouldn’t be a huge issue if Edwards’ acts were the among the funniest acts on the bill – comedy, like all the arts, is a very subjective thing.

It also wouldn’t be a huge issue if this competition was more varied than simply stand-up, and suspiciously traditional stand-up at that. Traditional, “I know what you’re thinking”, personality-focused stand-up, with pretty identikit joke structures, the kind of structures you might learn at a stand-up comedy course…

Ah well. Here’s how it went down.

On a breezy Tuesday night in late January, Komedia’s long, thin Studio venue was sold out for a night of competitive comedy. 

A table at the back of the room was ready for the judges, with their robes of office notebooks, and their jugs of water.

The host and only comedian getting paid for their time, Mark Cox, had one role as MC – to act as a psychic shield against the two drunk women in the second row, and to ensure that their many heckles and terrible opinions were aimed at him, and him only.

In this, he did a worthy job.

Honestly, him engaging with them could have gone either way, but miraculously his tolerance of their rambling incoherence and attempts to be the stars of the show drew fire away from the acts themselves, who had seven minutes of stage time each and therefore no time to deal with eejits.

Going on first at a comedy competition is poison: unless you’re Rod Hull, Emu, Jesus Christ, or some other genius, you have no chance of winning. But Indian stand-up and copywriter Adharva Pharande was game, leaning in to his deadpan persona and, in particular, a joke about Winston Churchill that would have absolutely killed in a less white room.

Next was Mark Moloney, who suffered from being the second male deadpan comedian out of two male deadpan comedians in a row. Much of his early material was based on his being bald, straight out of the aforementioned “I know what you’re thinking” school of stand-up comedy courses.

He then, boldly, spend much of the rest of his set talking about The Vengaboys – one of my own favourite ironically awful pop acts, but also one whose zeitgeist was at least 25 years ago. A decent proportion of the audience hadn’t even born when his questioning of the Vengabus’ cross-continental routeplanning was topical. 

Your reviewer has lots to say about how the collapse of mainstream cultural pop-cultural references, due to us all being in our own individualist silos, presents large problems for comedy performers seeking universal referential relevance. But the answer to this is not to do a routine about the Vengabus, much as I personally will enjoy it.

Next up was Louis Beer.

This guy was a step up from the two previous guys, in that he understood how to use a mic for variety. He moved it away from his face when he wanted to shout, and bumped it against his body when he wanted to make a funny noise.

He also was grappling towards a clear on-stage personality, and was good at regional accents. The guy was confident and held the stage and the room expertly, even if his material was a touch on the forgettable side.

Next up was Martha Casey. The person I know, and therefore I should probably not review, as it would be weird.

Ah well.

As soon as she made it through her opening 30 seconds, you could feel the entire audience’s collective sphincter loosen in relief.

The reason why comedy (or indeed any live performance) is never as good on context-free TikTok or in YouTube videos of tax-dodging millionaires calling a heckler a cunt, is that – at its best – it should basically a collective, magical, trancendental experience.

For this to happen, though, you have to trust the person on stage to know what they’re doing (and for the audience to stay off their phones, but that’s another story).

And to trust the person on stage to know what they’re doing, they have to relax you, the audience, very quickly.

Once you’re more experienced, you can play with this. Stewart Lee, for example, got so good at stand-up that he fell out of love with it. He’d go on doomed tours and lose the audience on purpose, just for the schadenfreudic joy of getting them back again, before incorporating this entire process into his successful comeback, as a meta-commentary on his own performance, smug, infuriating, cake-and-eating-it, funny bastard that he is.

What Martha has cracked in the past year is this absolute certainty in the audience’s mind that she knows what she’s doing. She’s got an on-stage persona (a hot mess who is basically right about everything) that is consistent, coherent, and – to the punter – seemingly innate.

And so, they react, and everything she says is therefore ten times funnier than all the acts who have gone beforehand, especially because she also knows how to do things like “callbacks”, and “subvert the audience’s expectations”, and “write funny and unusual punchlines”.

As Martha headed off stage to high fives from all and sundry, we had one more act before the break, a comedian called Tracey Davies.

Davies was a tall, likeable lady in her fifties, without any jokes as such, but some self-deprecating bits about being tall and a lady in her fifties.

The break. My friend lurked by the stairs, and was complimented on her set by what felt like half the room, as they filtered out in search of wees or something a bit stronger (a poo).

“If you haven’t won, there’ll be a riot, and I’ll start it”, said one.

“Still three more acts to go,” said Martha, which was fair enough. But based on the quality of the first half, it felt as in the bag as a horse’s face at dinner time.

The first act in the second half was deeply cringe, and a good example of the limitations of the stand-up format (this was the Komedia “New Comedy” award, but all the acts on stage were doing stand-up).

This comedian was called Eva-Jade (no surname), and the entire joke was that they were working class and therefore a bit dumb and common.

25 years after some public school boys (one a notorious sex pest) came up with Vicky Pollard and 15 years after Owen Jones’ Chavs: The Demonisation Of The Working Classes was published, you don’t expect this kind of obvious punching down (or, if we’re being kind, punching one’s self directly in the face) to still make it to the stage. Another bit of evidence, perhaps, that the Edwards course is a bit old-fashioned.

This act might have worked if they turned it into a character comedy bit – maybe heighten the grotesque, and make it clear it’s a parody of our culture’s assumptions and expectations of working class women. But this, whatever it is, is not it.

At this point your correspondent was flagging, and desperately hoping there weren’t too many more acts to get through. Fortunately, our next act, Crudi Dench, was a very funny, very likeable stand-up performing in drag. The performance was sharp, the exchanges with the audience made sense, and the audience was having a nice time. Dench (great drag name, by the way) felt like a truthful creation, and her skills, timing, and punchlines were clearly well honed from running cabaret nights in York (including once booking the craziest people in showbusiness, The Cheeky Girls).

Our final act was a guy called Paul Haines, who was clearly nervous and forgot a few lines. That didn’t bother me particularly, it happens. What was harder to deal with was it wasn’t clear what this comedian’s viewpoint was.

Like a lot of the acts here tonight, his material was clearly extrapolated from his own life, but the issue with storytelling bits around one’s own life is one’s life has to be either very interesting or very, very boring. There also needs to be a clear dynamic: does Haines think he’s a pathetic loser and has a very boring life, and is thus telling us about it in a way to make us laugh at him? Is Haines playing a version of himself that is oblivious to how boring his life is, and therefore the humour comes from the gap between his own perception of his worth and how he allows the audience to see him? Does Haines think he’s cleverer than his audience or stupider than his audience? Until these things are figured out, what we have is a man talking about the fact he has cat tattoos: nice, but ultimately pointless.

The night ended. Usually if there’s a competition, there’s a brief wait while the judges make up their mind. For this, the house lights come back on, some music is played. If you’re lucky, the bar reopens, so people can move about and have a chat and a drink.

What happened last Tuesday was that the lights stayed down, and the poor MC was made to improvise for what felt like an excruciatingly long time, but was probably only ten minutes or so.

Ten minutes, though, is a lifetime when people don’t really know what’s going on, and when an MC has to try to riff with a by turns restless and drunk audience.

Unfortunately the two hecklers in the second row were still around, and Cox did his best to wring more humour out of their slurring, until they eventually left, realising they – and everyone else – has had enough.

The minutes ticked on. I thought about eternity, and chatted to the person behind me, who turned out to be last year’s winner, about how long it was taking. [2]

Finally, it was time for a winner to be announced. For me, it was between Martha and Dench – both would have been worthy winners.

And so the winner was announced. It was… Davies. The likeable lady without any jokes.

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Like I said, comedy competitions were a mistake.

[1] Top result if you google Victoria Nangle and Jill Edwards: “Victoria Nangle talks to comedy coach and the brains behind Comic Boom Jill Edwards about this top night…”.

[2] For this, we got told off by Jill Edwards. Fair enough.