Do make me laugh: How to get ahead in Comedy
06 Jan 10
What does it take to make it in comedy? Matthew Bell gets tips from a panel of pros
Ruthless ambition, knowing the right people, even Lady Luck might help, but to get ahead in comedy you have to raise a laugh. So, asked comedian Rufus Hound, who was chairing an RTS Futures event at the end of November, “What makes something funny?”
“Surprise. If I tell you a joke you already know you might smile; if I tell you a joke you’ve never heard before you might actually laugh,” reckoned former BBC head of comedy Jon Plowman, now the executive producer of BBC2’s Beautiful People and Psychoville.
“John Cleese famously said that a good joke is like a derailed train. The idea being that you describe the grass as green and the sky as blue. You describe the people on the train and why they’re there. And then you derail it. So, what’s funny is a derailed train and my apologies to anyone who has been in a train accident,” Plowman added.
Derren Litten, the creator of ITV1 sitcom smash Benidorm, plumped for “recognition”, revealing that he had trawled his own and his family’s life for inspiration:
“For The Catherine Tate Show, I wrote a lot of sketches for the ‘Nan [Taylor]’ character and so many people would say, ‘That’s my nan.’”
“Personally, I like anything that’s a bit naughty. That derailed train analogy fits with me because I like comedy that looks as if it’s about to go out of control, the sense that anarchy is a second away,” said the third member of the RTS Futures panel, Katy Brand, best known for ITV2 sketch programme Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show.”
Plowman said his own genre – narrative comedy – is currently in “a bit of a state. It’s very difficult to get an audience to watch new comedy because we’re fighting our own history. Whenever a new show is launched you’re only 10 minutes away from a rerun of Only Fools and Horses on some channel somewhere.”
Hound asked Plowman whether this view contradicted his earlier contention that surprise was the key to getting a laugh. “Some familiarity with the characters, particularly in narrative comedy, is quite important. You have to put in a bit of effort to meet the new ones and I think people are putting in less and less effort the more comedy there is,” he replied.
Brand joined Plowman in comedy gloom mode, skewering the “new breed” of commissioners: “They are commissioning on the basis of demographics and how they can sell advertising space.” This is in marked contrast to old-school producers such as Plowman and the late Geoffrey Perkins, who made good but “subjective decisions based on their own taste”.
Litten recalled pitching Benidorm to ITV director of comedy and entertainment Paul Jackson: “Paul said, ‘What do you see this show being?’ And I said, ‘Well, have you not read it? That’s what the show is. If you want to take all the swearing out and put Robson Green in it, you can **** off.” Perhaps surprisingly, Jackson gave Benidorm the green light.
Despite his apparent cocksure confidence, Litten admitted he had been “incredibly lucky” to make the transition from a jobbing actor in the likes of Casualty to writing for The Catherine Tate Show.
“I was at drama school with Catherine Tate,” he recalled. “Geoffrey [Perkins] asked Catherine who she wanted to write for her when she was offered her own TV show. She said: ‘My friend Derren is quite funny.’ If I was a producer I’d imagine I’d say, ‘Good for him, now let’s get some writers in.’ But Geoffrey didn’t.”
“I remember a quote from Robbie Williams, who said that if he hadn’t been in Take That it wouldn’t have mattered; he would still have been a massive star anyway,” said Hound.
“That’s one of the things that makes him such a cock,” said Brand. But Hound reckoned that it also showed the importance of confidence: “There seems to be a line between being in the right place at the right time and having enough self-belief to keep going until it’s your turn.”
“There’s a similar line between having confidence and being a prick as well,” said Litten, adding: “If you’ve got a really funny script, unless it stays sitting in your drawer, somebody will find it.”
Hound wound up the RTS event by asking how important the panel felt it was to keep control over their work. “I get so exhausted filming because I check everything, every costume, every set, every prop,” said Brand. “I couldn’t bear the idea that something wasn’t right because I hadn’t bothered to check it.”
“[One Foot in the Grave writer] David Renwick very famously once said in a read-through, ‘Can we stop there; you’re reading a comma when it’s actually a hyphen,’” recalled Litten.
“I’m not quite as bad as that but you’ve got to look back on a piece of work and say, ‘If it’s not the best it could be, I want it to be my fault.’”
[How to get ahead in comedy was an RTS Futures event held in central London on 30 November. It was produced by Sam Ward.]
Question and answer session
How big are budgets for comedy shows?A
Jon Plowman: For very high-end comedy, if you were lucky, you might get somewhere between £250,000 and £300,000 a half-hour, assuming that it’s a mix of a studio and a location show. And, trust me, it’s going down.
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Rufus Hound: And it’s worth remembering that at the same time studio fees and the cost of going on location are going up.
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Jon Plowman: It [also] depends on the channel. If you are doing a show for BBC4, you won’t get more than £100,000 a half-hour…
And remember the money you get from a channel isn’t necessarily all the money that can be got for that show and most times it’s not enough. So you have to go cap in hand to a DVD distributor or [look for] rest-of-the-world sales.
How do you get to sit into a commissioner’s office?
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Jon Plowman: Find a producer whose work you like… and then go and talk to them about it…
I am trying to get somebody to give me the money to make a show at the moment that came in through the post.
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Katy Brand: Get to know a producer in a less intense way than sitting there sweatily trying to pitch your big idea. It’s better to start in a smaller way and build up relationships. Find people who are sympathetic to what you want to do and work your way towards it.
How do you get ahead in comedy?
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Jon Plowman: If you’re a writer, never send anything to anybody until it’s absolutely the best it can be… Aspiring comics [have] just got to do it and learn. Aspiring producers? I’m sorry, it’s closed.
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Derren Litten: When I was acting a lot, I acted in enough crap TV shows with really crap dialogue and I used to think is this the first time this has ever been read aloud. I always read my scripts aloud.
How important is live performance?
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Katy Brand: If you pick the right places and the right show, there’s nothing like it.
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Rufus Hound: Once you can tell people you’re a stand-up, whether you’re any good at it or not, they take you seriously… The process of being a comedian made me aware of how far I had to go.
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Katy Brand: [If] you’re a writer with no performing ability, find someone who you’d like to write for. There are plenty of comedy writers who get started like that.
