Hecklers often believe that heckling is all part of the fun and that comedians welcome it and that it helps them. While there are some...

For this the twenty-second lesson I thought I’d speak to a couple of working comics. To get a broad perspective I spoke to one newer act,...

In the last lesson I discussed Set List, the entirely improvised stand-up night. In this lesson, I’m discussing the use of “games” in...

I'm running a two part workshop online for gigging comics to explore their persona. 7pm-9pm UK time, Monday 23rd February & 2nd March 2026 , £70 (On Zoom) BOOK YOUR PLACE I'd been planning a lesson on persona and inspired by a question from a reader of my blog Ronan Anderson, I have combined the topic with improv. He said: “I'm very curious about your opinion on the place of emotion, riffing and the idea of finding one's voice. Comedians seem to develop authentic material qui

In this bumper blog we’ll see pretty much everything we’ve discussed about stand-up writing in a two-and-a-half minute Jerry Seinfeld...

Mark, a stand-up student of mine on my intermediate new material course, asked me to say more about what he termed ‘comedy metaphors’,...

Twenty five is a nice neat number isn’t it? It’d be a shame if it were ‘27’ lessons – hence me combining these three topics. I think I...

In the last few lessons we've been exploring transpositions. Let's end this exploration on personification. Also known as...

In the previous lesson we discussed transpositions. We’re going to develop this idea and look at a common comic effect that can be...

In the previous lesson I discussed the importance of going beyond what actually happened, and going into playful speculation. In your...

Comedy, and all creativity, begins with questions. What takes you into comic territory, rather than literary or dramatic territory, is...

A stand-up will send me a video of their set and I will watch it, meeting them subsequently to discuss my observations on their material...

Note: This is by some margin my most popular blog! I originally wrote it in 2018 so in view of how many people are reading it, I've just...

STAND-UP STORYTELLING WORKSHOP 10.45am-3.45pm, Saturday 28th February 2026 @ Theatre Deli , Leadenhall Street, London EC3A 4AF £75 Course info and booking There’s a problem with true stories in a stand-up context. The long build up that (eventually) culminates in a big laugh is often the form that anecdotes take; they have this in common with the ‘shaggy dog story’ type of joke. In modern stand-up you can't often get away with this long wait for a single laugh (however big).

In 2007 I interviewed Richard Herring in a Caffe Nero in Hammersmith for the short-lived comedy magazine The Fix. I’d recently seen him...

This blog on misdirection is one of the most popular ones and I originally wrote it in February 2018. So I've just given it a refresh in...

Now we've explored the wider context — the writing process and, starting the gig itself — let’s get stuck into the nitty-gritty, starting...

Having discussed bespoke material for the gig in the last lesson, I'm going to begin this lesson with the physical practicalities of...

The stand-up, compère, act booker and manager Geoff Whiting told me that many years ago he was an open-spot on a bill with Ross Noble,...

The lessons are about to shift into the writing of material. Before we go there, I wanted to say that the most important stage in...