The front row of a comedy club is a scary place to be. Those courageous enough to brave that spot – or any stragglers forced to tentatively perch there – do so knowing that, at any moment, a microphone could be thrust into their face by a comedian asking them what they do for a living. Such unscripted back-and-forths – or “crowd work” in comedy parlance – have always been a part of standup, often seen as a benchmark to separate the good writers or performers from those with truly funny bones. It’s these moments, when tension fizzes and audience members squirm, that attenders regale to their friends with the phrase: “You had to be there.”
But thanks to the internet, you don’t actually have to be in the room to see crowd work. Now, TikTok and Instagram are flooded with footage of standup comics showing off their wit through off-the-cuff interactions where they ask the audience members who they’re here with or what country they’re from, and improvise around the answers. When these clips are posted online, they share the same instantly recognisable template. The dialogue is accompanied by fast-moving subtitles where words are highlighted one by one, both to improve accessibility and hold on to users’ ever-shortening attention spans. Then, they’re packaged up with a caption distilling the exchange in to a single theme or an enticing title to drive engagement: “Heckler can’t handle it” or “Audience member breaks comedians”. It’s pure comedy clickbait, and the latest string to the comedian turned content-creator’s bow.
During Covid, we saw acts build up substantial online followings with front-facing camera sketches. When clubs reopened and those comedians started gigging again, sharing crowd work clips felt like a natural progression. From US comic and TikTok star Matt Rife getting his own Netflix special to Liverpudlian comedian Paul Smith performing in arenas on his upcoming tour, standups have built their careers around crowd work clips. A typical Smith clip sees him seek out a man in the front row who he learns is a retired prison officer, and brands a “fucking grass”. When the man explains he knows the person he’s come with from work, Smith asks if he’s a prisoner and if they let them “keep one when they retire”.
When Edinburgh-based comic Liam Withnail first saw Smith’s videos, his first thought was that he couldn’t believe “none of us had thought of doing this”. So Withnail started posting a crowd work clip from his shows MCing at Edinburgh’s Monkey Barrel Comedy to TikTok every day for three months, in a process that was, unsurprisingly, pretty “intense”. In one of his biggest videos from this time, Withnail banters with a nurse in the audience. He asks her about the strangest object she’s had to remove from a person (I’m sure you can guess where), and she says a lightbulb, bulb end first. “Why that way round? Are you going to try to twist yourself in after and see if a fucking light comes out of your mouth?” Withnail answers, quick as a flash.
Why hadn’t many comics thought of posting audience interactions online before? After all, crowd work has long been part of standup, with many of the greats (Ross Noble, Dara Ó Briain in the UK, Don Rickles and Paula Poundstone in the US) making it a key part of their acts. In comedy clubs, those chatty moments are often performed by the compere and help keep an audience hyped up for the performers on the bill. Still, such work has historically received little respect: comedian Erika Ehler admits that when she was starting out back home in Canada, you’d only do crowd work as a “last resort” if your set was “absolutely just not going your way”. For her, the UK’s compering style was far more appealing. “It gets a crowd on the same page,” she says – even if that shared focus is “one couple that’s being made fun of”.
For comics, posting organic moments also prevents something long seen as a comedy sin: the “burning” of material. Ali Woods, who has amassed more than 17m likes on TikTok with a mixture of sketches and live standup footage, says that the comic’s mindset used to be that once material was shared on video, it was unusable during your live set. You’d save your best stuff for your special, or an appearance on Live at the Apollo, “where you’d do that material”, and it was then burned, he explains.
But crowd work doesn’t have that problem. No two audience interactions will be the same, because crowd members are all different, and will collectively respond in their own unique way to these moments. However, posting clips like these does involve a lot of extra work. Often it’s on the act to film their own material, either on a phone or expensive camera. By now, Woods’s operation is slick and well-practised. He brings his own camera and tripod to all his gigs, and even wears a separate clip-on mic to capture audio in addition to the handheld microphone he uses on stage.
Whether it’s time or money (Woods employs an external video editor), it takes a fair amount of investment, especially when we consider that social media video wasn’t a part of the role when most of these acts began their careers. “The workload is now three times as much as it was when I started,” Withnail says. Comedians don’t just have to write and gig, but be “full-time content creators”. Withnail and Ehler say they try not to think about the videos when they’re performing, lest it throw off them their game. For one thing, audience interaction moments that felt so alive in the room often just don’t translate on camera. But for Woods, it’s something he thinks about a lot. There are times he’s been on stage and found himself being taken “out of the moment” because he’s fixated on the online potential of an interaction. He gives an example: “I chat to a couple; turns out he’s her boss. Instead of thinking this is fun for comedy, I’m like: if I get this right, this could be a great clip.”
Within the industry, there can be a little snobbery towards that video-first way of thinking. Withnail tells me there’s a longstanding “unspoken rule” that at a mixed-bill night the compere is the one who banters with the audience between acts; an act coming out and doing their own crowd work is “not really the done thing”. But the desire for clips means more are, and “stepping on the compere’s toes”. “It’s a cause of some friction between the older comics and the newer comics,” Withnail explains.
The prevalence of crowd work online is changing how audiences think about standup, too. All three comedians admit that audiences are generally still pretty scared of being picked on (“I think there’s that natural inclination to stay away from confrontation or get embarrassed,” Woods says), but Ehler maintains she’s been in shows where she’s felt that the audience are playing up for the cameras and trying to “outsmart” her.
And while Withnail echoes that most people are still “terrified” of audience interaction, Ehler argues that less “comedy-savvy” crowds now “expect every act to just be crowd work”. Woods agrees, and tells me: “I know other comedians who post a lot of crowd work clips, and the crowd are just talking to them. They’re like: ‘This is what you do, right? This is what we follow you for.’”
When they post off-the-cuff audience interactions, performers are asking to be judged for their natural comedic talents, rather than just well-written material. But on the flipside, Woods says that he is judged far more harshly for the live clips he posts than his sketches. On a recent crowd work clip he put on TikTok, the first comment declared him “about as funny as cancer”. “The hate you’ll get from standup is way quicker, way more volatile online,” he says.
This, in part, explains Ehler’s initial reticence to post her crowd work online. “I really had a problem with it,” she says, and points out that gender plays a role. “As a woman on the internet, I’m not only being judged for my jokes, I’m being judged for my looks. That’s something that I had to just deal with, because there’s no answer for it.”
Yet Ehler and others return to crowd work, despite the extra effort and the reducing of comedy to a clickbait-y moment. “I’ve seen it work for other people, and the formula is very clear,” she says. “You just keep posting, and you’ll find people who relate to you and want to see you. That does translate to butts in seats, which translates to money in your pockets.” And that’s no laughing matter.
Ali Woods, Erika Ehler and Liam Withnail are all appearing at Edinburgh festival fringe; see edfringe.com
