I want to tell you a story | Matt Price on the rise of the storytelling genre

I want to tell you a story

Matt Price on the rise of the storytelling genre

I've been a fan of storytelling for many years. And by that I don't mean storytelling as an excuse for not being a good stand-up. Or storytelling because you only have ten minutes of material at best and feel that by adopting a more earnest tone and a theme that you can get away with doing an hour. Or indeed men with big beards and baritone voices reciting fables. I mean telling a story, with peaks and troughs and with a beginning middle and end. Something that is well constructed, draws people in and makes them laugh. Actually, the pay-offs can be numerous. I love a narrative and I love comedy so I've always felt, well why not combine the two?

The main answer has been because it hasn't been practical or made particularly good business sense. To be labelled as a rambling storyteller when you are a jobbing comic could be potentially damaging when it comes to making a living from comedy. And so I have learned over the years to be able to adapt to whatever the room in front of me wants. There are times when art has to be secondary, especially to casual comedy goers, hens and stags, late night gigs. I enjoy these environments very much and giving the audience what they (appear) to want should be the priority of any professional comic, in my opinion.

In 2006 I did a two-hander in Leicester with my old friend Matt Hollins. I will admit that I died on my arse for both nights and returning to Leicester has always been a bit embarrassing ever since. The looks of sympathy that his friends gave me at the time are looks that all comics have had at one point or another in their careers. A year after that Matt told me that one of his friends said, I shouldn't be doing comedy (she isn't the first person to say this by the way) and that I should be doing storytelling nights. At the time I wasn't aware that such nights existed. But on the bright side, after an eight-year wait, I'm almost trendy.

I say this because over the last couple of years, storytelling has crept into the Fringe Brochure as a sub genre and in conversation I hear other acts describing storytelling as a thing. For a while I admit, that I thought that ‘thing’ was in some way inferior to pure stand-up. And even now when comics ask me if I'm doing a storytelling show, I struggle to not be defensive about it.

I know that the great comics Pryor, Cosby and Connolly were hailed as great storytellers and I agree, but in recent years, a niche area has now broadened and become almost mainstream in it's appeal. More and more comics are calling themselves storytellers if only for marketing purposes, as well as the cliched ‘rising star’ and the ‘hardest working comic in the country’ etc

But despite all the attention that the genre is receiving, there are still people who offer some interesting opinions. Typical criticisms of storytelling in comedy tend to be along the lines of :

It's not gag, gag, gag.

Well first of all. Try doing traditional set up and punch line for an entire hour. The best acts in the world have to think about structure and how to break things up so that the audience have a break. Whatever form of comedy a show takes and there can be a mixture of styles in one show, the best ones are carefully crafted. They just make it look easy and spontaneous.

I don't know how you can cope with 30 seconds or even up to a minute of silence.

A one liner can fall flat. The trick is to have another straight after that doesn't. And what happens if your gag, gag, gag approach doesn't work? Every comic dies at some point. I would never go on stage without other options.

I like storytelling because there's No Pressure To Be Funny

True. But there IS a pressure to tell a good story. Now that storytelling is a thing, the audience want a story not jokes or puns placed together to create the illusion of a story. That is a very different, but equally valid genre.

The main thing is that now storytelling is more popular and storytelling shows are considered part of comedy, I reckon I could go back to Leicester to the same audience and perform again and do well in front of them. I have no way of proving this of course, other than to say that thanks to storytelling being popular and much more recognised that the audience would realise what they were getting. And of course, my lack of experience at that point aside, I'd have a much better idea of the genre I'm trying to be successful in.

Matt Price: The Maryhill Dinosaur is on at the Counting House at the Edinburgh Fringe at 5.45pm; and he co-runs the monthly Natural Born Storytellers night in North London.

Published: 9 Jul 2014

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