That's the secret to Edinburgh Fringe success, says Dave Cohen

It feels strange to use a word like ‘writing’ when discussing stand-up comedy. Such is the conversational nature of stand-up, half the audience think you’re making it up as you go along, and even if the audience are reduced to tears by your sharp observations, they’ll struggle to recall a word. 

‘I saw a brilliant stand-up last night.’ ‘Really, what was their name?’ ‘I can’t remember. She had red hair.’ What jokes? ‘I can’t remember. Oh yeah, she had this hilarious bit about dogs. Actually, it might have been cats. Actually, that was the bloke before her…’

It’s almost as if the material is, well, immaterial. New acts already start out quite professional compared to a few decades ago, when my shambolic contemporaries emerged. They look good, engage with the audience, carry themselves confidently – not surprising really, there’s so much out there live, on TV and YouTube, for them to study and copy. 

The one thing they can’t fake is a point of view. Just as it can take a writer years to find his or her voice, so a stand-up will have to perform a lot of gigs before finding the persona on stage that they are comfortable with. 

This is not always the case. The first time I saw Stewart Lee was in 1989 when he was a student, trying out material in the venue where I was doing my show. I don’t remember any of the lines, but was immediately taken with the person on stage – and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look or sound any different in the intervening 29 years. Others I remember arriving fully-formed from day one were Jo Brand, Jeremy Hardy, Lee Evans and Harry Hill. 

They were the exceptions. Paul Merton, Eddie Izzard, Jack Dee were among many who were perfectly good when they began performing, but took a while to stand out from the crowd.

The best stand-ups find laughs in many ways. A comic’s physical appearance, the way they move, or stand still, can be as important as what they say. Facial expressions, used well and sparingly, will enhance the set. Comedians working regularly, repeating their lines four or five times a week, may suddenly work out a way of saying the same line that will bring a much bigger laugh, or a response to a heckle may end up being incorporated into the routine.

But with few exceptions (Jerry Sadowitz the only one I remember from my generation), comics do write their material down, and even if you aren’t hearing many words, there’s a large written element behind even the most visual of routines.

If you’re a comedian and don’t think writing is important you should start working with someone who just writes. If you think comedians don’t need to be writers then you aren’t paying attention to the job.

Over the years I’ve seen Michael McIntyre called a number of names, especially unflattering ones by his fellow comedians. One word I’ve never seen used though is ‘writer’. On the surface, McIntyre’s routines are viewed as the elongating of a single reasonably familiar observation into three minutes of visual buffoonery, sold to the undiscerning punters through a mixture of grinning tics and boundless high energy.

There’s some truth to this, but look closely, and you’ll see how much work has gone into those routines. Watch the clip on YouTube where he talks about travelling on public transport – there’s probably nothing in those three minutes that hasn’t crossed most comedic minds. However, as the old fella used to say, it’s the way he tells them. 

The routine starts with a few funny mimes and two nice jokes – the observation that everyone reads the same paper on the London Underground, why can’t one person read it out to the whole of the carriage? Followed by a lovely left-field remark about how turning the page of an old broadsheet newspaper was like folding a tablecloth. Two big laughs and we’re only half a minute in. Both are comic embellishments to a familiar setting that I don’t remember seeing before (and I have a great memory for other people’s jokes).

They serve merely as a set-up to the bigger story: Act One, we’re on a train – and this is where McIntyre scores above many of his rivals, he is a proper storyteller who understands the narrative power of a comedy routine.

What do I mean by this? Most stories, novels and movies follow a basic three-act structure, as defined by Aristotle more than 2000 years ago. Act one is the beginning, a familiar place: something big happens, and sends us into act two, from which complications arise, escalating to another big incident that takes us to act three, and the end. 

That structure works for most things, even jokes. You could take a gag as short as Tim Vine’s classic ‘Velcro? What a rip-off!’ and define it as a three-act story. Act one gives us something we all know, Velcro, but we’re being asked to question this familiar thing – that’s the twist which will take us into the complication of act two, which also happens to be the punchline.

Taken as a whole, McIntyre’s two and three-minute routines are like three-act stories. They start in normality and build towards a climax, with big laughs along the way.

Today, we’re told in the Tube story, the train is full, the fullest he’s ever seen it, and there’s a few visual laughs on the way to the end of the act one complication, which is this: a man is going to try and cram himself onto an already full train. The laughs are coming regularly now, as McIntyre describes the complications that arise from this twist. Having failed to get on the train, the man walks away. Is that the end? Of course not, he hasn’t given up, he’s giving himself a run-up.

The man gets his body in, but the head is sticking out. The words are sparse in this routine but McIntyre is painting a vivid picture. The doors hit the man’s head – ‘no one needs to get on this badly, get out man, get out!’ And they hit his head again. We get to the twist at the end of act two – the man moves slightly to one side, and uses the force of the tube door to knock his head into the train. End of Act Two.

Act Three is a short explanation: ‘He’s in!’ and a little punchline recalling a gag from earlier in the routine. Three minutes of big laughs. 

Watch the clip, and you may feel it’s very slight, three minutes of nothing. But think about how even the most prolific of stand-ups rarely create more than an hour of material in a year – and you’re looking at slightly less than three weeks’ work. A lot of those hours will have been spent trying out the lines in small clubs, watching back physical moves and refining them. And while as a piece of writing, the routine would struggle to fill a page, even using double spacing and a big font size, the work that went into it will have been as painstaking as anything you may have seen on TV – a key scene in a funny sitcom, a stand-out sketch on a popular show.

If you want to know how the best comics come up with their material, have a listen to Stuart Goldsmith’s Comedian’s Comedian podcast, in particular, the episodes featuring Gary Delaney and Jimmy Carr.

Every comic has a different way of coming up with material. For James Acaster it’s always a work in progress, constantly being improved. One of his new shows (he’s very prolific) combines making up new characters on stage through improvisation, and writing routines about the minutiae of life for that character.

With so many comics arriving Edinburgh, still full of optimism and not yet crushed by the daily onslaught of alcohol, successful colleagues and incredible shrinking crowds, over the next few weeks one or two will rise above the rest and be feted by audience and critics. 

Who will it be? I’ve no more idea than anyone else, but those who keep coming back and winning new fans? That will be the comedians who understand that in order to be a consistently successful performer, first you must learn to write.

• Learn about Writing for Stand-Up

Published: 5 Aug 2018