Dave Cohen has some suggestions

Spring is here: leaves are budding, flowers blooming and a thousand comedians are fretting about what to do in August.

This is traditionally the time for sifting the festival websites and searching for a coveted slot in the most popular Edinburgh venue at the best time of day.

Not any more. A quick trawl through the recent Chortle news headlines suggests that the only trips comedians are planning to Scotland this summer will be to answer questions about their latest magnum opus at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

Sara Pascoe’s writing a novel, Rosie Jones ‘her first non-fiction book’, Peter Kay’s on to his fourth memoir. Not bad for a man still a few months shy of his 50^th birthday. At 66, Adrian Edmonson is writing his first.

And if there’s a well-known comic out there who isn’t working on their latest children’s book I’d be curious to know who they are.

Today’s stand-up comedian is more likely to be found lurking on the shelves of a sit-down librarian.

Is stand-up enough? Could you build a literary career? The answer is yes, but you’re going to need to be one of those comics already up the TV ladder to attract any interest.

What you can do, and what I encourage every stand-up to do, is learn the skills to become a writer for radio and TV.

TV includes the internet, by the way. It’s never been easier to write and record your own sketches and stick them online. If they’re funny they’ll soon bring you an audience.

On Sunday April 23, I’m bringing together comedy writers, producers and stand-ups to learn about each other’s skills and needs. We’ll be coming up with topical jokes, online sketches and sitcom pitches.

The good news is that if you’re already good at your job of making audiences laugh, you understand, albeit instinctively, the mechanics of writing.

You know that every joke tells a story. Movies last around two hours, novels can be 80,000 words, jokes come in around ten seconds, but the principle is the same.

Every story, as Aristotle told us around 3,000 years ago, has a beginning, a middle and an end. If he’d hung out at the Athens Comedy Store back in the day, he might have defined it as the set-up, the complication and the punchline.

Stand-ups are already at an advantage here. One of the greatest assets a topical or sketch writer can own is the ability to jump in on someone else’s set up and add a jokey punchline.

It’s good, but it’s not everything. People who only write may lack that skill, but they are good at some things that you may not be. They can edit the raw material of your gag and make sure it’s played for maximum laughs. They can take your joke and fashion it to fit the rules of whichever topical show you’re writing for.

Equally important to coming up with ideas, we’ll get to meet people who might be able to help us. And we might be able to help them.

Working in collaboration might seem odd to a person who spends their entire working life alone, but so much comedy is written in pairs – and the best comedy shows are a result of teamwork. Think of a show like The Thick Of It that combines the skills of actors, improvising stand-ups, writers and the producer who came up with the idea.

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.

There are other career options, but sticking to stand-up alone feels like it’s no longer one of them.

None of this is surprising – the pandemic brought about the instant demise of the live stand-up scene. Overnight hundreds of comics saw their incomes drop to zero and this ushered in a new golden age of book writing.

Three years ago this month, a rush of agents signed up the written-down thoughts of well-known stand-up comedians.

How is it that three years on, with live shows back in earnest, the wit-lit books are still flowing?

The stand-up scene is back, but not like it was pre-pandemic. The truth is that it’s unlikely to ever return there.

The decline in stand-up comedy, the small but significant fall in regular audiences, the closing down or merging of regular clubs, had been happening in slow motion for years. There was already a Catch-22 that if you wanted your career to go up a level you needed to be seen on TV panel shows – but in order to get those gigs you needed to be doing more high-profile live work.

All the pandemic did was accelerate that.

As every stand-up comedian who went to Edinburgh last summer will tell you, the YouTok sketch creators are our new rulers of the comedy universe. Audiences are still watching stand-up but supply is way in excess of demand, and the only queues outside venues were for the post pandemic online mini-Gods.

You can self-publish your books, like I do. But don’t expect it to be anything more than a very expensive hobby.

Learning to write more than one-liners for yourself is a valuable skill, and once you start you’ll find the opportunities increase considerably. Getting TV shows made is still a fiercely competitive world, but if you want to play the game, you need to learn the rules.

Join us on the 23^rd, there’ll be a bunch of expert gag, sketch and sitcom writers there to help you take those first steps towards a comedy career that takes your stand-up skills and builds on them.

See you then!

• Click here for tickets to Dave’s Sun-DIY Conference at the Bill Murray in London on April 23, priced £99. 

Published: 24 Mar 2023