Will Davies investigates

I do not like to think of myself as someone who holds grudges, so whenever I have a disagreement with someone I go down into the great vaults beneath my house and record the details in the Tome of Unavenged Wrongs. This way, the grudge is held by the book, and I can focus on more important things. Like avenging wrongs.

In fact, just the other day while I was down there catching up on a few grievances, I had a bit of a flick through and was reminded of something that another stand-up said to me in 2018: ‘Improv will never be as funny as written joke.’ So, let us put the record straight. 

The provenance of mirth is irrelevant. If there is good soup in your mouth the means by which it was delivered there is hardly of concern. Soup is soup, funny is funny. Do not get up my ass about what kind of spoons I have.

The comedy soup has two main ingredients: surprise and recognition. Some things are funny because they are surprising (a punchline) and some things are funny because they are recognised (a callback). An improviser and a stand-up may prepare and season these ingredients in their own way but fundamentally the quality of is acted on by the chef rather than the school of cuisine.

Case in point. No written joke, no improvised twist, will ever be as funny as something said by one friend to another without thought or effort. If we were count all the times in our lives that we have just been absolutely killed and left creased over with tears streaming down our purple faces, a thousand percent of those moments wouldn’t have happened anywhere near a stage.

Of course, no one would dare suggest that wild-grown laughter is a lesser form of humour than any other. If anyone did than every comedian would have to walk en masse into the sea because that is not a fight we can win. Stand-up however feels secure in its disdain for improv, seeing there an opponent so hopelessly outgunned that it would be a moral failing not to beat the living piss out of it every hour of the day.

The reason for this colonial attitude is that stand-up is cool. Improv is nerd shit.

Stand-up comedy lives and dies on the authority of a lone performer. The stand-up faces down a numerically superior audience and instructs them, dogmatically, on the laws of the universe of expectation from which the necessary surprise and recognition are derived. To do this you must be cool. Even in the case of low-status characters you must be cool. If the audience doubts for a second that your mastery of this universe is absolute, they are going to kill you dead.

Improv begins every show with no universe at all and simply hopes to discover one as time goes on. In many ways this is a strangely scientific process as performers develop theories about the nature of this comedic reality, test them in the field and retain the ones which are borne out by the evidence. This is a very earnest approach, and therefore it is uncool which is the ultimate heresy against the accepted canon of coolness.

It is a strange anti-Copernican situation. The church of stand-up insists that the earth is at the centre of the universe, and improv says ‘yes, and he has a hat on.’ They are both immensely wrong in their own special ways, but since one of them wrote everything down in a big book the other gets to be flagellated in the square.

Ultimately, this debate is moot. The audience does not care nor can they tell the difference between the modes of comedy. Not even if you explain it to them. At improv shows audience members have expressed admiration for how well we remembered the script. At stand-up shows they have, eyes glistening with naivety, asked how we come up with all that on the spot.

To the soupless, all soup is magic. We, the soup wizards, should do nothing to dissuade them of the power of soup by bickering over who has the biggest croutons.

Also, it is podcasts. Podcasts have the biggest croutons.

• Will Davies: Much Peril, Many Intrigue is on at Just The Tonic at The Caves at 5.30pm during the Edinburgh Fringe

Published: 3 Aug 2025