Ashley Frieze on how much to invest in making comedy content perfect

As a comedian, one of the greatest pleasures is to get a laugh very soon after having an idea. Thinking of a new bit of material and then quickly hearing it do well with an audience is enormously satisfying, especially if it all happens in the moment.

However, as a musical comedian and creator of online content, I often spend a lot of time between the initial idea and getting it out to the audience. I often worry that with some of the things I create, I’ll end up spending more time crafting it than the total amount of time other people will spend consuming it.

As creatives, are we wilfully wasting our time? Or is the investment of time and craft worthwhile in itself? Is that what makes it art? As I’ve discovered while completing my latest album - Ashley Frieze Is Wasting His Time - there are a few pitfalls to avoid: overcooking, flogging a dead horse, perfectionism, and delay.

The amazing comedy coach, Jill Edwards, teaches that a joke needs to be trimmed and trimmed until there’s nothing unnecessary in it. In musical comedy, where extra bits of music take time to play and dilute the listener’s attention, this rule is especially important.

In my songs, I generally dispense with intros. I rule out repetitive choruses since people will have already heard the joke, unless the chorus develops the idea further. I never have instrumental solos. In my view, there’s almost no such thing as a funny tune, or a funny chord. My musical instincts are to make more music, my comedy ones are to make less.

The only time that having more music is an advantage is if it’s some really delightful showing off, or if the joke is, in itself, a musical one. For example in Tim Minchin’s F Sharp, he’s singing between two keys - a showboating piece of clowning.

Worse than adding stuff that doesn’t serve the joke is continuously revising an idea that will never work. There are two schools of thought here. One is that great material isn’t so much written as rewritten. The idea being that the craft will eventually get the one true draft that shines. The opposing view is that great material is picked from the tree fully formed.

My own experience, annoyingly, is that the stuff I knock out in a few minutes often performs the best on social media. A short song I made about middle lane drivers has probably had the most cumulative views across all platforms, and took me about 20 minutes to make, compared with some of my larger multi-part harmony productions that have largely been ignored.

The biggest thief of time, though, is perfectionism. In producing my album, I know I’ve spent hours and hours tweaking things that people will never notice. It’s a huge dilemma.

Unless you already have the production skills, then taking time learning the studio and editing techniques to get your work out there can seem like time away from creating the thing. For example, Matt Price spent a lot of time editing his recent comedy special himself, slogging through the process to find the show he wanted to release.

If he’d just put one camera at the back of the room, and dropped the video from that, it would have been the same show, though probably not the same polished viewing experience. What Matt’s amazing at is making things happen in a live space. So time not doing that might not seem like time well spent. His special, though, is really special.

The challenge is to strike a balance between improving the experience without  addng stuff that nobody cares about.

Trying to get my songs to sound nice in the car, bringing out details of certain instruments on earbuds, and preventing vocals and cymbals from sounding harsh was a huge investment in time and music tech. All of this was to avoid the listener getting a bad experience, so the jokes were not a turn-off. Whether or not it was time well spent, I’m definitely glad nobody heard some of the versions before I got them right.

I know for a fact that songs like The Meeting That Should Have Been An Email will never truly pay me back for the time I spent trying to unclutter a mix way beyond my sound engineering skills.

But there comes a point where perfection is the enemy of good and you have to get it out there. We have to make peace with accepting the least worst version of what we were trying to make.

This is where unnecessary delays and procrastination can be the worst of all time wasting. I had been holding out until I could make a video of one of my songs. I had various side quests, releasing other things ahead of completing this album. Essentially, I made something that I could have been sharing with the world – then wasted my own time by not getting it out there earlier.

It happens, and maybe the time it spent on the shelf being fine-tuned meant it was a better product. I’ll never know.

I’m going to try to use what I’ve learned on this album project to make future ones better. But I’m proud of what I’ve made this time around.

• Ashley Frieze Is Wasting His Time is available on YouTube, Amazon Music, Spotify and Apple Music.

Published: 13 Apr 2026