Review of a new book about the state of comedy by Jonathan Grant

If you want a good snapshot of the state of the comedy business… well, you’re already in the right place. But if you want the sort of content covered on Chortle collected in neatly summarised chapters and published in book form, Jonathan Grant has you covered.

Now a writer and adman, he was once a stand-up and later an agent  – and now has interviewed more than 50 comedians and others in the industry to create this overview. Its level seems aimed at those who already have some interest and knowledge in the world of stand-up – maybe as an open-spot comic or nascent promoter – who want to get brought up to speed quickly on what older hands already know.

Reading The Room is easy to digest, with fewer than 20 chapters, each of which will only take a few minutes to read. A hot topic such as the culture wars – on which shelves full of polemical books have been written – is covered in 15 pages. Yet Grant covers the main bases with pithy quotes from all those contributing, without taking sides. You’ve surely heard all the arguments before anyway.

The author starts with a brisk assessment of the state of the circuit, bypassing any ancient history about the birth of alternative comedy (again available elsewhere) to focus on the 21st century. The turn of the millennium was a boom time for the big clubs and those who played them, where the likes of Jongleurs paid handsomely, and there was a clearly defined path of progression from newbie to pro, if you fitted the right template.

He charts the evolution through a new wave of alternative nights pioneered by Josie Long (and Robin Ince, rather unfairly overlooked here), the bust that followed the boom, and the proliferation of open-mic nights that have become a huge, messy subculture of its own, hard to escape. 

The pros and cons of Edinburgh, comedians finding their audience ‘tribes’, the wisdom of turning your issues, from mental health to grief, into stand-up are all covered with first-hand pearls of wisdom from comics who have gone down these routes.

A chapter titled, tongue in cheek, The Lady Comedian, addresses some of the toxic elements of the circuit, while the significance of class and race on a comedy career is not overlooked, either.

Meanwhile, the timeline of stand-up moves through the Covid pandemic that temporarily killed the circuit, accelerating the move into today’s world where building up a social media profile is more important for a comedian than catching the eye of a TV executive – even though building an online presence requires a lot of work and skills not always the same as making a live audience laugh, or being innovative.

Grant covers a lot of ground in not many pages, without feeling too rushed or superficial. And he finds new excitements in every mutation along stand-up’s evolutionary path, giving his book the tone of a love letter to the form, without being blind to the many faults that surround it.

‘It’s the very mutability of stand-up comedy that makes it so special,’ he concludes.  It's an artform that didn't work on TV until it took it over, that couldn't play to big audiences until it moved into stadiums, and that had to have people watching it live until it had to go entirely online to survive. 

‘No other type of entertainment can be so easily staged, and when it's good, when it's really great, few others can match its power. It has the ability to educate, provoke, divide, unite, enrage, and engage all while making you howl with laughter.’

• Reading The Room by Jonathan Grant is available from Go Faster Stripe for £15 as a physical copy or £10 digitally.

Review date: 23 Jun 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett