Last month I was chatting to a frequent collaborator and friend about a new idea we’ve just pitched into the Gods of Radio (pray for us! Cross your fingers! Send us your best vibes! It’s a documentary about pirates, kind of!). We were catching up on what we’d both been up to and I was explaining that most of my year so far had revolved around live work again, with me working on my own show and simultaneously directing several others.

“Just as the cards foretold,” I rounded off, smugly.

“What?” he replied. I explained once again that a Tarot spread I’d done over Christmas had predicted that my year would principally revolve around a return to live work, with frightening accuracy, and that he’d know that if he’d signed up to my newsletter like a true friend and fan.

“Go and read it now,” I demanded tetchily, popping the link into the Zoom chat. The call was silent for ten minutes or so.

“Doesn’t say anything about live work,” he said eventually. I’d forgotten I was still on a call at this point, and was by now midway through a Sporcle quiz to see if I knew all the Spider-Man villains (I don’t – who the hell is Big Wheel??).

“What?” I said, hurriedly closing the window.

“All the cards you drew relate to vague, non-specific concepts like goal-setting, negative thought patterns, poverty-consciousness and so on. The only person making them relate to the idea of doing more live comedy work again is you.”

“Oh, right,” I said, a little disappointed.

“Also, this part of our conversation didn’t even happen, you’re just once again inserting an external critical voice into your prose writing so that you can simultaneously enjoy the mystical air of being someone who gets a kick out of Tarot spreads while also making fun of yourself for it because deep down you know it’s all a bit silly.”

“Oh, is that what I’m doing?” I said.

“Seems like it to me,” he replied. The conversation then reverted back into things that did actually happen, and I told him more about these shows I’ve been working on.

“So what is comedy directing?” he said eventually. “I see it more and more these days, on people’s posters – “directed by so-and-so” – but I don’t really grasp what that means in relation to a comedy show. Is it like a theatre director or a film director? Are you making all the decisions and telling them what to do?”

I’ve been asked this question a few times, and in the last couple of years I’ve learned a huge amount about it as I’ve built up my directing practice, so I thought I’d talk a bit about it here this week.

In my experience, the director of a live comedy show is most similar to a role in theatre called a dramaturg (the “g” is pronounced “gzgzh.”) A dramaturg will usually come in and provide some form of external support and accountability during the writing process of a play – researching the writer’s ideas, interpreting the script and story, helping the play to take shape by asking questions and workshopping ideas – but they’re not directly responsible for the play itself. That responsibility is shared by the writer and director, with the writer obviously responsible for the actual text and the director responsible for all the decisions made about how that text is interpreted and staged. Generally speaking, once a play actually goes into rehearsal, it’s the director who decides what happens at any given moment of the production, but that’s not usually the case with a comedy show.

By contrast, a comedy show belongs creatively to its writer-performer, with the director playing more of an advisory, supportive role. Ultimately, every decision about what’s actually going to happen in the show comes down to what the comedian wants to do, and the director is there to facilitate them doing that. I always see it as my job in the rehearsal room to be a mirror to whatever the comedian says they’re trying to make. I try to listen closely to what they say they want the show to be – what themes they want it to explore, what tone they want it to have, how they want the audience to feel as they leave – and then to keep asking questions and making suggestions that I think help nudge the show closer towards the thing they’re describing. I tend to work on the assumption that what we’re doing is excavating – the perfect version of the show we’re working on already exists somewhere in the comedian’s brain, but they can’t see it because it’s buried under a lot of other stuff. So it’s my job to help brush the layers away until we can see it.

Sometimes I might really push for an idea I’ve had, when I’m convinced that something in what I’m saying is really key to helping the show improve. I might not insist on my exact suggestion being the right one, but I might insist that we’re dancing around something that needs to change, we just haven’t worked out what it is yet. But mostly, I don’t see it as my job to bulldoze through my ideas – if I make a suggestion and the comedian responds to it thoughtfully but eventually ends up pushing back against it and insisting on their own initial idea, then I’m very happy to let that happen. I often find in those scenarios that the discussion has still ended up changing something, because the act of being challenged and forced to consider a different interpretation then means the comedian rethinks how to present that idea in a way that makes it clear what they want it to say.

So the job of being a live comedy director essentially involves being a good listener, and being good at spotting opportunities in between the things a comedian says they want. My actual process in the room changes from show to show. I’m directing four shows this year (yes, that is a lot, no I don’t regret it because they’re all really good, but then it’s not August yet, so let’s see how I feel in September), and they’re all so different that the way in which we end up working on them is entirely dictated by what kind of show the comedian is trying to make.

Here I am directing Edy Hurst’s Wonderfull Discoverie Of Witches In The Countie Of Himself last year at the Lowry in Salford – sometimes being a comedy director simply involves summoning the comedian from out of a big cauldron, and all you need to be able to do the job is a working knowledge of dark magick.

One of these four shows is a sketch show that already existed in an early form before I came on board, so it’s easier to work on it almost as if it were a theatre show – we’ll get the individual sketches up on their feet and run through them, with me watching and taking notes and occasionally interrupting to suggest things or observe things. We’ll discuss bigger things like structure and themes as well, but all that discussion feeds back into practical work where we try to directly explore how the things we’ve discussed can feed into the sketches and transitions themselves. (Side note on lunches, a key part of the collaborative process – on this show lunch tends to involve a range of different cheeses, one of which had black bits on it one time. I was told this meant it was good cheese, but I tried some and I do think it had gone off. Otherwise really good lunches, though).

Another show is a character comedy show which didn’t really exist until I came on board – there was a fantastic 10-15 minute character routine that I loved, and I came in to help expand it into a full show. For this one, we’ve been working with me as more of an active participant in the generating of material – interviewing the character in extended improv sessions, getting up and trying out collaborative dance routines in the absence of an audience to play off, and so on. All that work eventually translates into the same sort of “running it through on its feet” work as the sketch show, but the initial bulk of the work was about helping to literally create the material to then sculpt into a show. (Lunch on this show is usually a falafel and salad platter from a cafe round the corner, which the guy spends up to seven minutes arranging neatly on a board so the cous cous forms a quadrilateral heap with a bit of pickle jauntily perched on each corner).

And the other two shows are stand-up shows, which are much harder to “rehearse,” because written stand-up feels incredibly stilted and artificial when recited by one person to another person in a rehearsal environment without an audience. There, my role is much closer to being a sort of creative counsellor – I’ll try to ask the right questions, listen to the answers and then look for what’s going on underneath them in order to find the avenues we can explore that will help the show grow into the best version of itself. We might sometimes try and rehearse things more practically, but often it’s more about discussing things as thoroughly as possible and then setting “homework” – identifying the new ideas, structures or approaches that could be tested and tried out at previews and gigs to then feed back into the show and discuss the results of next time we meet. (My work on both these shows has been done in half-days rather than full days so far, so I cannot comment on lunch, but with one of them we often drink Diet Coke while we work, and with the other we enjoy eating Doritos and salsa).

So that’s pretty much the job! It sometimes involves getting up and rehearsing things over and over as you would in theatre, and it sometimes involves fighting your corner and saying “This is what I think needs to happen here” the way a film director might. But often, you end up being more of a therapist than anything else, listening to what someone wants and then talking to them and giving them the space to help them achieve it.

As for why it’s become so prevalent over the last 15 years or so, when at one point it wasn’t really a very visible or talked about aspect of making live comedy, I think it ultimately comes down to two things. One, that live comedy has become increasingly ambitious and theatrical over the last two decades and ambitious theatrical ideas require collaboration in order to work as well as they possibly can. And two, live comedy can be a lonely pursuit – so much of it involves raking over your own lived experience and thoughts and ideas trying to find anything of value, and sometimes the sheer experience of having a companion who is there for the process and ready to carry some of it for you and help you to see the value in what you’re doing, can be completely transformative.

It amazes me that I used to make shows completely on my own. It’s such a silly way of working. To round off, if I may just take a moment to be very proud of the work my directing clients are doing this year – this week not one but two of these shows were nominated for awards at the Leicester Comedy Festival – the Mayor and his Daughter for Best Debut Show (cheese) and Andy Barr for Best New Show (Doritos).

I remember feeling like such an imposter when I first started directing shows 3 years ago, and I’m so proud to see that now I am actually able to help people achieve amazing things, and see their shows really growing. Though as I say, all I’m doing is helping them to make the show they already had in their head. I just enjoy brushing things away to get to it. I hope it’s a line of work I get to keep doing for a good long while. Just maybe not four shows in one year next time.

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – Glasgow Comedy Festival is just around the corner! I am, of course, going to plug my own show on the 18th because I think it’s great and the people of Glasgow will love it, but there’s loads of other great shows next week that you should check out – Soft Play! Micky Overman! Katie Mitchell! Grace Jarvis! Felicity Ward! Pravanya Pillay! That’s plenty for now and still only gets us to next Sunday, so maybe I’ll do more recommendations next week.

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – Sorry to sound like a broken record, but it’s The Apprentice again because this week they made a really shit-looking chocolate egg.

Book Of The Week – I’m reading Every Man For Himself And God Against All, Werner Herzog’s memoir. He’s just told the story of how he acquired his first camera, which he says has been misinterpreted in the retelling as him having stolen it. He says what actually happened was that he picked it up to have a go on it then took it outside to test the viewfinder over longer distances, then realised nobody had stopped him so he might as well take it home. I guess that’s kind of different to stealing it.

Album Of The Week – If I Could Do It All Over Again I’d Do It All Over You by Caravan. This album title is so rude. I can’t believe it. I thought Caravan were a very genteel band, but that title is outrageous. Good album, though. I can’t believe I’ve been a card-carrying prog fanatic for nearly 20 years now and have only just started getting into the Canterbury scene. What a scene! Oh to have been in Canterbury in 1970!

Film Of The Week – Memoir Of A Snail. Be warned – this is incredibly bleak and miserable. It looks charming because of the stop motion animation, but it is unremittingly grim. I can’t work out if it was a smidge too grim and could’ve done with a tiny bit more hope, or if it actually did exactly what it wanted to do very well, as I do keep thinking about it. It also boasts an incredible cameo which I won’t spoil.

That’s all for this week! As ever, let me know what you thought, and if you enjoy the newsletter enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe I’d hugely appreciate it. Take care of yourselves until next time, and all the best,

Joz xx

PS If you value the Therapy Tapes and enjoy what they do, and want to support my work and enable me to keep writing and creating, you can make a one-off donation to my Ko-Fi account, and it’s very gratefully appreciated.

PPS Sunsets are shit, aren’t they? Look at this crap one I watched in Rye:

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