Reality Check

Getting a story into your stand-up can make it shine.

As Spring turns to Summer the nation's comedians start to really get to grips with their new shows, with an eye on the Edinburgh Fringe in a few months' time. To those outside the comedy business, a stand-up show probably seems pretty simple: you just tell your best jokes, for an hour. And, yes, a lot of performers are happy enough doing that.

Increasingly, though, a stand-up show needs a bit more substance to fulfil certain objectives - to get noticed and talked about, win award nominations, then TV, tours, and more. It needs a story. Most stand-ups tend to talk about their own lives anyway, but weaving those anecdotes into a coherent narrative is harder than it sounds. If also rewarding, when it works.

Autobiographical tales certainly work elsewhere. Kenneth Branagh's film Belfast fictionalised his Northern Irish upbringing and won seven Oscar nominations this year. Tales of loved ones, too: Colleen Hoover's novel It Ends With Us sold over a million, loosely based on her parents' relationship and the cliff-hanger question, does Lily end up with Atlas? And that's something comedians are already good at, the pull-back and reveal. Every gag is arguably a cliff-hanger.

Take a knock-knock joke: it's like a tiny episode of Columbo. We all know that it's the same old structure every time, but we all want to find out whodunnit anyway (in Colombo, who knocked someone off; in a knock-knock joke: who knocked).

Good comics are already thinking about narrative, when they put a set together; even the punslingers. Whenever you insert a callback - a joke later in a set that refers back to a previous one - you're adding a whole extra layer; taking the audience on a journey. But can you go another step further and get them emotionally invested in what you're talking about? And would you want to? It's not for everyone.

Stand-up comedy is a broad church nowadays, and sometimes telling jokes just isn't enough. There are big subjects that need to be discussed, and everything is fair game: the loss of a close relative is now a surprisingly common theme in the stand-up world, for example, so much so that it's almost a cliché. But stories like that are good for getting attention, and keeping an audience interested, particularly at that awkward 45 minute mark, when they've had enough of laughing.

There are two main ways that comics actively try to add some story to their show. Newer acts often have a big bunch of pre-existing material they want to work in, then try to think of a theme that links those routines, with varying degrees of success. In an ideal world it gels together so well that people assume they actually did the second method: decide on the story, then add gags along the way, and hope they work.

Either way, it's worth a go. It's a perfectly valid goal in the live comedy business to make an audience laugh for an hour: giving them a break from all their worries sure would help a lot, as the theme from Cheers put it. But if you can give that crowd some 'takehome' too - send them away with something to think about - then that takes laughter to a whole new level. And if you build in a bit of suspense: now that's a show.