Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Comedy gigs can be a challenge for audiences too
It must be the dream of many stand-up fans to start their own comedy club, one day, and perhaps bring their favourite live acts to their own home towns. They'll become a pioneer, the face of comedy in that town, and perhaps even get some stage time of their own with a bit of compering. Getting slots at gigs is increasingly competitive as more and more new acts emerge, so a lot of comedy clubs kick off as a place for the host to hone his or her act.
On the other hand, there are probably a lot more people who've thought about starting one, quickly come up with a bunch of potential downsides, and decided against it. That must be particularly prevalent in smaller towns, which could actually do with more to do. The very idea of prising people away from their suburban couches can seem a gargantuan task, as there's a whole world of in-the-house options these days. You could be listening to French radio, or playing USA online casinos, or watching a live feed of a train making its way from one bit of Scandinavia to another.
Would you really want to prise yourself away from the web's endless source of global opportunities, to wander out and pay good money to watch some comedians that you may well never have heard of, especially after a hard day at work?
If you're in that can-I-be-bothered zone, you can usually come up with at least one occasion where you've been stuck watching someone have a nightmare on stage, which turns out to be a nightmare for the audience too. Unlike films or concerts, there's an idea that leaving a comedy show early is more difficult: either you'll hurt the comic's feelings, or you'll getting harangued by them as you try to sneak off. Both can be awkward.
What's often forgotten in these should-I-stay-or-should-I-go occasions is the transformative effect of being part of a room that's all laughing together (or pretty much everyone laughing together anyway; there's always someone who isn't, and they're invariably sitting right at the front, for some bizarre reason). That's partly because great gags have a weird tendency to vanish from your head the minute they've been said, as if you've been zapped by that Men In Black neutralizer thing.
There's a whole Billy Connolly routine about it, the fact that his whole audience would laugh until they hurt, go home, tell a friend about it the next day, and not remember a single thing he said. It's almost as if the first thing a really top comedian learns is how to hypnotise an audience so no-one nicks the jokes.
The thing is, even if a comedy gig does turn out to be the biggest onstage catastrophe since Samantha Fox and Mick Fleetwood hosted the Brit Awards, at least you'll remember that show, and you'll all laugh about it when you eventually get to leave the venue, and every time your companions mention it in the decades to come. And then, having made an effort to go out and support live comedy, you can feel good about heading back home to watch, say, a live webcam feed of the tide coming in on an Australian beach. Or whatever floats your boat.