From time to time a disgruntled promoter will write something accusing the people of Birmingham of being an apathetic bunch who’d rather stay at home than go out and have a good time. See this post from a year ago for an example.
James Cook has joined this cohort with a post titled ‘Why the Birmingham comedy scene repeatedly dies on its hole…‘. His gripes are that (and I apologise for paraphrasing):
- research shows that residents of Birmingham are the most risk averse in the country. We have a drinking culture, but not much of a ‘going out’ culture. This makes things difficult for promoters
- there are too many poor quality comedy night charging people good money to see new, unpaid acts. These nights are rubbish and will put people off ever going to a comedy night again
I don’t claim to know too much about this – I go to the occasional stand-up show, but I don’t have James’s experience of the local comedy scene and he’s not the first to have made this complaint. However, from a lay punter’s point of view, I was under the impression that if comedy’s your thing then Birmingham caters for you pretty well. We’ve got:
- the NIA and LG Arena for the big, mainstream touring shows
- Town Hall and Alexandra Theatre for other biggish touring shows
- two main stand-up venues – The Glee Club and Highlight
- other occasional shows at The Public and the MAC. Warwick Arts Centre and various places in Wolverhampton are fairly close too
- some smaller, regular nights bringing in some decent national names (Comedy Junction and Popcorn Comedy)
- there’s a proliferation of other, smaller nights at pubs and bars around over the city too
In terms of general promotion, we’ve got a dedicated comedy website and (almost?) every year the Birmingham Comedy Festival draws a ring around a load of shows happening over the space of a month and shouts about them.
That seems like a pretty healthy spread to me. Certainly a good deal more than many other towns and cities can claim. Does it constitute a ‘scene’? If not, is it just the audiences for the smaller gigs that are missing, or something else?
I’d be interested in hearing what people think. Or, seeing as how he started the discussion, leave a comment on James’s post.
Hi Chris, thanks for highlighting my blog post
My main concern, and motivation for posting, is the proliferation of smaller nights that you mention. These are the ones that, if they followed the Comedy Junction model, would be a massive boon to the about-a-fifth-of-the-size-of-Manchester’s comedy scene that we have in Birmingham – but mostly they are slash and burn gigs run by people who have no quality control and who are, intentionally or not, misleading an audience.
There is a bit of a comedy scene in Birmingham, but most of those venues you mention are only concerned with touring shows from TV names or are organisations from outside of the City – so we don’t really consider them being part of it. I’m probably being a bit too insular and I think it’s good that I can get an ‘outsiders’ perspective on this.
I think what I’d like is to have a comedy scene where the audience trust that a ‘comedy night’ advertising ‘top stand-ups’ (whether they’ve heard of them or not) will be any good, and that the promoters deliver value for money to ensure that attitude prevails.
Cheers
James
What about Laughing Cows 2nd Wed of the month @ The Kitchen Garden Cafe in Kings Heath?
I think visibility is a problem in Birmingham. I went to a Fat Penguin Comedy night in Moseley last night which, while a bit shonky in places, had four really good acts on for a fiver in a local pub, two of which were bigger names.
I went because I saw a poster in the pub, but the gig wasn’t on any online listings sites, there were no Twitter or Facebook pages, there were no posters outside of the pub it was held in, and no press coverage.
I think this situation is common and amounts to a seemingly smaller ‘scene’ (if that’s what a competitive market for live comedy should be called) and stunts a small club’s ability to grow an audience.
Another bi-product of a lack of visibility is the amount to which up-and-coming comedians (who might only need short open support slots) see that there are gigs available in the city. I’d love to see more acts from around the country learning their trade in Birmingham and getting a name for themselves.
I really don’t believe for one second that it is the audience in Birmingham that is missing. The comedy festival and other successful nights prove this. If the scene is to get stronger, the promoters need to up their games, be that through their bookings, promotion, presentation, media coverage, location, or otherwise.
Hi Chris
Gudonya for highlighting whats good about the Birmingham scene, but having had a little experience of other comedy scene around the place, I would agree with James that Birmingham’s seems remarkably poor for a city of its size.
Exactly why this is Im afraid I couldnt tell you. I think James makes a valid point about the dangers of audiences judging the quality of the stand up scene on the basis of what is basically a new act night, but that cant be the whole of the story.
One basic theory I fall back is diversity. The diversity of culture in Brum is a huge blessing in many ways, but compared to somewhere like Manchester – which seems from what little I know to have a more homogenous culture, perhaps it makes it difficult for things to flourish at certain levels.
Perhaps our diversity simply means it takes longer for a scene to develop in which case it may simply be a case of lets celebrate what we have so far and watch this space …
Rich
Ian’s point about visibility is an important one. It’s going to be difficult for comedians and audiences, both inside and outside Birmingham to be inspired to be part of a scene that they’re not even sure exists.
If the Manchester/Birmingham control test is going to be used, typing in ‘Manchester Comedy’ in Google turns up this as the first result:
http://www.manchestercomedyguide.com/
Whilst Who’s Laugh Now is great there’s room for a clearly signposted home for everything comedy in the Midlands.
Further to my comment. Having run Popcorn Comedy for a while now, it’s incredible how much easier it was to sell tickets when the Comedy Festival was on.
It wouldn’t be hard to round up the local scene with a similar amount of enthusiasm all year long. The Comedy Festival itself would then have a bigger base to jump from.
I agree that visibility is an issue. In my experience, local media (especially the traditional print media) generally show very little interest in comedy outside of the Comedy Festival or whenever one of the really big acts comes to the LG Arena. I’m generalising, of course, and there are exceptions, but really not that many. Maybe they’re reflecting what a lot of people think – live comedy at the ‘top end’ is big business, and there’s lots of stand-up on TV again, which is how a lot of people will find out about acts. Maybe it’s a fear of the unknown or taking a punt on acts they’ve never seen before. I know people whose only experience of being in a comedy club was a stag night at the Glee Club, which is fair enough but if they’d never been before and haven’t been back since…why, and what could be done to change that? I think James’ point about being risk averse is relevant here.
Louis – thanks for flagging up the Manchester Comedy Guide site. I do what I can with Who’s Laughing Now but am very limited due to time and resources, and reliance on public transport means covering anything outside of Coventry, Birmingham and (maybe) Wolverhampton is very difficult. Due to a lack of contributors we don’t even have many reviews of the smaller comedy nights which need the support far more than bigger venues which have devoted marketing departments.
What’d be really interesting is to know who is behind that Manchester site. A network of venues? Promoters? A media outlet? There are surely enough people passionate about live comedy in Birmingham alone that it could be possible to group together and do something which is broadly similar, maybe stretching out further across the Midlands. I know I’d like to be part of something like that.
Simon – Definitely agree. Found information on the team behind the Manchester Comedy Guide. Seems like an ambitious but sustainable set up. http://www.prideofmanchester.com/aboutus/index.htm
Look Who’s Laughing fulfils it’s agenda really well, especially with the limited resources. I just used it as an example as the closest we have to a continuous all-encompassing site.
From a punter’s point of view would I really go to http://www.manchestercomedyguide.com/ or smilar to find out about small gigs? Seems like a mainstream site existing only to sell tickets or get referral money from hotels etc — 7 clicks to a venue page and still no information about whether any of the acts were any good or not. I don’t think a lack of information is the problem.
Visibility of that info might be. But I think information above the basic words is what stops people, if you have to build individual brands (comedians or promoters) then there’s no scene — no assumption that anything on has any value other than what you can derive about it on it’s own.
http://livebrum.co.uk/genres/comedy pulls all the info through, but doesn’t do critical analysis — but then nothing in birmingham does really, not for music, art, anything. There’s a wealth of preview but little review.
(Could whoslaughingnow pull that feed through, easy enough & I’m sure Josh would help) to leave more time to do the critical bits?
Oh and then buy http://birminghamcomedy.com/ and point it there for the SEO juice.
Louis – just to clarify, I didn’t interpret your comments about WLN as criticism (though I recognise its limitations). My reasons for starting up Who’s Laughing Now were to continue what I used to do for the Birmingham Post (interviews, features, reviews, previews) as a blog. When Rich, who has also commented above, and I started it we decided to pull in the LiveBrum comedy listings feed rather than attempt our own listings.
It’s sad that there isn’t already something else like the Manchester example which serves Birmingham. I’d love to do more previews and interviews if I have the time – something which can flesh out audience expectations and help promoters to publicise their nights. If there was a dedicated comedy site for Birmingham, and possibly covering wider areas of the West Midlands too, it could have a much greater scope for this. With more manpower, and pooling of information/resources, I think it’s possible.
Looking at the Pride of Manchester site, that’s quite a vast operation but they’re running several sites which are essentially covering most arts/culture in Manchester (couldn’t tell you how well they’re covering it because I’m not familiar with the city, but it looks pretty exhaustive). If there was a network of people with knowledge of what was going on (whatever their background – whether comedians, venues, promoters, media etc), passion for comedy, and ideas about how to share that information with people, it might be possible to emulate something like that but with its own unique Birmingham flavour. I’m throwing my hat into the ring if anybody wants to discuss this further.
Hi folks,
Speaking as someone from Brum who knows the comedy scene pretty well and has recently moved to Manchester, the first thing I noticed was that word of mouth is much stronger.
It goes back to Richard’s point about singular identity in a way but all sorts of people in Manchester have referred me to various local comedy nights. A lot of times comedy does bring us together, yeah?
Another point worth raising is accessibility perhaps. I was a big fan of Comedy Kav – mostly because it was the end of my road. I once spent a night driving round Bearwood trying to find The Bear (or on a Bear hunt – brrrrm tish) to no avail.
And on that bombshell, I thank you, good night.
As Jon says, Live Brum does comedy listings but not critical analysis. If anyone wanted to make a proper site with listings and critical analysis then I would happily provide feeds.
I’d also help set it up and host it if anyone (or group) was sufficiently motivated to maintain it.
Also a quick clarification – whoslaughingnow.org.uk does use Live Brum data for the listings – and other sources for it’s news but I don’t think it’s actively curated.
Oh, ok maybe it is more actively managed than I thought.
http://www.whoslaughingnow.org/2011/03/02/preview-popcorn-comedy-with-david-schneider/
That’s good. Sorry for casting aspersions.
Jon – good point. At the moment we have this: http://www.whoslaughingnow.org/category/listings/ which pulls the info from LiveBrum’s comedy RSS.
That leaves my bit of WLN which is the more critical part – reviews of shows and selective previews. We’ve had a few people doing reviews for us in the past, but people have left the area or become disinterested in doing it so at the moment it’s mostly me (there is one other person who contributes occasional reviews too). I guess I should do more to try to find other people who’d like to go along to gigs (usually for free!) and write reviews of the acts they’ve seen, because there is a lot of ground that could be covered. If you know of anyone interested, do point them my way.
Interesting that that URL’s available…
Dan – interesting to know. Wonder if that’s an issue of people being more willing to recommend things, a greater willingness to try out new things, or something else entirely. I think your point about comedy having the potential to bring people together is a really important one. Are there many better feelings than being in a room full of people united in laughter (unless, I suppose, you’re the one to have made them laugh, intentionally so)?
A lot of the smaller nights in Birmingham happen outside of the city centre – other than the Glee and Highlight (clearly the Town Hall/Symphony Hall, Alexandra, Hippodrome et al are very different beasts), there’s Popcorn and what else? I think the Old Joint Stock still does comedy nights but not sure who runs them now Rich isn’t involved. But there aren’t seemingly very many good small or medium venues in the city centre offering comedy (I think this is also an issue for music too, although a little less so). You often have to look a bit further afield, and that’s perhaps harder for people to do without a more comprehensive resource (which, if and when I have more time, I’d like WLN to become) for people to dig into and get more detailed information from.
Having now read all the comments properly (sorry ’bout that) I will certainly throw my hat in the ring and offer whatever support I can.
Josh – you’re right that it isn’t very actively curated. I do previews selectively, usually about the gigs that I’m going to be reviewing or are most interested in. That’s probably not the most efficient or helpful way of going about it, but with limited time and only myself maintaining the site that’s what I’ve been able to manage.
Oh, and I didn’t think you were casting aspersions!
For the record, as well as using Live Brum for the listings feed we import the Chortle news feed, but obviously that isn’t locally facing.
Again, I can only reiterate that if there’s anyone who’s interested in forming a bigger network to facilitate a more comprehensive site covering Birmingham comedy (whether that’s using Who’s Laughing Now or a completely different site altogether) I’d be keen to talk to them. I know Brum Notes are trying to increase their comedy coverage and it’s something I’ve not had chance to discuss with them in more detail yet, but if there was a comprehensive central place for people to look for a more critical/editorial approach, allied with the Live Brum listings info, it may make it easier to support the live comedy nights taking place in the city (and nearby) and for people to make more informed decisions as paying punters.
Above all critical comment (using it’s proper meaning: comment on the value of something rather than comment on the failings of something) is the bedrock of any ‘scene’. It’s how something gains perceived value. Simon, you’re doing good stuff and I hope more people join you. The promoters, you’re doing good stuff too—you have opinons and care and that’s important.
Critical comment that both helps promote good gigs, promoters, venues, comedians (bands… artists) and reduce the viability of the fly-by-night pig-in-a-poke stuff that James C mentions as devaluing the stock of the artform generally. People who are used to reliable and honest assessment will ask “why haven’t I heard of that/them or why is it out of step with the other stuff”.
Witness the same stuff on music forums “where’s the scene” or on here “why won’t people come to the art”… I’m of the opinion that it might jus be because we don’t talk (or be talked at) whether any of it is any good. It doen’t mean being nasty, but just pointing out the good stuff and ignoring the bad (I’m guilty of this too) isn’t enough.
Who’s gonna do it? I don’t know.
Good thread this.
I moved back to Brum a year ago and I have to say I think things have got better culturally in the past five years. Judging by some of the folks involved in this thread I am thinking that a burgeoning scene for a lot of creative things might be on the cards.
“Be the change you want to see in the world”, as the Buddha used to say, or was it John Lennon?
Having seen all the comments so far, I’d like to see Who’s Laughing Now (or something similar) make closer ties with the city’s promoters and act as a platform for them, as well as a resource for audience members.
As well as the reviews, previews, listings, and features, a directory of promoters so people can see the active clubs and venues in the city might help. If this could collect together their reviews, upcoming shows, ticket links, flyers, open performer slots, contact details and general info, that’d be cool.
It seems as a city we aren’t doing the basics to help comedy audiences find the good stuff so some general tips to help ‘skill up’ promoters in the basics of online promotion (such as where to add listings, who to send press releases to, etc) might be a good way of boosting visibility and coverage.
Maybe a weekly what’s on mailing list? A Facebook page?
Just throwing out suggestions here.
Ian – some very good points and a lot of stuff to think about. I agree that the onus should be on promoters to get their message across rather than audiences being solely responsible for seeking it out themselves – if promoters aren’t enthusiastic enough about what they’re doing to sing its praises, why should audiences be expected to care?
I’d certainly like to make Who’s Laughing Now bigger and better, and a site which offers promoters a platform – whether it’s WLN or another site – sounds like a very good idea.
Drawing on personal experience, I think the previous comments regarding a lack of visibility is probably the main problem. For example, I live round the corner from The Bear and had no idea that it still hosted the occasional comedy night. I saw it mentioned in Frank Skinner’s first book (~2yrs ago) but assumed such events had long since vanished as I hadn’t seen or heard anything.
Another problem could simply be that people underestimate stand-up comedy they haven’t hear of. Before I moved to Brum, I had never seen live stand-up (being from the hills!) and I was rather skeptical – I also had a fear that being in a small venue would increase the chances of me being the stand-up’s hapless victim for the evening! I know I’m not the only one to have thought this, and its a daft preconception that should be addressed.
My experience of Brum (and the Black Country) has been that there is a natural sense of humour about the people, much of which is some of the most secure self-deprecation I’ve ever heard.
I have recently been inspired to promote new comedy acts (particularly Birmingham based), and have been exploring various online media resources (youtube, twitter etc) – but currently limited by my following. I have a few ideas and I would certainly be very keen to get involved in any promotional projects
I run a comedy impro night and we have a great group of local comedians and actors. We do Whose Line style games and have sketches and stand up. We’ve recently moved to The Station Pub in Kings Heath where we have our practice sessions on Mondays 7-9. If anyone would like to come and get involved your very welcome as we are always on the look out for new Funbaggers and comedy acts. If any promoters would like to do some cross-prom too, drop me a line on :)
The Funbags Comedy Cabaret
20th April, 8pm, £5
The Station Pub, Kings Heath, Birmingham
Join the hillarious Funbags Comedy Impro Troupe plus special guests for an evening of quality games, sketches and stand-up. This month we have special guest Freddie Farrell, a budding stand-up making waves around the West Midlands, as well as the usual ‘Whose Line’ style games from a wealth of local comedy talent, and an Alan Bennett style monologue thrown in for good measure.
Come get your Funbags squeezed!
Hi
I live in Kent and until recently there was no comedy circuit or scene at all, a friend of mine is now slogging away to change this (comedyisland.co.uk)
but the real reason for my post was I have just started stand up and I have to visit birmingham for a weeks training in may. I thought whilst there I could easily pop along to one, maybe 2 open mic nights and try my stuff.
I have been really surprised at the lack of this sort of night in such a great city, it reminds me of Kent!
If anyone has any ideas they would be appreciated!
Andy
Wonder where he get his stats from. News to me. Dave Gorman was at the Birmingham Hippodrome last Saturday – great crowd – and filmed for Dave TV – likewise Michael McCintyre was full, Dara O’ Briain sold out and John Cleese plays 3 nights in May. Seems to me Brummies love to laugh.
Mandy, you should read the article before posting, you have completely proved his point. Michael McIntyre sell-out gigs were not the focus here!
Super-similar to the unsigned music scene!
Has he been to the Laughing Cows comedy at the Kitchen Garden Cafe, Kings Heath or the Laughing Sole at the Royal Oak, Stirchley? These are regular sell-out monthly/bi-monthly comedy clubs and are a great night out.
I don’t think the Glee Club and the MAC are too bad for comedy – just seen Tim Key and Richard Herring at the Glee and the MAC has Daniel Kitson and Simon Munnery playing shortly. I certainly find the comedy scene here to be much better than the music scene, which is mostly WANK.