Congrats

The Hackney Empire New Act competition is the most prestigious of its ilk. Last night it was won by my friend Rob Broderick and his Irish improv hip-hop group Aband'o'man.

A name, as they say, to watch.

The 1% doctrine

There is some logic to the idea that it is better to overreact to a situation than to underreact. However, overreaction is not an incontestable virtue per se. Action often feels better than passivity but that misses the point; if you're trying to solve my problem then what I need is an appropriate response. There can be as much downside in doing too much as too little.

Much of the world is wired to overreaction. US tort law is an obvious driver here. American politics has long been skewed by lawyers and their lobbyists forcing the view that overreaction is a necessary virtue on the commercial culture of that country (and thence the world). I once sat in a meeting in a US corporate HQ where the in-house lawyer demanded that the company avoid recommending a specific course of action to a customer (aka 'sales') as that amounted to exposure to law suits. The VP of Sales blithely responded that if that were the case then 900 people just lost their jobs.

The most destructive iteration of this was Dick Cheney's 1% Doctrine that justified US adventurism in the Middle East because a threat to American lives assessed at a liklihood of 1% was to be treated with the same seriousness of a 99% threat. This flawed logic led to the Iraq War amongst other policy disasters.

Risk should be avoided but not at any cost.

How much is cool worth?

In the past fortnight I've performed in four improv shows; three in California and last Saturday an eight-hour shift in London's 50-Hour Improvathon. The most commercially successful of these was also unabashedly the least cool.

Tradition dictated that after that show came down we sprinted to the foyer to line up and high-five every audience member as they left the theatre. This was done smilingly without a hint of condescension. As my castmates happily chatted about the show, the cast and life in general it was clear that many, if not most of the punters were returnees. We'd played to a full house so this process took a good fifteen minutes before we could head back upstairs to pack up and change.

This is how you get your 1,000 Fans. By converting monologues into dialogue. By smiling and letting people touch you. By answering questions and asking a couple of your own. By not worrying about being cool.

Cool is the opposite of friendly. Cool is aloof. It's black-windowed limousines, velvet ropes, private rooms and everything else that limits interaction. At a commercial level cool operates on the old one-way producer-to-consumer relationship.

But cool only pays if you've got 100,000 fans each paying $1 for the monologue. This puts you at the traditional end of the Long Tail and good luck to you if you get there. In the book of the same name, Chris Anderson warns that when shooting for 100,000 it's all or nothing. A fanless rock star is just a guy in dark glasses with a day job.

I kick myself for keeping the Scenes from Communal Living cast back for production notes instead of sending them out to chat with strangers who'd come to see the show. By the time we got downstairs only our friends were still hanging around and they were fans already.

Cool doesn't pay as many bills as you'd think.

1,000 fans

Last night's gig involved a six-hour round trip to Lincolnshire on roads that were less trecherous than the British media had warned / wished. Happily I shared the trip with another comic, a newly arrived recruit to the legion of Australian stand-ups based here.

We spent much of the time puzzling over his big challenge: -

What is the quickest means for him to create sufficient demand for his stand-up such that he can provide for his wife and newborn daughter?

His parameters are simple: he sees himself primarily as a storyteller and really isn't interested in TV except to further his live performing. He is a terrific writer and fine comic with a long track record of great shows in Australia. What piqued my interest was his mention of 1000 Fans. This is a new sort of business model ascribed to Kevin Kelly, the logic of which is as follows: -

An artist can make a living from a thousand fans willing to part with a hundred dollars a year

So as well as creating cool stuff we have to usurp the means of distribution (promotion) of our work. The idea also raises something interesting about ambition: -

Is $100,000 p.a. enough?

This is a fascinating question to ask young comics. $100,000 is more money than most comics will ever earn in a year but far less than what they dream of. Like every kid footballer who believes he's the next Christiano Ronaldo, young comics seem to want Russell Brand's life or bust. My new Australian friend is mature enough to see that $100K a year doing the thing he loves as amounts to a successful life. Now all he has to do is find those thousand fans.

Kelly chose his two numbers carefully; 1,0000 is more people than you can possibly know well but not so many that they can't feel that they have a relationship with you, which speaks to the asymmetric (but not didactic) nature of 'fandom'. And $100 a year is neither a throwaway amount nor does imply an obsession.

Cultivating a thousand-strong fanbase means putting the effort into avenues of ongoing two-way dialogues. So setting up your own fan page on Facebook is a wholly illusory step in the right direction. For a stand-up comic the real gain is more likely to come from chatting to the punter who buys you a drink; this is someone showing that they want to give you more, that they want a relationship.

I am a huge fan of The Bugle, the free weekly podcast made by Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver (of The Daily Show). I have no idea how many subscribers they have but right now I'm listening to a 'Best Of' episode featuring 20 minutes of fans' unsolicited remixes of old shows. Because the podcast is free its fans have found other ways to create the dialogue.

So Kelly's metric presents a stark question for a live performer: how many of your Facebook 'fans' would pay $20 a show to see you perform five times a year? You're welcome to include family and friends in that number.

Stories

Every trainer should understand that narratives are important. Everyone should.

This is the Commencement Speech that Robert Krulwich gave at Caltech in 2008. It's part of the fantastic Radiolab science podcast series from WNYC / NPR.

Scenes from Communal Living: wrap-up

As it's highly unlikely that Scenes from Communal Living will reappear in 2010, what follows is an assessment of the experiences of last year.

The year broke broadly into four interrelated projects: -

1. The initial Camden run (18 shows over three weeks)
2. Edinburgh (25 shows back-to-back)
3. Sydney (10 shows over a fortnight)
4. The return to Camden (16 shows on consecutive Sundays)

Initial Camden Run

An almost unqualified success. The cast were focused and committed to the rehearsal and performance schedule. The investment in PR ensured a decent level of press coverage. Friends and family made the effort to support the show, some on multiple occasions. The shows themselves were high energy and great fun and by the end of the run we were turning away punters.

This straight-shot multinight run approach may be the best chance that a show like Scenes has in terms of both creative quality and promotability.


Edinburgh

Hard but a 25-show run was always going to be. It was essentially the same cast as the Camden run, many of whom were distracted by other projects. This in turn ate into the rehearsal schedule and also left me with little or no post-show time to correct bad habits once we got started. As fatigue set in things got genuinely unpleasant off stage so it became harder and harder for anything good to emerge on stage. Houses were at the bottom of expectations. It was always going to be hard to achieve decent share-of-mind in the ultimate crowded marketplace, especially as I arrived with no real appreciation of how little love the Festival has for improv.

I don't regret taking the show to Edinburgh but in retrospect there's much I'd do differently: demand more commitment from the cast, perhaps even recast the show entirely and definitely do less than the full month. Also I was guilty of schoolboy howlers like not giving the best quotes from London critics sufficient prominence on the flier.


Sydney

This was really Marko's baby and everything I know is via second-hand reports (including an absolutely stunning review). Marko took a different approach to casting in that he chased a couple of 'alpha performers' then allowed them a lot of input in terms of casting and rehearsal scheduling. This seemed to disrupt his production timeline but the show's overall creative quality was seemingly unaffected. We made the decision to paper the house for the Opening Night in the expectation that this would create 'buzz' and we'd recoup the lost sales in word-of-mouth. This didn't really happen and we left money on the table by giving tickets to punters who would otherwise have paid.

My advice to Scenes from Communal Living's next 3rd-party director is to have faith in your ability to extract great performances from run-of-the-mill performers rather than chase reputations, especially as the Sydney 'alphas' ultimately didn't outshine the rest of the cast. The success of the straight-shot multinight approach was certainly vindicated.


Return to Camden

We expanded the cast and creative quality returned to pre-Edinburgh heights. I had taken a regular weekly slot because I was intrigued by the challenge of carving out an ongoing space in the London comedy landscape. My hubris was aptly punished, especially as I relied on some low-level media contacts, Facebook and fliering as my sole promotional tools. We were old news to both the London print media and those punters who had supported it earlier in the year. Tickets were unnecessarily expensive for a Sunday night show.

In London a 50-or so seat theatre is a promoter's black hole: there's no way that anything less than a consistent run of 90% houses will break even after PR costs have been factored in. The theatre was unwilling to offer much of a discount and I glibly refused to see that as I was going to lose money anyway I might as well have set a loss-making ticket price from the outset and got bigger houses. I also wonder whether the specific nature of the show (scenes always set flat-share arrangements) was a negative for improv fans who will happily turn up every week to watch the same actors work in a more demonstrably open format.



2009 taught me a lot. I'm a little sad about the 2010 hiatus but needs must.