LESS BECOMES MORE

Stand-up comedy in Britain revolves around August

The Edinburgh Festival is the focal point

Comics need a new 60 minutes for it each year

So after they’ve finished one year

Sworn they’ll never do it again

And then realised they probably will

They have about 9 months to get their act ready

And so begins the process

Original ideas and themes are the first part

But then comes the really important part

The refining

The testing and trialling

Reframing and rethinking

Lucy Porter has described making her show

As about getting rid of stuff

Much more than about adding stuff

Cutting away and striping back

That’s where the great jokes are found

Because it’s not about more jokes

It’s about better jokes

I’ve been pitching to clients for 10 years

In almost every pitch we’ve been adding right up to the last minute

New stuff, right at the end

Which is crazy when you think about it

Like trying a joke for the first time at Edinburgh festival

We don’t do nearly enough of the other side of making

The discarding, the tightening, the refining

The bits that can make good great


As an industry built to generate ideas

We’ve become over focussed on the generation

At the expense of the refinement

But clients don’t need more ideas

They just need better ones

We need to remember when making

Less becomes more