We regularly meet with owners and managers of venues to discuss the potential of running a comedy night in their premises. As with any meeting, all those attending bring their own aims and knowledge (or lack of) to the situation - we don’t know much about running bars, and often they don’t know much about running comedy nights. So this can lead to a bit of ever-so-mild conflict on occasions - particularly if the venue has only ever put on music events before.

You see, hosting a music event is VERY different to hosting a comedy night.

Put music on at a loud enough volume and it doesn’t matter whether the audience are dancing, singing along, looking at their phones or wandering in and out to the loo every 5 minutes.

But with comedy you’ve got to ensure that there are only two things that can be heard in the room

1 - The comedian

2 - Laughter

• The stage needs to be lit brighter than the rest of the room but the audience still need to be lit enough that they can be seen
• Drinks should only be served in the breaks - otherwise there’s noise of glasses, change and people ordering a small babycham (or other more modern drinks)
• All seats (and they need to be seated) should point towards the stage

And that’s only a small selection of the things we suggest/insist

This isn’t just us being difficult for the sake of it - we know what we’re doing!

And the venue manager knows how to run a venue 😀

Dan - Funny Firm