Free kicks

On Saturday night in Abergavenny in the beautiful Welsh valleys I did one of the most difficult gigs I've done in ages. Every comic knows the sinking feeling one gets when the poster on the venue door advertises Tonight! Free Comedy!

Is it banal to point out that for comedy to succeed the audience must be engaged? Most comics write material that pre-supposes that at some level the audience wants to engage in what's being said from the stage. We'd like that engagement to result in laughter but we acknowledge and accept silence and heckling as workable alternatives to be converted into laughter if we're good enough.

The first mistake the promoter of the Abergavenny gig made was to not charge the audience to watch the show. Even so he got nervous that the crowd was still too small so he had the brainwave of shutting the pub's other bars to force the crowd back to where we were performing. A horde of chatty Welsh drinkers looking for nothing more than a refill piled into the room where, despite it being no more than four metres from the stage itself, the bar kept serving.

All of this happened after the show had started meaning that the (excellent) MC had no opportunity to engage the newcomers and attempt to lay down some ground rules. The acts were left on the horns of a dilemma -

Do you play to the seated few whose attention has been earned already or do you sacrifice that attention to go after the many that arrived late and who may or may not hang around?

Each act tried a different approach but nothing worked. We did our time and salved our egos afterward by declaring the room unplayable.