More thoughts on collaboration

It was a sure bet that Andrew Watts would take exception to my entry on the lack of collaboration in the stand-up milieu: -

It's different from other art forms because your collaborator will have a different function - Alan Bennett talks about how productive his relationship with Richard Eyre is - but there it's because Eyre is, as a director, coming at each script from a different angle to the writer.  But in stand-up, there is a direct relationship between you and the audience; and any collaborator will feel like a third party in a marriage.

Andrew is wrong-headed here (knowing him, perhaps deliberately so); he confuses the roles within a collaborative arrangement with its overall intent and he knows that a raving* of comics riffing off each others' bon mots in the pub is not the actual work of writing

I think that the real reason that so few stand-up comics can effectively write for another is a lack of personal vision (or 'voice').  No writer can collaborate with a performer who lacks the discipline to reject a joke, no matter how good, on the grounds that it isn't right for his or her act.  Occasionally I've been asked to direct a comic who hasn't yet got this voice / vision thing right and the project has quickly fallen apart.  Conversely the few times I've been lucky enough to direct comics who have artistic certainty the resulting shows have been great.

Interestingly, it's about the time that a good comic finds a voice that he or she begins to attract a fan base.  There is a consistency to Stewart Lee's left-of-centre political material that sets him apart from Tim Vine's manic punnery.  Fans will pay more and travel further to get what they want from either act than for a night of 'voiceless' acts no matter how funny.

Sadly, my own set is still a mishmash of personal anecdotes, cleverish observations, puns and so on.  Charitably you'd say that I'm still finding my voice.  Until then collaboration would be counterproductive so my ideas won't coming around Devizes to beat Watts' at sport any time soon.

***

I can't resist mentioning the comparison that has been made between the Bennett / Ayres collaboration with that of the playwright Anton Chekov and the director Constantin Stanislavsky.  Until he joined the Moscow Art Theatre Chekov was convinced that The Seagull was a comedy

* My suggestion for the collective noun