The Joke Doctors

When Brendon Burns won the if.comedy award for So I Suppose THIS Is Offensive Now, he recalled one of his co-directors, Ro Acharya, informing him early in the show’s development that "if you cut out this, this and this, you will keep everyone laughing from start to finish and you will win the if.com." 

At the time people were sceptical of comics employing directors for their Fringe shows. The intensely personal nature of standup, along with the extra cost of hiring a director, fostered a suspicion that still widely endures. For Burns, Acharya and Matt Holt were “deeply instrumental in making a solid show really special and memorable”, though he stresses he had to be willing to learn and cede a degree of control.

“Our level of communication and understanding was so high that we got to where we needed to be in a matter of minutes” he explains. “But using a director is only useful when the comic is ready to listen. And given the control elements in place within any stand-up’s psyche, that’s something to overcome. But the rewards are rich when you do.”

Like Andrew Maxwell and Glenn Wool, Burns had previously worked with Ed Byrne’s younger brother Paul, who alongside erstwhile stand-up/director John Gordillo, credited by Reginald D Hunter as an integral artistic rudder for his shows, was pivotal in changing perceptions of stand-up as a directable process. 

Finding someone sympathetic to your creative vision isn’t easy. The eccentric Paul Foot suggests, possibly apocryphally, that he handed the reins to Noel Fielding after “we were having tea at the Dorchester together, randomly going round shops and then suddenly, on the spur of the moment, Noel said he would direct me. I tried to dissuade him and bore him with the consequences. But he insisted.” 

Facilitating the Mighty Boosh man’s directorial debut has been “completely catastrophic. Instead of just getting on with performing a show, I’ve got an interfering busybody putting his two tuppence worth in, not so much with delusions of grandeur, more the delusions of a nutcase.” 

More seriously, Foot relents: “I think it’s a good partnership. There aren’t many comedians with such an understanding of each other’s work. We’re both original voices and there’s a sort of madness that characterises our shows, even though we both marshall that to ensure there’s reliability and consistency.”

Fielding is more sceptical and argues that stand-ups tend to have their “own idiosyncratic style” and “ultimately, those who make the best directors are not other comics, in the long run.” Recalling when Stewart Lee directed him and Julian Barrett in Arctic Boosh at the 1999 Fringe, he points out that “often he’d have solutions to our problems, but they were very much in his style, which was very difficult to apply to our work”. 

Lee, for his part, has written of trying to convince the Boosh they were Flanagan and Allen rather than Miles Davis and John Coltrane, before accepting that the pair were right all along. Fielding chuckles as he recalls the then rookie director exasperatedly claiming that directing them “was like trying to direct smoke”. 

“I think this is my payback for being difficult, because Paul’s pretty hard to direct” Fielding reflects. “He doesn’t really need it to be honest, I’m just another pair of eyes and someone he can chat to about it.”

He sees his role as encouraging Foot to be as daring as he can and persist with routines that might initially falter.

“He’s almost too good, that’s his problem” Fielding maintains. “Paul writes quickly and his style is so strong that he can kind of pull off anything, which is slightly dangerous because he shouldn’t rely on improvising. When you’ve been doing it for a while like he has, it also becomes difficult not to second guess the audience and try to work out what you should or shouldn’t be doing. I’ve been trying to encourage him to be completely free but also to persevere with routines that don’t come as easily.” 

It’s an approach shared by Stefan Golaszewski. The award-winning standup and playwright has worked with Joe Wilkinson and Diane Morgan on their sketch show, Two Episodes of MASH. According to Wilkinson, Golaszewski's input has taken the duo “out of our comfort zone”. Alluding to a conga line sketch that finishes in painfully drawn-out circumstances, Wilkinson recalls thinking “oh, you arsehole, please don’t make me do that”, and only later came to appreciate the new playfulness with tension. “We did it and it makes the show better. That wouldn’t have happened without Stefan being picky.” 

With greater variety and invariably more people involved, sketch represents a different directorial challenge to standup, one that arguably increases the need for a fresh perspective. 

“I like directing things I like,” says Golaszewski, whose directorial CV is one of the most impressive Fringe résumés around. His projects include the best newcomer-winning Tom Basden Won’t Say Anything and Jonny Sweet’s Mostly About Arthur, along with two shows by Tim Key and three by Nick Mohammed. “I thought Two Episodes' sketch shows were the best in Edinburgh, but they could be a lot better if they honed what they did.

“It’s been a case of tightening them up, making it clear to the audience that it’s a deliberate choice for them to stumble on stage and mumble.”

Mash’s Diane Morgan admits that “for the first couple of years we felt something was missing and had no idea what it was. Before, we did the same sort of show we did in London, very ramshackle. It looks as if we don’t know our lines or don’t care, that’s the joke. But you take that to Edinburgh and people think you don’t give a toss. Stefan’s allowed us to keep that shambolic element while making it slicker and more polished.”

Wilkinson adds: “When we’ve disagreed, which is now and then, we’ve had to prove it to him, really get it past him. If it did, it was good enough. Sometimes, there were a couple of bits he really didn’t like, so that made us work on them and make them stronger.”

Early on, the three of them established parameters, rules for what belonged in the show and what didn’t.

“We wrote some really funny stuff that just didn’t fit in.” Wilkinson explains. “Now all our material points in the same direction and makes for a fully rounded show.’”

Directing Sweet required even greater script focus.

“It was an interesting process to go through, because he no idea what he wanted his first show to be, really,” Golaszewski recalls. “It’s such a hard thing to write an hour of comedy for yourself on your own. I made him write a manifesto from the beginning, so we both knew exactly what direction we were going in.

“Once we got a script we were happy with, he started doing previews. I noted them and made suggestions, he rewrote and then we continually edited it to take out any slack. I was really pleased with it because it just constantly threw new ideas at the audience, which is what I want from an Edinburgh show. 

“This year is the same sort of character, the same sort of stupidity, but hopefully we’ve raised the bar slightly. His writing has come on so much in the last year, I’m really excited about it.”

Nevertheless, Golaszewski doesn’t see employing a director as a sure-fire route to success, deriding those directors who charge thousands of pounds for their services. He points out that it was the first Tim Key solo show that he didn't direct—last year’s The Slutcracker—which won the Edinburgh Comedy Award.

“It was such a blessing in disguise, because it meant he could work out exactly what it is he wanted to do – without me giving him notes, trying to change him. That’s why the show was so good, because it expressed him and nothing else. Acts should use directors at first to try to work out what they want to do but then move off and do their own thing.”