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Jason Cook, comedian
How do you make the perfect stand-up show? Take one Jason Cook and blend briskly with an audience desperate to take part
Jay Richardson
06 November 2010
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AT THIS year's Edinburgh Fringe I helped Jason Cook write his 2011 show. Or rather, I was in the crowd as the Geordie performed The End (Part 1). Revealing how a brush with death inspired him to try new experiences, he asked his audience to tell him "the best thing they've ever done". A lad ventured "drink tea through a Kit-Kat!" Voted one of the best suggestions of the night by those assembled, the notion is still amusing Cook on tour, as he compiles further experiences for The End (Part 2). Cook it transpires, is crowdsourcing his laughs. And like many crowdsourcers, he stumbled on the business model accidentally.
"Apparently I'm quite approachable," he says. "People come up and tell me things, so I've always fitted them around my own experiences. When I did my show Joy, it grew by 30 minutes from people telling me stories."
The term "Crowdsourcing" was coined in 2006 by journalist Jeff Howe to describe the emerging, invariably internet-enabled "act of taking a job traditionally performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call".
By delegating aspects of his creativity, hosting what Howe calls an "ideas jam" every night, Jason Cook is harnessing others' wit, producing funnier and better targeted routines for his audience. Anyone who has seen Part 1 and contributes a suggestion, votes or even laughs is invested at some level in Part 2. In market terms, we pay to co-create and focus group his routines before paying to hear them told back to us.
So is Cook the Simon Cowell of comedy? Partly, though he's also the archetypal X-Factor contestant, his need to perform "that constant search for affirmation, love me, please love me". Our most popular TV show relies on similar crowdsourcing principles, yet I would suggest Cook's motivations are nobler. Not for him the musical bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people. X-Factor is about standing out from the crowd. He embraces it.
Like virtually any performer sustaining a UK tour without TV exposure, Cook maintains a dialogue with his audience via e-mail, Facebook and Twitter. He hands out socks, Santa hats and free tickets to returning fans. But he also gives himself away and the crowd respond in kind.
"When I spoke about my dad dying, so many people came up and told me about their fathers dying too" he says. "When I did Joy I must have received 100 really personal e-mails."
Interestingly, he says "I can never show those e-mails to anybody." Unlike the government, which tried to ease fear about cuts by insisting "we're all in this together" and asking the public to post ideas for savings online, Cook's community is a real open forum built on trust. Anyone suggesting "send back the immigrants" in a Cook show would be heard, but likely ignored, ridiculed or ejected by their peers. Moreover, the crowd is always right. The sound of a failing comedian is one who berates an audience for not getting the jokes.
So the crowd self-regulates and refines. But isn't such clique-thinking anathema to producing original comedy? Google, the most powerful crowdsourcing tool ever developed, primarily ranks searches by how many other pages link to a page. Type "drink" "tea" "through" and "Kit-Kat" and you'll find the top result is a blogpost on this subject from 2008. Or this article. Nevertheless, before reading this, I suspect you were oblivious to the concept of using porous confectionery as a straw. We tend to think of great inventions as the work of solitary geniuses, rather than a lengthy, incremental process of someone building on their predecessors' publicised breakthroughs. Cook intends to try all different types of Kit-Kat for instance.
So we shouldn't perceive stand-ups as isolated artists delivering finished jokes to a passively receptive, homogenous audience, the Hello Wembley! of Michael McIntyre's bestselling DVD in which he's supposed to be saying "what we're all thinking". Cook is simply foregrounding the countless interactions and negotiations that exist in stand-up. The constant feedback of laughter or indifference, the solitary heckle or isolated yelp of recognition, the weird occupation of the woman in the front row. All of these can alter the course of a night and indeed, a tour. A comedian presents a routine in Aberdeen, then tops it by saying "I did that in Cardiff and a bloke shouted…" What is the Edinburgh Fringe if not crowdsourcing shows for distribution across clubs, theatres and supermarket DVD shelves?
And truly, there's nowt so funny as folk. We're all individuals with a collective hoard of experience that no single comedian, no matter how debauched, can match for richness and diversity. Prior to Edinburgh, Sarah Millican e-mailed acquaintances about how they relaxed, cherrypicking the best anecdotes. When producers sought a primetime BBC vehicle for John Bishop in the vein of Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow, they tweaked the format to intersperse his stand-up with tales from the public.
Comedy Roadshow reflects and perhaps precipitated a growing sense of regionality in comedy's mainstream boom, scotching, scousing and welshing the notion stand-up is niche entertainment enjoyed by a metropolitan few in purpose-built clubs. Comedy is popular and its practitioners are ubiquitous. Yet if we conveniently overlook The Sun's comedy rich list, the gap between performer and audience has narrowed. Mark Watson launches a Ten Year Self Improvement Challenge on his blog and fans flock to join him.
More importantly, boundaries between professional and amateur comics have blurred beyond the open mic circuit. Take any comic hostage after a show and they'll tell you 97 per cent of jokes told by the public are terrible. Yet consider 3 per cent are brilliant. Last week, professional and amateur gagsmiths collaborated to contrive the funniest joke about Paul the psychic octopus' death in competitions run on Twitter by comedy club chain Highlight and drinks firm Fosters.
Despite judgment ultimately resting with a panel and notwithstanding the problem of plagiarism, the joy of creation and peer acclaim coupled with a tiny chance of winning a small cash prize motivates the crowd to create the best one liners. A meritocracy has emerged where the funniest jokes, regardless of origin, are endlessly retweeted and distributed in e-mails. Someone sees an amusing set-up then tweaks it with a better punchline. Plenty of chaff is generated but the crowd identifies the wheat.
More remarkable is that office workers with a sense of humour will produce a better joke than an equal number of professional comedians, simply because they adopt a more diverse, less formulaic approach. Sooner or later, one of these dilettantes will strike comedy gold. Jimmy Carr is a former marketing man with a nerd's love of comedy. It's worth noting his Comedy Idol competition, an extra on his Stand-Up DVD, unearthed the diamond in the rough that is Edward Aczel. Would this shambling part-time office worker and cult comic have been as successful 15 years ago?
If there's any precedent for Cook's crowdsourcing, it's TV presenter Danny Wallace's Join Me cult encouraging random acts of kindness. Howe points out the Latin root of "amateur" is "love" and Cook is happy to share. "Am I cheating?" he asks. "I still need to experience all this stuff. In my last Edinburgh show, my sister was there and shouted out 'have a baby!' I've been letting the audience decide and, of course, they go mad for it. So I've added a caveat that if next year's show is sh*t, I can blame them. And the baby."
• Jason Cook plays the Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, tomorrow; The Stand, Edinburgh, Saturday; and The Stand, Glasgow on Sunday.
