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ARE COMEDY COURSES WORTH THE CANDLE?

Academic degrees are less use than practical experience for stand-up comedians, writes OLLIE WILSON.

STAND-UP COMEDY has been traditionally one area of show business where formal training has played a minimal part - and hands-on experience at the chalk face of entertainment counts for almost everything.

Performers like Alan Davies have learnt their comedic skills in the clubs and pubs - not the colleges and varsity refectories, even if they have done a degree as well.

But as "alternative comedy" has become big and mainstream business, the teaching world has jumped on the bandwagon.

Multi-million pound television and movie contracts are up for grabs for the best acts. So naturally thousands of wannabes will happily invest their cash in any training that might help them climb the slippery pole to stand-up stardom.

But are they wasting their money? Is stand-up comedy a discipline that can be successfully taught like history or physics?

Surely, the whole point about modern comedians is they should try to do something original - and not borrow from the vast archive of work that precedes them.

Nonetheless, stand-up is too rich and juicy a pie for the education industry to keep its fingers out of. And as with most pedagogic pursuits, there are up and down sides to the equation.

The biggest growth area in comedy education has come in the form of journeymen comics teaching their craft, as they see it, to boost their income. This is not entirely bad.

It keeps many dedicated comedians off the dole and, to some small degree, ups the quality of new - so-called try-out - acts.

In particular, courses can put off people who are completely unsuited to a career in comedy and provide guidelines on comedy ethics and etiquette (such as "Don't steal other comics' material" and "Don't heckle other acts") for the ambitious young performers who remain.

On the down side, courses can sap originality and mould new comics in the image of their teachers, often failed comedians themselves.

They are a crutch that needs to be kicked away within the first six months of a comedian's career.

But more alarmingly, Britain's universities are now getting in on the act. At least two institutions - Salford University and the University of Kent - have been teaching stand-up comedy as an academic discipline.

Kent University - which is based in Canterbury - made national newspaper headlines by recruiting a former comedian turned academic - Dr Oliver Double - to develop and teach a stand-up course. Dr Double's sales pitch sounds sensible enough.

He admits that most comics learn their craft in "the actual situation of a pub or club" and says he is only trying to get students into the classroom so they are "kind of prepared to face a proper audience".

Students will also be taught the history of comedy from ancient Greece to the present day, and physiological theories of why people laugh at all.

But is university really the right place for such didactic fare?

Judging by its Drama Department's prospectus, Kent University seems determined to lay claim to the legacy of alternative comedy, claiming "the explosion of alternative comedy in the 1980s was very much a product of university drama departments - Alan Davies is a Kent graduate".

Leading London circuit promoter Ivor Dembina, an original-wave and radical alternative comedian who runs the Red Rose Club in north London, has grave doubts about the university's motives.

"It's a load of marketing tripe," he says. "There's currently an explosion in comedy courses. A course like this is an example of a university desperate to attract students in any way it can to get government funding."

Indeed, the drama graduates who turned to comedy in the eighties did so largely because of the collapse of fringe theatre (after withdrawal of public funding) - and certainly not as a result of any great comedic boost from university drama departments.

When asked how he learnt his comedy, Alan Davies speaks at length about the influence of the London circuit and his upbringing on him and does not even mention Kent.

Dembina - who has himself run short comedy courses - believes that learning about the history and ethics of comedy on a college course could be good move for new comics.

But he says graduates of an academic comedy course who believe they will make an instant impact on the stand-up world are in for a big shock.

Perhaps the exception that proves the rule is Peter Kay, who studied stand-up as part of an HND course at Salford.

Within months of graduation, he had made his name nationally by winning the prestigious So You Think You're Funny contest final at the Edinburgh Fringe, and went on to become a Channel 4 star.

"I chose stand-up as an option in my second year," says Kay, who had previously dropped out of a more academic course at Liverpool University."Each week, the tutor gave you a subject like D-I-Y or holidays and you wrote a routine on it and got up in front of class and did three or four minutes of comedy.

"You did 10 weeks like that. Then you worked out your best material and you went to a club and got on stage and performed your best 10 minutes. The tutor watched and graded you on the audience response. I got great grades."

Coupled with the acting experience he gained studying at Salford, the course genuinely prepared Kay, 29, for a career in television and club comedy.

Perhaps the success of his course was down to its short and practical nature.

As with journalism, the best courses find the most talented students and give them a highly practical training in the nuts and bolts of their chosen discipline.

The worst ones put their undergraduates through three years of essay and dissertation writing and leave them ill prepared for the cruel world outside the university gates.

But perhaps the final word on this subject is that good stand-up comedians teach themselves their craft - with the audiences they face acting as the toughest and least-forgiving examiners of their achievement.


Copyright 2001, Ollie Wilson