The Comedy Crowd Blog

O2 and The Comedy Crowd

We are delighted to have partnered with O2 to produce a series of original sketches showcasing up and coming talent from this fantastic community. The partnership is part of O2’s campaign to “Do more of what you love”. O2 and The Comedy Crowd have partnered to enable new creators to make five original comedy sketches which are […]

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How To Identify and Develop your Stand-up Persona

By Chris Head. My book, “A Director’s Guide to the Art of Stand-up”, begins by exploring ways of identifying and developing your persona as a stand-up comedian. This is your unique voice, outlook and identity that you present on stage. It stems from your actual self but is not identical with your off-stage self. Finding […]

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Hide and Seek: Finding your audience online

By Eleni Young. Using social media when you’re posting to your friends and family is easy, you already have an audience who’s interested in you and you don’t have to think too much about what or when you post. But when you’re posting for an audience who doesn’t know who you are, social media can […]

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Are Men Writing Women Right?

Writer and journalist Joanna Tilley has launched a script companion service that focuses on female characters. Here she tells The Comedy Crowd the reasoning behind the new Pay What You Can service and what it can offer comedy writers. In 2018, The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain found that only 11% of comedy episodes on […]

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The Inbetweeners: How Subtlety Enhances Comedy

The scenes from The Inbetweeners that most likely to come to mind are its gross out moments, such as Simon’s testicle doing the catwalk or Neil casually punching a fish to death. But it is not these moments that really define the show and in fact, as argued in this excellent video from ‘Full Fat Videos’, the puerile moments are […]

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How ‘SpongeBob’ Redefines Writing For Children’s TV

There are amazing opportunities for those interested in writing for children’s TV, but what puts many off is the perception that they would have to dumb down or simplify their writing. Increasingly kids TV has moved away from the fairytale Disney story and character tropes towards a more nuanced style that blurs the line between children […]

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The ‘Creative Chaos’ Of Making A South Park Episode

It’s incredible to think that something as consistently good as South Park has less than a week turnaround on each of it’s episodes, especially when the industry standard for animation is around 8 months! This video by ‘Nerdstalgic’ looks at why the creators put this constraint on themselves, stating that some of the benefits are: For […]

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7 Editing Tips That Are Simple And Beautiful

Sven Pape’s ‘This Guy Edits’ Youtube channel is a fantastic resource for editors, regardless of their level of experience. This video is aimed at those who are new at the craft, listing 7 tips that will have a huge impact on the quality of your work, including: For more articles and videos like this that […]

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The Ultimate Guide To Visual Storytelling

‘More to That’ is a blog by Lawrence Yeo that uses simple, distinctive illustrations to craft thoughtful posts. Yeo describes himself as a visual storyteller, and in this post he explains how he takes an idea and creates a narrative journey in which visuals play a vital role. There are some brilliant insights in this […]

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Pixar: What Makes A Story Relatable?

Pixar have a rigid 22 rules of story telling that they apply to every project. In this video Youtuber KaptainKristian looks at one in particular: ‘Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.’ He argues that it is this rule […]

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What We Can Learn From The Perfect Simpsons Episode

In this series Youtuber ‘Nerdstalgic’ picks out an episode of a renowned show that encapsulates what it does best. The Simpsons is a particularly interesting case study, having departed so far from what used to make it great. Simpsons fan or not there’s lots for creators to learn from this analysis of the episode ‘Marge […]

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Why Comedy Ages Poorly & What you Can Do About it

This is a really interesting and thought provoking video about why certain comedy shows lose their appeal over time. In picking out examples the creator, Renegade Cut YouTube Channel, hasn’t exactly gone high-brow (Dumb and Dumber, The Mask and Austin Powers feature strongly) but nonetheless there are some really interesting principles highlighted. Using specific cultural […]

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