Guest Post Archives - Comedy Crowd

Producing a live comedy show

By Paul Holliday. I’m excited to be producing my first live comedy show, ‘A Little Bit Sketchy‘. And at the Lowry no less! It’s been quite a trek to get the show up and running and thought to share a few bits of my experience.

How I became a BBC accredited supplier

By Dan Page Okay, clickbait alert! I haven’t personally become a BBC accredited supplier because, well, people can’t. But companies that people set up can. And – spoiler alert – I just stubbed my toe. Wait, that’s not how that works…the point is, I’ve set up my own company and as of January 2020 I’ve […]

Why Back to Life is Genius

By Dan Page. Back to Life is genius. The acting, the writing, the cinematography, the up-close and personal sound….everything is simply brilliant. I am in awe of Daisy Haggard, Laura Solon and the whole cast and crew. But the thing I like most about Back to Life, and arguably why it works so well, is […]

Creating, Writing & Making Online Comedy Sketches & Shorts

By Chris Head and Steve Whiteley I’m Chris Head, and in this blog Steve Whiteley and I will be discussing online comedy sketches and shorts. I’m a comedy director, coach, script-editor and author of “A Director’s Guide to the Art of Stand-up”. Steve (pictured above on “Swiped” shoot) is an actor, film maker and the […]

My top five ‘Hmmmm… Interesting’ shows on Punkanary

By Joanna Tilley (@JoannaTilley) I hope we can all agree that the Comedy Crowd and its weekly newsletter has brought a lot of joy into our email lives. Not only is it full of opportunities for new comedy writers, but it has links to some great inspirational articles and I think most importantly of all […]

Trying Not To Lose Yourself In Other People

By Joz Norris. I’ve found this blog very difficult to write, weirdly. The initial draft essentially waxed lyrical about some of my comedy inspirations when I was growing up (Marion & Geoff and The Trip in particular) and praised the fact that neither of those were obviously mass-appeal, marketable ideas, but both of them really doubled down on […]

Why scratch theatre is great for comedy writers

By Stevie Cooke. I’m the first to admit, I’m a submissions junkie. If you’re anything like me, you’ll spend your time trawling through the internet finding any open opportunities that might be suitable for your work. Or not – sometimes I’m not fussy, I’ll enter anything just to get that submissions high… A few years […]

Belladonna Comedy: Making a comedy satire site and getting a book deal

Sounds like the dream right? Brooke, Caitlin, Carrie and Fiona make up Belladonna Comedy. They run their own popular satire website and are shortly releasing their first book “New Erotica for Feminists”. We had the pleasure of catching up with them and finding out how they did it. There’s some great advice in here for […]

No Matter How Good You Are At Something There’s Always About A Million People Better Than You: The Journey of a Runner Up

By Jon Holmes. In 2017 comedian Hari Kondabolu created the documentary “The Problem With Apu“. It was a made-for-TV doc that addressed the racial incoherence of a fictional character: Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. While I don’t claim to be of any sort of minority, I certainly always admired The Simpsons and still to this day will cite […]

Building a sitcom plot using set-pieces

By Chris Head I coach and direct stand-up and am the author of “A Director’s Guide to the Art of Stand-up”. Meanwhile I have an annual gig working with undergraduates at Bath Spa University to develop a multi-cam studio sitcom, I coach writers and I am about to script-edit a BBC Radio 4 sitcom pilot. […]

The Producing Journey

By Jon Ornoy, Producer and Director, Animal Mother Films. As an independent producer, figuring out how to do a lot with a little is pretty much the name of the game, and as I now embark on producing my first narrative feature film that maxim is only proving more true. The other guiding principle that […]

How to create a comedy character

By Chris Head. So you want to create a comedy character. Perhaps it’s a character for you to perform or for a sitcom/comedy drama script. In this blog I am particularly thinking of narrative comedy script characters, but these thoughts can be equally useful for sketch characters and so on. Here are some ways you […]