Crowdwork is one of those aspects of stand up comedy that divides and defines us. Some comics do a lot of crowdwork and some don’t. I’ve described a spectrum of stand-up with “loose” (on-the-fly, improvisational) at one extreme and “tight” (precisely scripted) at the other. Crowdwork falls very much into the “loose” camp, generally considered the ultimate in improvisational comedy.

Truthfully, Crowdwork is often less improvisational than people suspect (more about that later), but the magic of experiencing something particular to the unique time and space an audience is sharing with the comedian is irresistible. Also, we give a lot of points to a comedian when we believe they’re creating their material in real time.

In the interests of full disclosure (because I should reveal my biases, so you can decide how many grains of salt to take with them), I’ll let you know that I’m not a fan of crowdwork. I don’t enjoy it, and I don’t have any patience for it. When a comedian starts asking someone where they live or what their job is, I grit my teeth and want to fast-forward to their actual material (if they have any).

I don’t like watching crowdwork and I therefore don’t really do any.

So now you know where I’m coming from with this post. I hate it when people aren’t honest enough to reveal their biases and pretend their arguments are coming from a neutral objective place. Fucking bullshit. So I’ll tell you right now, I definitely do not love crowdwork.

There are peers of mine who’ll tell you it’s because I can’t. They’ll tell you I fall in the scripted end of the comedy spectrum that Id described, and they’d be right about that bit. They’re also the same comics who impose strict time limits, so they know I won’t waste any of my precious 300 seconds on stage dealing with obnoxious drunks.

To those comics I’d say that I fucking hate pointless mundane small-talk, and having stupid conversations with randoms doesn’t become magically interesting to me when I’m holding a mic. It feels pointless. When I think of great comedy, I think of amazing bits that hold up over the years – Jim Jefferies’ Gun Control, George Carlin’s 7 Words, Glenn Wool’s Big Car People, Gary Gulman’s How the States got their abbreviations, etc – snarky exchanges with randoms about their jobs never, ever make my list.

But that’s just me. I know comedians who think of crowdwork as the highest possible comedy achievement. Back in 2021 one of the comics in my local scene described crowdwork as “the purest form of comedy.”

I don’t know when we started evaluating comedy by it’s purity, or how comedy purity is measured, but nobody challenged this statement at the time.

This was the beginning of a really weird time in my local scene. Local comics became evangelists about crowdwork and made snotty remarks about anyone not interested in it. Every single night they’d swing an miss at the crowdwork thing. They’d initiate conversations that didn’t go anywhere, so they’d move on to someone else. It was one epic fail after another.

Also, they all seemed to lose interest in actually writing material so they’d have nothing to fall back on. These guys (and girls) were determined to prove they could do Crowdwork, so every month became an endless series of failed small-talk attempts.

Even if I actually liked crowdwork it was painful to watch. Like I said, it was a weird phase. I’m not sure any of my peers got good at Crowdwork during this time.

For the record, I fully agree that crowdwork is a skill and hard to do well. Look up Ian Bagg and prepare to be astounded. He does full-length specials that are 100% unscripted, and he’s excellent at it. Check out his special “Getting To F***in Know You” and prepare to be impressed.

When a comic is good at crowdwork, it’s very good. The rest of the time I just see a comedian who arrived at the party empty-handed and fishing for material in the audience, hoping someone in the crowd has brought something funny for them to take credit for. By all means, learn to interact with crowds… But also, don’t show up to the party empty-handed and expect the crowd to come up with your act for you. It’s not as cool as you think.

I mention Crowdwork because it’s an example of how values change over time. There are others. Like how the F-word we couldn’t say a decade ago is OK now – and the F-word that was OK is now the one we cannot use. Or how in the 1960’s the police would arrest a comic for offensive material that the audience were actually OK with, while now the audience will try and perform citizen’s arrests on comics for offensive language that the police don’t care about. Styles and tastes change over time with comedy as they do with everything else.

For Crowdwork, it went from being the “purest” gold standard a few years ago to tiresome. Then, it came back with a vengeance in 2023. And now there’s backlash.

Recently a couple of comics got huge boosts to their careers online. Matt Rife might be the best example of this. He’s a skilled comic who’s paid his dues over decades, but had any of you actually heard of him a few years ago? Nope. He made it big on Instagram and TikTok, which is a platform that tends to “blow up” suddenly instead of building over time. And while many of you will attribute the success to his good looks, it’s his short crowdwork videos that got him the traction on social media.

Comedians have a bit of a problem with social media because once our written material appears on it, it’s burned. 15 years ago comics like Louis CK were complaining that people pull out their phones during new jokes, and the next night an audience in a different city would be completing all of his punchlines – because everyone published his material before he was ready to.

The newness of our material and our right to decide when it’s published are all we really have, so comedians saw this is a much more serious intellectual property theft than downloading a movie from the major studios. We’re not really that keen to undermine our own shows by sticking our jokes on TikTok first.

Then, Matt Rife, Sam Morrill, Andrew Schulz and a few other comics realized it was safe to market themselves with unscripted material. Such as audience interactions. And it turned out that a 30-second exchange with a heckler is not just the perfect format to sell the energy of a live show, but that titles like “Comedian DESTROYS Heckler” do really, really well on the algorithms that Youtube. TikTok and Instagram use.

Now, it’s almost impossible to market comedy on these platforms with any amount of success unless it’s a comedian DESTROYing a heckler. Bonus points if it’s negging a female in the audience. Extra bonus points if she’s drunk or can be made to look drunk in the vid. Social media loves this shit, and has made instant stars out of a few comics with it.

This sort of thing changes the comedians, the audiences and the whole scene. Lots of comics have been saying in interviews that since the TikTok Crowdwork explosion audiences are more unruly, louder and think they’e part of the show. Audiences who haven’t seen a lot of live comedy see these videos and expect live comedy to be an interactive argument that they participate at least 50% in.

Also, Comedians who write for the algorithm are a thing now. You know how the science of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has fucked up the internet, rendering search engines useless by filling up the whole web with targeted keywords and crap? How Google doesn’t seem to work anymore because attention-seeking results are more powerful than relevant ones?

Well, something similar has happened in comedy. Comedians create the most value when they write for themselves or for audiences but a lot of them now are writing for the algorithm, trying to catch an attention wave when they should be trying to capture a good idea. It feels shitty and disingenuous.

But it’s not as dishonest and shitty as seeing those comics trying to record their clickbait. What Crowdwork should be a way of connecting with the room. But a lot of comics now are only pretending to. They’re actually just fishing for 30 seconds of footage that will make them an Insta-star.

It’s twisted the aim of audience interaction into it’s exact opposite. And you can tell that some of these guys don’t actually have an actual act beyond the clip they posted.

My favourite comics, Kyle Kinane and Gary Gulman have both assured audiences that they’re not going to be forcibly conscripting their audiences into social media marketing; that they’re there to do their thing and not to exploit an algorithm.

I’ve witnessed a few other comics lately (Marc Maron springs to mind) expressing disapproval of the relationship between Crowdwork and social media. Some of them have pointed out that the crowdwork thing might get you a lot of TikTok likes if you ever plan to pull off an hour on a big stage, or to do a Special, you need an actual act.

Did Matt Rife manage this with his “Natural Selection” special on Netflix? Well, he did get himself into trouble trying to pivot from his TikTok crowd to edgelord bro-comedy fans (The shitty podcast comedians of the Broganverse have a lot to answer for), and he did close the special with a snarky “but I’m just a crowdwork comic” remark… so, you tell me.

There’s been more backlash against Crowdwork than I expected. For the first time ever I’m seeing comics in online forums refer to crowdwork as “hack,” which is a pretty far cry from the “purest” claims I heard just a few years ago.

But maybe not all of this is super-new. I found this comment in an exchange between comic Matt Ruby and Jimmy Dore (who’s comedy I’ve always liked) from 2009. Responding to the claim that ‘Crowdwork takes more skill than written material’, Jimmy Dore said:

“…comedy is taking an idea and relating it to strangers in a way that resonates. Doing crowd work is way way way way way way way way way way way easier than it looks. and way way easier than crafting ideas and presenting them comedically to strangers.”

I agree with this view. I don’t do much crowdwork, but that’s not because I think it’s particularly difficult. I know the tricks, many of which revolve around steering a conversation around to our stuff. This, by the way, is something we all consider to be shitty behaviour when we see people doing it in ordinary conversations.

Someone does it at a dinner party, we think they’re a narcissist and a bore. Other tricks include invoking cliched stereotypes to put shit on people’s homes or jobs. You know – the sort of stuff only dickheads do.

Most of the conversation we think is really witty on stage is actually boring douchebag stuff in real life. Personally, I don’t and can’t consider it to be harder or wittier than crafting real epiphanies and making them funny.

But that’s just me… If I suddenly decided to jump on the TikTok train and push my material aside to make mundane small-talk with randoms in the audience it would look weird and feel even weirder.

It’s interesting to see the scene morph and change as social media comes into play. I wonder what will come next?