There’s no feeling quite like it. I arrive at the Edinburgh festival’s Assembly Roxy venue to see Sam Campbell – director’s choice at the Melbourne comedy festival, produced here by Soho Theatre, likely to be worth a punt. There’s a big queue, and I check with an usher to see if I should be joining it. No, I’m told, the Sam Campbell queue is over there. I look where she’s pointing, at the seven or eight people assembled in an uninspiring cluster. Uh-oh. It’s going to be one of those.
And so it is – not, I should say, through any fault of Campbell’s. He deals as well as he can with the presumably soul-shrivelling experience of performing to a crowd the size of a football team. But there’s no avoiding it: from the moment we enter the room – the Assembly Roxy Downstairs, capacity 60-ish – this is an exercise in damage limitation. For everyone.
That might not be the case with theatre. There are plays you can sit in the dark and watch, barely noticing that there are only a handful of people there. But this is comedy. There’s a direct correspondence between performer and audience – and pity or embarrassment isn’t a good starting point. In comedy, performers depend on a responsive audience to make their shows work. No comic likes the sound of less-than-10 people laughing – it makes their jokes sound lame. But here, that’s the best they can hope for.
Every audience member wants to be part of a big crowd, too. It makes you feel you’ve backed a winner. It loosens you up, defrays self-consciousness and takes the pressure off you to generate the laughs your entertainer craves.
I felt that pressure at Campbell’s show. How could you not? And it’s not conducive to a fantastic time. A self-consciously weird young act from Brisbane – lots of axolotls; childlike doodles of stick-people with rearranged body parts; a slide-show about his mum and dad – his show needs not only an audible response, but a physical one (at one point, he crowd-surfs). And we feel that need. We know this only works if we, all 11 of us, do our job. We’re all keenly aware of one another. In a sense, we’re also performing. Which, when booking for a comedy show, isn’t what most of us (show-offs, drunks and vigorous hecklers excepted) think we’re signing up for.
Campbell duly singles me out for a bit of audience participation. He has few options; everyone gets a go. It starts to feel less like comedy, more like a parlour game at an awkward party. He tells us that the technician is his only friend in Edinburgh. Maybe he says so at every performance, but today it takes on a tragic pallor.
So what’s a comic meant to do when the feeling in the auditorium, before they’ve even opened their mouths, is disappointment? Most comics acknowledge it: addressing the elephant in the room is on their job description. Some comics can’t stop talking about it, which seldom works. Some see an opportunity in the audience’s lowered expectations; others may take comfort that nervous laughter, after all, is still laughter. Campbell treads those lines pretty adroitly – but even then, the gig seldom feels more than an attempt, on all our parts, to simply get through this with dignity intact.
Now and then you hear stories about unforgettable performances, when gifted comics rise to the challenge of a tiny audience, refashioning their shows into intimate, you-had-to-be-there treats for the lucky few in the crowd. Super-confident acts may sometimes style it out. Surely, a fallback strategy for dealing with single-figure audiences is a necessity on the fringe, even if the festival’s oft-quoted average crowd of six is, I think, a myth. For all those comics who have to put that strategy into action, well, they deserve sympathy – which is, of course, part of the problem – and so do their audiences.
• Sam Campbell is at Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh, until 28 August.
