Feedback With A Face

One handy thing about living in London, if you enjoy stand-up comedy, is that so many comedians test new material here in small venues – often playing “works in progress” to audiences of just a few dozen. Stewart Lee famously iterates his show over many, many performances at the Leicester Square Theatre before he takes it on tour to bigger venues and has it recorded for TV and DVD. Here’s the thing: comedy requires feedback. Immediate feedback. Not an aggregate report at the end of the show, but in-the-moment feedback about how a joke’s landing. In big theatres, audiences can become that faceless aggregate, but in 100-seater venues, every data point has a face. And that matters. It matters when you can see the faces and hear the responses from your audience. Because now each one of them matters, and that’s a very different kind of feedback to being told that “27% thought that the routine about Prince Andrew went on a bit too long” after they’ve all gone home. I hear developers all the…