Words: Simon Harper
Illustration: Chris Dickason

“We’ve used the internet and so on quite extensively in the shows before, but not in a very organised way.” Award-winning stand-up Mark Watson is explaining the premise of his most recent venture. Renowned for the 24- and 36-hour marathon sets that have distinguished his tenures at the Edinburgh Festival, the Bristol-born comedian decided to take an altogether different approach for a performance on his latest tour of Australia.

Around a week after staging an Al Gore-style climate change lecture, Mark’s interactive comedy show took a traditional stand-up performance and turned it on its head. Born out of collaboration on a global scale, the show threw together a raft of content submitted by volunteers from across the world, gathering information, videos, photos and other material, and drew together simultaneous ‘official’ audiences in Melbourne and London, as well as people viewing the whole day-long experience in the comfort of their own homes, via the Internet. It’s a pretty ambitious multimedia adventure - why bother?

“I think the 24- and 36-hour shows have always been about collaboration and so the next logical step is to unite that team spirit with technology,” explains the 2006 winner of the Time Out Critic’s Choice Award. “What happened is that we did things in the main room - setting challenges, appealing for various things, inventing games - and people following online joined in, sending in videos and photos and so on, so the scale of the show wasn’t confined to the live audience but involved as much international interaction as possible.”

Pursuing comedy in a very non-traditional sense, the evolution of new media has challenged the notion of stand-up as being one man or woman and a microphone; where the audience would be different each night and only the people lucky enough to be in the room are in on the joke. Less exclusivity and more democracy, then. But how does this impact on audience interaction in a comedy setting?

“It’s kind of the same idea really; spinning a show out of a collaboration between audience and performer,” reasons Mark. “Obviously in this show, the audience had to be a lot more creative and resilient. And go without sleep. I think one of the things people love most about stand-up is the one-man-and-a-mic feeling, the simplicity of it and the intensity. You could never lose that from live comedy. But maybe we will see more people exploiting the internet to do different things, like my show, which don’t really come under the bracket of stand-up at all.”

In an environment which feeds off the reaction of a ‘live’ audience, what place is there for virtual punters? Online resources such as 4Laughs and ConstantComedy.com have allowed clued-up comedy fans to heckle from their own desk, with the click of a mouse replacing a roar of disapproval; a star rating in place of a withering put-down. There’s something about stand-up comedy, though, which puts significant emphasis on the rapport between the performer and audience members.

“The reason is probably that live comedy feeds off laughter and reactions in a way which hardly any other type of show does,” says Mark. “As a comedian you literally will be funnier, and better, if you’re responding to enthusiasm. If you’re doing a play or you’re in a band or something, you can always kind of pretend people are loving it whether they are or not. Comedians can’t do that, so the audience’s visible response becomes all-important.”

Certainly, he suggests that the congregation of fans who gather for his now-established stand-up marathons are key to the success of such lengthy jaunts. Keeping the laughter flowing for a full day or more requires a bit of help from those watching his on-stage endurance test.

“The rapport tends to come from the loyalty of the longest-serving audience members,” posits the ardent Bristol City fan. “A lot of people do stay for the entire show and the relationship you build with them is quite an unusual one, because you’re quite heavily dependent on each other as you’re spending that much time in each other’s company. You also get people who come in for short bits and then go again; they tend to be left fairly baffled by the whole experience. So the connection that you get with an audience at a 24-hour show is all about everyone being in it for the long game basically, and the people who get the most out of it do tend to be the people who see most of it. In a way the show is about that long-term co-operation.”

Starting off as an experiment, his unprecedented long-haul shows at Edinburgh were lauded and attracted huge attention, despite Mark never having intended it to become a regular feature of his visits to the festival.

“I never envisaged it as something that I’d keep coming back to, which I have done. I saw it as a one-off experiment and it’s ended up being more of an annual tradition just because of the way that the Fringe has adopted it, as an institution of sorts. I wanted to see how far I could push myself and push the idea of a live show. I wanted to do something that no one had done before and it seemed like a good way of just seeing what could be done, basically.”

“I only ever thought I’d do it the once. It’s become a sort of trademark and it was definitely a surprise because that’s what I’ve ended up being known for. I wouldn’t have guessed it would be for something so off the wall, especially because I did it outside the establishment. Certainly at the Fringe, I always saw it as an alternative to proper shows, and it’s weird that that in itself has kind of become a tradition now. It’s nice that people recognise it but it makes it harder to keep pulling it off when there’s more and more hype about it. The whole thing relies on the fact that it is ridiculous.”

With interactive comedy shows like his latest experiment, the idea of not actually being able to see most of the audience might be quite unsettling for the performer. Far from conforming to a traditional set-up, interactive stand-up presents a dilemma - does the comedian risk undermining the audience gathered at the venue, and are they able to engage with people scattered around the world, who are on the other end of a modem? It would seem that while it might put the relationship between comedian and audience under a lot of needless strain, for Mark it presents an opportunity too good to pass up.

“There are a lot of disadvantages,” he confesses. “It would be easy to try to be too clever, when ultimately people just want to have a laugh. Most audiences’ idea of a good time is to hear good jokes and see a funny person, not marvel at modern communication techniques.”

“However, there is massive potential for people like me to experiment with interaction on a scale never before seen. For me, comedy is a very wide term - anything which is genuinely odd, eccentric and heart-warming counts alongside more recognisable joke-craft. So the internet offers comedy a way of moving forward, or at least sideways into new territories.”

It’s not an entirely new concept for Mark, though. At the Edinburgh Festival in 2006, his 36-hour epic journey or mirth and whimsy - titled Mark Watson’s Seemingly Impossible 36-Hour Circuit of the World - was viewed simultaneously by a small audience in Melbourne. A success of sorts, this was presumably one of the reasons behind his recent experiment, amplifying the principle of an online audience and taking it to a more ambitious level.
“Its impact on the show was that people felt they were part of something bigger and grander than just a lot of nonsense in a dark room. Also, it gave me something to talk about in difficult moments,” deadpans Mark. The idea is beginning to take off, too, most notably thanks to fellow comedian Ross Noble. On his 2007 Nobleism tour, the big-haired stand-up’s performance at the Liverpool Empire was beamed into Vue cinemas across the UK. Reportedly an attempt to reach a larger audience without resorting to playing stadium-sized venues, this is another example of media platforms colliding head-on with comedy.

So is Mark - who admits to constantly trying to find new ways of challenging himself and his fans - dissuaded by the fact that the idea is starting to catch on with other performers? And can it translate to an ordinary length show, rather than the decidedly looser, free-form stand-up marathons he finds himself coming back to?

“I’ll almost certainly keep trying out new ways of bringing micro-audiences together under one roof. It is difficult to imagine doing something based on mass technical trickery which was short, yet still had enough of a heart to engage the audience. Not impossible, though.”