The Web's a Funny Old Thing

I have a research curiosity about the role that the online world plays in the comedy industry. The Edinburgh Fringe has slowly built up its online infrastructure, and performers have gradually incorporated Twitter and Facebook in their marketing, to the extent that "bucket speeches" often request social-media likes as much as cash! COVID and lockdown have forced comedians and promoters to move towards online perfomances - and many have discovered that they don't entirely hate it as much as they thought. Received wisdom about "being in the room" and the necessity of intimate responses to a live audience no longer seem to tell the whole story about standup performance.

Comedy itself is evolving, as performers find new online audiences via Twitter, Youtube, Instagram and Tiktok, and the adaptation of the craft to new kinds of performance on these new online platforms has been accelerated by the new necessities of the pandemic.

© 2020 Leslie Carr, provided under a Creative Commons Attribution license
Template design by Andreas Viklund