The world of comedy and why it matters with comedian alfie dundas

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Arthur: [00:00:00] Welcome everybody to today's episode at the Collective Institute of Ideas. We have Alfie Dundas, comedian our first comedian to have with us today. Alfie and I, we've got bit distracted just before the session. We've been talking about itching. We've been talking about sweat patches but on some more serious matters, Alfie to give you a flavor, Alfie, you are one of the rising stars in the UK and on the, in the comedy scene.

And in 2023 alone won the backyard comedy knockout, smash it at the King Gong, which flows in the comedy world. We know a lot about and open for Stephen Bailey Reen Solo and Max Fosh at the n Royal Theater. Our Feet, there's, if you open up any newspaper right now, there's a lot of quite heavy stuff.

And on your street, perhaps there's some, peculiar, quite sad things going on certainly on, on my street. But the, there's a lot of, challenges and comedy seems to be keeping humanity, all the wheels. It makes [00:01:00] everyone's life better, but what has comedy brought you?

Alfie: It's a good question. And thank you for such a glowing such a glowing opening. That's nice. It's good to see that I've updated my website recently and it's all feeding through to Google Orhan bt, so that's great. Very kind. What does comedy mean to me? I think the way you framed it is probably a good way of looking at it.

This is not the first period of time where people have been like looking at the news and looking at what's going on and then discussed whether things like comedy are. More needed than ever or whether a lot of people are like, should we be Jo? Bo Burnham's got that famous thing in inside where he is like, how can you be making jokes at a time like this?

And that was during COVID. There's like a lot of comedians or academics or journalists that have looked into comedy post a tragedy. So comedy in New York post nine 11, for example. How many weeks do you close down the comedy clubs before you need the comedy to get people out of the rut and back into reality?

And I think the consensus is that once you're willing [00:02:00] and able to laugh about something, it can no longer hurt you. And that can either be individually, so you'll see a lot of the best comedians. Not every comedian has to do it, but a lot of great comedians will take a personal. Conflict or tragedy, or there's a bit of a stereotype of Edinburgh Fringe becoming a place where you go and tell a story about having a dead dad.

That's like a trope, it's like a dead dad show or whatever. A divorced dad show or a dad didn't love me. It's a lot of male issues to be honest. And a lot of comedians are making like really good art out of that. And then if you extrapolate that out to a population, it's like things have got so bad and available, I don't think things are necessarily worse than they've ever been, but I do think we all have access to the bad news way more than we should because as soon as something bad happens, I can watch 500 people film it and put it on TikTok.

And so you then are constantly going through this 24 hour news cycle of huge, massive conflict or trauma. [00:03:00] Process it, make a joke about it, move on the next day. And it's just like with TikTok that has just and Instagram and YouTube and whatever, that has just become like a 24 hour process. When nine 11 happened,

there were six weeks of people trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. There was then two years of people trying to process that and create this amazing art. And then, it's like you are talking months and now it's like people will watch, for example, earlier this year, you got the Charlie Kirk assassination.

They'll make a joke about it on stage that night. Everybody will have moved on by the following Monday, if not the following day. Last week we had Prince Andrew get stripped of his titles. I saw every single comedian make jokes about it. And now we've forgotten that it happened. It's a bit of a chicken or an egg situation.

Did the trauma happen first? And then we all had to make jokes about it. And that was just part of one of many coping mechanisms or. Do we just make light of what is around us and what is around us is now constantly weird news and bad news and [00:04:00] trauma. I don't really know where I lie on that, but for me personally, I think it's important that whether you are performing standup everybody is having to deal with grief, loss, sadness, betrayal, failure, whatever it is, and we all make jokes about it.

Whether you're doing it on stage to a hundred people or just with your siblings at the funeral of a relative, or at Christmas when you remember someone you make jokes about or you remember funny things that happened in their life. Because if you don't do that, then you know, if you don't laugh, you'll cry.

Arthur: Interesting that your you point around this notion of everyone feeling oh, the world is all doom and gloom, but actually things have always been difficult, but how people use that kind of conversation point to connect.

But, on the other side, people also had, you have comedy to connect and talk about issues without mentioning 'em necessarily. If we look at, how you get rewarded by comedy, how would you [00:05:00]describe singing? The most empowering part of what it gives you?

Alfie: It's a good question because I I'm quite romantic about comedy and comedy as an art form and comedy as something that can help people process. But I'm also aware that if you lead with that kind of attitude, then you can get very pretentious very quickly.

having said everything I've just said for the last five minutes, standup comedy to me is also just having a laugh in the room. And it doesn't have to be more than that. That is enough. Now in comedy, there's a lot of you read a review for a comedy show and it will be like, oh, it was just funny for an hour, three stars because it didn't have some deeper message.

And I, I don't think that's fair. I think that is literally the point of the art form. If you can make people laugh and get a message across, great. If you can just make people laugh and at the very least, forget about their day a little bit at the end of the day, we are still jesters, it's still the [00:06:00] entertainment industry.

It's a performance, it's fake. It's like going to the theater, going to a concert. It's a job. We are paid to go to clubs and be the five people in the room that make the other 200 people, chuckle or just to be honest, we just smooth the drinking of alcohol. Like the business model of entertainment is to serve food and booze and merch.

And we are just a lubricant where it's you need something to watch and something like, and we'll do comedy for 20 minutes and then you'll get a 10 minute interval to go get a drink. And then again. So it's arguably like we're just part of a wider mechanism that is at the very least, trying to distract you and make you laugh.

And at the most would be great if we could help you. Understand something, communicate a shared feeling process, something that you are going through. For me, when I was watching comedy growing up, it was both , I just loved turning on live with the Apollo and Michael McIntyre's Comedy Road show, and just seeing six people make a fool of themselves and make me [00:07:00] laugh.

And even if it wasn't relevant to me, even if it wasn't my generation, like I would watch, comedy from the sixties, seventies, eighties, and I don't really know what they're talking about, especially American comedians and I don't understand the references, but there was like a tempo to the comedy that elicited a laugh.

Like it was like a call and response. After that, I started to find comedians that I really loved and I really felt, spoke to how I feel and they helped me communicate things that I didn't really fully understand. And that was a great step up. That was an amazing thing to find. Yeah, but it still needed to just, at the end of the day, make me laugh

And there were some comedians that went beyond that, like Bo Burnham, who I mentioned earlier, he doesn't really perform any much anymore, but he was an American standup and he had a massive rise with the advent of YouTube. He did YouTube songs and he has three Netflix specials and he's like a musical comedian that just does isolated bits.

And [00:08:00] arguably, I, I can't do any music. I can't sing. I have no music in my show. And I try and build a show that's like a whole long narrative. I could not be a more different comedian in that way to him, but I've never felt more connected to a performer where I was like, all of the things he's saying about performance and anxiety and or existentialism and loneliness.

And I was like, oh, he understands how I feel. Even though he's 10 years older and he's a musical comedian in the us. And I am not, and I'm in London. I felt that connection. So for me that is what, if I could emulate anything over a whole career, I would love to emulate and have that relationship with someone else that I don't know.

But at the very, very least, I just want to do my job four, five nights a week and for people to leave the room a little bit happier than when they walked in.

Arthur: That's really beautiful how you've showed that link with someone who has such a different comedy style to you , but also how people connect and learn about [00:09:00] things as well. Are there some non-obvious things that people get from comedy?

Because you are mentioning them subtly, just, even the notion, everyone's got their own brain, right? You don't know what people are thinking. But even comedy, it does connect people to understanding, different views and ideas and also subjects in a way that.

One might have felt that wasn't necessarily true or people didn't connect to you in that same way. For example, I guess what people wear and their fears around what's going in their head and going to row. And then if there's a comedy sketch around, these sort of ridiculous, fears that people have when they go into a room.

It almost rationalizes and bring, makes one, one feel connected to their own world, but it's completely someone else's. Tell us about those sort of hidden surprises.

Alfie: yeah. To be honest, I think what you are touching upon there is. Not only like a standup thing, I think that's just like the basis of comedy. If you're trying to break down what is comedy or what [00:10:00] makes something funny, I don't know what the entire formula is, but a part of it is 100% has to be relatability.

And I think nothing explains that or like showcases that better than Instagram, TikTok short form sketch comedy that isn't recorded in front of a live audience, but still is counts as comedy and makes people laugh. So every comedian is now doing it because, I can record 50 videos in my room in a day and I can only record one standup clip.

It gives you more freedom. But if you break down what on Instagram as comedy, after a while you'll notice that it's not necessarily jokey. In standup, we have a set up punchline. That's the foundation of all standup comedy. Whereas online it's more POV, you're in your thirties and your boss tells you to do that and it's relatable.

It's, oh, I'm in my thirties and I work in an office and isn't that, oh, here's the character from HR and here's the character from sales and here's the whatever. [00:11:00] And it can be as easy as I posted some videos where I would, when I was getting Uber's home after gigs, I would just pretend I would just set up my camera film myself and I'd pretend to the Uber driver that I was on, like a really important venture capital call.

And then I would just talk absolute jargon. And just reel off all these terms that I knew from when I was working in tech before I did comedy, and then just put a, trying to convince my pretending to my Uber driver that I work in vc.

And you chart that out on Instagram and that would get more views than my standup clips because everybody that works in tech is seeing all this terminology and they've all had the thought, isn't this a bit ridiculous? They've all seen a pitch deck and gone, that's a bit silly. And everything's a buzzword and we're talking about AI and everybody's talking about reinventing the wheel and pushing the counter.

And like all of these things that mean thing, I wasn't even making jokes, I was just saying them out loud. And then everybody's in the comments like tagging their colleagues because there's this shared humor that's [00:12:00] unspoken. And then arguably, all I'm doing in that situation is bringing it to the fold.

They, two people have that interaction at work and they're sharing the reel to each other. They are laugh, they're looking at each other and raising their eyebrows. When they're in meetings with their boss who just talks in buzzwords. All I'm doing is like seeing that, extrapolating it, making a bit silly.

Putting it back out, and then other people are connecting with it. So it's about one of, trying to figure out what comedy means to people. One aspect of it is purely relatability feeling seen and feeling part of a community, which, considering we all work from home and we all spend all of our time, watching TikTok and reels, I think there will be increasing demand for as we will get more insular and more lonely.

It's a different type of connection. It's like when, I think you're probably a tiny bit older than me, but we are of the same generation where I didn't have a phone at school until I was a [00:13:00] teenager, and even then it wasn't a smartphone. And we would come into school and you'd get around your friends and you'd have seen something on TV or your older sibling, or your parents would've said something or a teacher would've said something and then would get to break.

And you'd go to the playground and you'd talk about that. You'd imitate it, you'd repeat it. Whether it was a scene from the Inbetweeners or something ridiculous that your teacher said, and you would just go over what happened and it'd be the funniest thing. Like nothing is as funny as chatting shit with your mates at school.

I think all comedians are just trying to replicate that feeling with strangers or if you've got an older, like my older brother was the funniest person in the world to me. I couldn't believe he wasn't a comedian when I eventually found out that he works in PR or whatever. It's just the way he would just, we would watch comedy films, we'd watch The Hangover and then he would quote it and I, it doesn't matter how many times I've already heard the original quote.

It was the funniest possible thing to me, and it's just, I don't know [00:14:00] what that is, but that must be a fundamental part of human nature. Because it's not something that I, we've tried to cultivate. It's something that happens when you're a kid and you get in a group of other kids your age and you riff off something that is shared knowledge.

So there's a community aspect to it and there's a relatability aspect to it. And if you took a joke from your office, an in joke from your office and you tried to relay it back to me, it's not, it, I don't find it funny. It's like when you try and show a friend, you go, you've gotta watch this scene.

And then you hold the phone to them and you hold them hostage and they look at it and they're like, I don't get it. And it's because they weren't part of the initial moment. And it's that shared experience, shared interaction. Any way that you can emulate that in a comedy club or online gives people a sense of belonging and like they're being seen because they all can relate to the original material.

And I think a lot of the things that are happening in comedy and like anytime you look at a change in the industry, so you look at the death of panel shows, you look at the rise of social media, a lot of it just is like, [00:15:00] where is that community going to? It used to be in the playground that it was in the clubs.

Now it's in dms and group chats, and in five years it'll go somewhere else. But the core principle between some sort of shared experience being regurgitated or repackaged in some way and everybody resonating with it that's the core part for what comedy is gonna give you.

Arthur: Yeah, fascinating. And how actually things aren't changing really. Looking at it commonly gives people a lot, it is meant to release endorphins, dopamine something called oxytocin.

Part of life, is navigating through conflict, whether it be across a, Christmas family meal or, something bads happen. People have very different views on what's going on. Can you think of moments that you've been in or heard about where comedy's completely dissipated?

Tension?

Alfie: That's a good question. I think someone, every year it does the rounds. It's like a Ricky Ves or someone of that, level of fame has a story [00:16:00] of, their father's, Ricky vet's mom or dad's funeral and. Everybody's sad. And then one of the siblings cracks a joke and everybody smiles or whatever, and it's, he talks about it on panel shows and it always gets in a round of applause.

And I'm always like, damn, I wish I had that exact thing. There's nothing in particular that comes to mind, but I'm a hundred percent sure that cracking jokes and humor has been the connecting link for me in all of my meaningful relationships. So I'm aware that going back and, I remember joining a new school when I was eight

and that was one of my earliest memories of new challenge, new environment. And I moved from a school, to a new school, closer to home. But everybody else that was going to, that, I was a bit of a late edition and most of the people going to that school had a connected kindergarten school before.

So having to join a new school, but also where everybody else is already friends, and I'm still friends with a lot of those guys now. , But the basis of [00:17:00] those friendships were humor and comedy. That was my thing. I was not the most intelligent or the best at sport or the da, but I was cracking a lot of jokes.

I'm sure that also made me unpopular with equal amount of people as it made me popular with, which is like when you're cracking jokes, you could have made half the room laugh and the other half hate you. But then I went to boarding school and it's there's many ways to avoid trouble at boarding school because there is a lot of trouble because you've got boys five years older than you and everybody's confused and going through puberty and they just want to take out their anger on people.

And one way to avoid being bullied or just running into trouble is to make older children laugh. So now you're trying to figure out how to not make your own year group, but people around you, different sensibilities, then you joined the workplace.

I started working when I was 18 in a big office and was probably the only person there under 25. And you're the lowest on the totem pole. And again, it was like you could, I have nothing to talk to a senior 45-year-old marketing manager about, I have no, there, [00:18:00] there's no, I can't talk, he's going through a divorce and he is got kids and he is going and it's there's nothing that I can glue.

But if I can make a joke about the office or about something that's happened again, like we've just been talking about, suddenly you ease the, you ease the tension. So I can't really pinpoint one particular thing where I'm like, thank God I had that joke in the back. But even recently, like in terms of getting into relationships and meeting.

Meeting my partner's parents and da. It's always been just one joke that got the right luck and it probably risky. 'cause if it goes wrong. But, meeting with a boss, meeting with your in-laws, meeting with whatever, and it's if you can get them laughing on the same thing, now we're on the same side.

It's, I, there's a really interesting study that distinguishes between a crowd and a group . And the example they use is if you're on the tube it's packed and everybody's like jostling for a seat, you look at the people around you on the tube and you slightly, you're a bit hostile towards them.

They're taking [00:19:00] up your space. If they touch your hand on the bar, you're a bit like, go away from me. They've taken the seat. 'cause your heart, you are stressed and it's you versus the enemy. And the enemy is everybody else on the tube. If the tube stops suddenly and the person comes on the tanin and goes, sorry, we're being held at a red light, we should be moving.

In the next couple minutes you look to the people around you and you go, ah, classic, classic, TFL, classic London shapes never working. And now you have a common enemy that's out of sight and it's such a minor inconvenience, but now you are friends with the person on the tube. Now you are the ingroup and TFL is the enemy.

It's the common enemy kind of situation. And it's crazy how it can be a look like. It can just, when you just look somewhere, you go, ah, classic Mondays or whatever it can be, whatever. And it's the smallest portion of humor that you can get. And now you've broken the tension.

You're not strangers,, both trying to get to work both with the enemy of the tube line and like that, that from that extrapolating all the [00:20:00] way to making a joke that breaks the tension at a funeral. That is the spectrum of comedy easing the transition a little bit.

Arthur: Totally. And the world's filled with different cultures, but comedy, there's so much room for it to go from here and in terms of how it can bring people to together in the way that it already does, as you say, in the tube with funny things happening.

But also in terms of, it's an amazing way in which people can achieve things, maybe take pressure off themselves. Have you had someone, like a mentor, someone you've looked up to, maybe they've done really well professionally? Or maybe it's, a kind of pillar in, in a community where they use comedy just Yeah.

Just in a way that helps them and others.

Alfie: Pretty good read, really good question. I feel like

that's interesting because I'm relatively new to comedy in the sense I've only been doing it , three years, quote, I'm profe like as the main [00:21:00] focus. It's it's yeah, you gotta self elect when you are gonna call yourself a comedian rather than just.

Just doing gigs as a hobby and then it's like when you start making money off it or whatever, but so I'm used to working in an office and having mentors in business and I, it's 'cause it's a creative field. I don't necessarily have that same thing in comedy. There's a lot of comedians and people that work in the industry that have been incredibly generous and like kind and I take a lot of advice for from, but because they're comedians, the thing that you get as them being your mentor is not that they make you laugh, it's that they like, they talk to you about everything but the laughs.

So when you're in the comedy industry, everybody's funny. Everybody can make jokes. That's the one thing we can all do. The guidance you are looking for is like. How do I get an agent? How do I sell tickets? How do I do social media? How do I act at gigs? [00:22:00] What professionally, what's the etiquette for booking gigs?

Rocking up, running over, what do I wear? All of these things. And also morally, not in the sense of right and wrong, but emotionally, how do I justify this career to myself and to others? How do I make money from it? How do I make money from it but not lose the sense of being an artist?

How do I be an artist without being a dick? How do I not burn out? Do too many gigs? How do I not get lazy? 'cause I don't have a boss? And also, how do I avoid imposter syndrome? I think that was the main thing. Like when I, I didn't really, I wouldn't say I have any, a set kind of mentor in comedy like I used to in my day job, in an office job.

And I imagine my mentors in business, it was nice to have a bit of comic relief from someone. If you are the junior employee at a company and the boss, you have five minutes with them by the water cooler, or you they take you for coffee and they do a walk and talk and they start joking and they add a bit of lightness to the situation.

That's very [00:23:00] relaxing. And that's how you can build the connection. In comedy, it's the opposite. It's everybody's light and funny all the time. So the way you know that you're actually friends with someone is you can have a serious conversation with them. So it's, it is almost the inverse relationship that you'd have in any other job.

And what I've always asked for from people in comedy who were ahead of me, that I've been really admired either growing up or just met them on the scene and really admired the way they go about things has always been about everything but the laughs. It's I want to know how you survive in this industry because there's.

Very little out there for you to learn from. There's no playbook, there's no kind of like rules. Everything is just learn to experience. It's kind of trial and error. And what you want to do as a comedian is avoid as many fuckups as you can or just get through them really quickly. Get through all, do everything wrong in the first year so that you can get over that awkward first year that you'd have in any job.[00:24:00]

In any job, you have that awkward first year. The issue within comedy is you're only doing it a couple hours a night, so you know, to get a year worth of stage time, you need 10, 15 years on the circuit because you're only getting 10 minutes a night, 20 minutes a night, maybe an hour a night if you're on tour.

It takes a very long time. Whereas if you were joining a job, you get 40 hours week one, where you pick up office politics, you pick up how to talk to people, how not to talk to people. You also learn what everybody's role is, what their kind of atmosphere is. You get onboarding when you become a comedian.

No one sends you an onboarding PDF with here are all the passwords, here's all the workflow. You're not in a team, no one's picking up the slack. It's you and that's great. When it's going well, you get all the attention. It's a real solo sport. But when somebody's going badly or when nothing's happening at all, you're not getting booked.

You're not getting likes, people aren't reaching out. It's how do you maintain any kind of sense of [00:25:00] confidence or self-worth or motivation

Arthur: The human journey.

Alfie: Yeah. That drive. How do you maintain that drive when you're in a sport which is completely singular and and a completely individual pursuit.

Arthur: So talking of pursuits, what's very important for your pursuit and for anyone's pursuit is, keeping going. I always hear his of this analogy of, you've just gotta keep the bike moving. You can't stop. And a big part of that is just.

Keeping positive and comedy sets that positive notion so well. But there is a, and I don't know how you coin these people or this attitude that sometimes people have that I'm sure they sway between the attitudes. But this concept of people deciding that they are the ones to tell you whether or not something's appropriate or not or funny or not.

I think what's really interesting is the dark in the darkest rooms moments and at places is dark comedy or, [00:26:00] comedy's rife. 'cause people have to get through that. And then, you look at, other rooms where people, you'll have someone in the room that says no, that's Alfie, that's really inappropriate.

You are this or that. They'll label you. And I'm just intrigued about maybe you've got a funny way in which you've navigated around that. But also just if you have a view around, what can help people, collectively not be that. And then obviously, we want comedy to serve people in a way that's productive.

And you can't have every joke in every room, for example, but how do you see and want, the risky humor to continue

Alfie: That is a conversation that a lot of people are having and it feels like one of the real talking points of comedy at the moment and people give it different names.

In America you can't really go two meters without someone talking about cancel culture. [00:27:00] And when people find out I do comedy and I don't know them very well, they always start with it must be really hard 'cause you just can't say anything anymore. And my first reaction to that is just I don't think those people are going to comedy.

And I think you've been to a comedy club recently wherever you are in the uk, if you're in a major city, you've got a great comedy club. And if you go there on. Monday to Sunday night and you go and watch six comedians do 10, 15 minutes plus an mc. Over those two hours you will hear every single taboo subject spoken about the idea that you can't talk about X, Y, and Z.

People come up, they say you can't talk about, you can't talk about race, or you can't talk about class, or you can't talk about gender, or you can't talk because you're a man. And I'm just like, go look up the bills. It's 80% white men going on stage saying what they want. And it's not that they're saying what they want and all of them are getting it right all the time.

It's that people are buying into a social contract when they go to a comedy club, which is, I am paying [00:28:00] to be made to laugh and not everything is gonna make me laugh. And there are some things that may offend me, but I'm not gonna be shocked by the fact that the words said here and not the words which are said in the office because it's a different scene and. It. And you're a hundred percent right to say which jokes can you say in which rooms? The problem with having a conversation about cancel culture is there's so much more nuance to offense than people are willing to engage with. They see a headline they, I'm talking either side, like I'm talking, people who are snowflake, left, loonies, whatever.

I'm also talking about like the kind of right wing that are equally snowflakey and something offends them and they kick off. And it's bo both sides of the political spectrum or the ideological spectrum think that they are just interested in the truth, but both of them are offended.

Everybody's offended. Everybody has a thing that they don't want to laugh about. And it's really hard for anybody to impose what [00:29:00] is or isn't universally funny because it's just not how it works. So the first thing I would say is that obviously context matters massively. The, and with my act, for example, I can even talk about my experience, but it's if I go into a room and it's a bunch of a hundred like posh white audience members in Notting Hill, then it's not that I'm gonna make different jokes because I'm worried that they're gonna be more or less offended than a more diverse group.

But it's more that like I, I'm not going to not address the situation. I'm not going to not address that we are all the same and that we are put and anywhere where I can take a jab at the audience whilst keeping them laughing. That's the sweet spot for comedy. I feel like people are fallen into two camps, which are both wrong.

There's one camp, which is, it's more important to say the right thing than the funny thing. And I don't think that's wrong. I think if you're getting a lot of like applauses and a lot of like clicks at a gig but not a lot of laughs, then you are playing [00:30:00] it too safe. You are pandering to a crowd that already agree with you that could be left wing or right wing.

If you look at a, an election trail in the us, they go in front of their own supporters. They say things that they know their supporters will like, and then everybody cheers. That's not an impressive job. It's not impressive to get credit from the people that already think the way you think.

It's impressive to cross, dance along the line of nuance. The other side that I also don't agree with is that it's our job to cross that line. It is not a comedian's job to say the unsayable. I'm not a hundred percent sure what that means. The unsayable doesn't exist. Any comedian that you think is canceled is probably not canceled.

In the UK we've got Jimmy Carr, Ricky Ves, these are the famous. Canceled comedians that people latch onto. They are the only two comedians from the UK that can do stadium tours of the us, uk, Europe. They both had Netflix specials last year. They're making tens of, they're the, [00:31:00] their voices are the most amplified.

I'm not saying rightly or wrongly, I'm saying they're the most popular, most like available to find you. You're not being canceled. If you're on a world tour and you've got a Netflix special in the bag, you are the dominant voice of the industry now it now. So I don't think it's someone's job to cross the line and that everybody that's crossing the line is getting canceled inherently.

I think Andy Warhol had a quote, which is, art is getting away with it. And what that means is if I can go to a comedy club and I can say things that play with a stereotype or an attitude and people in the room almost. Feel like they maybe shouldn't be laughing, but the joke is good enough and well informed enough and coming from the right place enough, that's really important.

Not punching down satirizing something if they are laughing at something that they usually wouldn't laugh at, then you've got away with it. If I [00:32:00] tell that joke and then later that night the comedy club gets 500 complaint letters because they were so upset and offended by what I said that I haven't got away with it.

There's a lot of comedians, I think in the uk, but mostly, also maybe more so in America, but maybe they're just more vocal who will tell a joke that's offensive. The mo, the majority of the people that heard the joke will complain and go, either it's offensive or more often it's just lazy.

It's a lazy punch down and it's not clever or adding to anything. It's not a nuanced take on the topic. And then they'll be like I'm a comedian, it's my job. And it's that's not an excuse. You didn't get away with it. If I walk into a room and I just start like reciting slurs and then I leave the room and go, yeah I'm a comedian.

Deal with it. It's not clever. You're just a bad person. It doesn't matter how much you're getting paid. And if 30,000 people online come to your defense and go I found it funny. Then it's maybe all of you are bad people. Now the internet makes this [00:33:00] so much worse because if you buy a ticket to one of my shows, for example, I will do some tongue in cheek material about being better than the audience.

'cause I'm posh and I'm richer. And I can do stuff on class or on race or on money, and these are quite like taboo topics. But if you bought a ticket to my show, that fundamentally. That I don't actually believe any of those things I'm saying. And the reason you know that is because I'm jabbing up at other posh people.

I'll take the piss outta posh people and then I'll claim to be better than them. And I'm actually the only one that's good and all these things, and I'm playing a character and it's clearly satire. If you watch it for an hour, it's pretty obvious. And you look at the stuff I post online, and at no point do I use slurs and say I hate women and try and do domestic abuse jokes.

It's very clear where I stand as like a liberal person who is playing into this character. But if you take a clip of mine and Instagram, this is what they do. They show it to people that they know are gonna hate it, and then those people engage with it because they comment [00:34:00] and they say, liberal comedy can't be, I, I get called a liberal and a Tory online.

And people will be like, I hate leftist comedy. And then they'll be like, I hate this Tory. Pocho prick, and I'm like which is it? You are just watching a 15 second clip. You already want to hate it. You then are hating it. It's confirming what you already think. And then, but Instagram reward will do that because it gets the engagement and that's where we've lost the nuance in the comedy club, in the theater, good things are rewarded.

People will leave the room. Literally, they will take their wallets and they will leave the room if the comedy is bad or offensive or lazy, or they, or maybe they won't leave the room in the moment, but they won't come back to the tour next year. Whereas online Instagram reward the good stuff, but they also make money by pushing the shit around.

Either way it's engagement.

Arthur: tell us about, 'cause one particular video and viral for you, which is around your father going clubbing [00:35:00] with you because it's amazing the way you frame it is really amusing. Just the concept of not wanting to go out with your dad. Tell us a bit about that and then where it went.

Alfie: Yeah, that was like probably the first joke I had that sort of was, I was proud of, I was gonna say that popped, but I dunno what that means. But it was the first joke that,

Arthur: You are popping. You're.

Alfie: it was the first joke that I was like proud to do and it felt real. The joke, the premise of the joke basically was starting from a place of truth, which is my dad is 50 years older than me and he's a cool dad.

Like my dad is still clubbing. He loves this Belgian DJ called Charlotte Dewitt and he goes to gigs on his own. He went to, we went to Lady Gaga together this month and he went to Tom Adell last week. Like he loves it and he'll travel, he'll go to Europe, he'll, and he loves rave music, right?

And he goes and he sits and he stands at the front and he parties till 4:00 AM and then he goes home. Like he really does love it. And I don't go out that much. I don't really go to raves. So the joke, I [00:36:00] extrapolated both those things and I basically have my dad clubbing and then me waiting at home for him to get back like a disappointed parent.

And I talked about, him and I embellished a little bit, but the idea of him keeping his ecstasy in a day of the week pill box and sneaking out the house and going clubbing. And the main punchline that I have is that, and this is again real, I took a video of my dad at Charlotte dewitt at Printworks, and I put it on TikTok and it went super viral.

And all the comments were like, music has no age. I hope I'm like this, when I am 75 or whatever. And then there was some comments because again, Instagram will show it to everyone who were just like, he's hot. And then there were comments like, this is my type. Is he, do you have a mom?

There was all this kind of stuff. And I just thought that was really funny. So I turned that into a bit and I would love to do more with that premise. If Jack Whitehall hadn't nailed travels with my father, which unfortunately he did well, and a lot of series of, I would [00:37:00] love to try and commission a show where me and my dad go to the 20 best raves around the world because it, he just loves it.

He loves the music and he loves being, my, my parents, neither of my parents are necessarily into comedy per se, but my dad was definitely into performance and expression of some kind, and that must be where I generate that interest from.

Arthur: The.

Alfie: That joke's a great example of something which is like, it comes from a place of truth.

The details are false. As in he doesn't really take ecstasy and keep it in a but those are punchlines that. I hope, just supplement the feeling I'm trying to get across, rather than people feeling deceived when they meet him. And it's not necessarily true, but it's like you gotta drum up the stakes a little bit.

All of the major things that I tell in that story. And that joke did happen. And then again, you clip it and you put it online, and suddenly I've got people from the rave community sending me messages and saying, you've gotta bring your dad to abi. We love your dad. He's a [00:38:00] legend here in Vegas

and then a whole bunch of people who just have seen it out of context and gone he sounds like a shitty father. , He's not very present. Oh, I can't believe we're celebrating alcoholism and drug abuse. And I'm just like, oh it doesn't matter that much. It's just Instagram comments and dms.

But I'm like, take a day off. You don't have to get upset about every single thing and if you are gonna get upset. Comments and dms don't really have purpose. There are genuinely bad people doing genuinely bad things and getting away with it. And then there's people like just posting jokes online that are getting hounded and it feels like we're, I don't know.

It's just I dunno if the platforms are to blame or if we are to blame because we've let them chip away at our attention span and now we're so reactionary to everything. But going viral is the, is such a visceral feeling of here's literal love, here's likes and love and comments being that your phone is blowing up.

Here's [00:39:00] millions of views, hundreds and thousands of likes, tens of thousands of comments. And then two days later, who the fuck are you? I don't care. No more views. And I didn't get paid for the views anyway. I'm not getting paid every time I get views on Instagram. So if you don't, it's I don't know.

It's all feeding into this thing, which is like immediate dopamine hit. Immediate reaction. And if I can't if by Instagram's internal logic, if we can't make you laugh, then we better upset you because we need a reaction of some kind. There's a reason more people are on Instagram than watching the news and it's because it's a constant supply of dopamine here.

Arthur: Sp speaking of reactions it's such a relatable, concept act like going out clubbing with your father for lots of different reasons that I weren't provide a, a few you,

Alfie: you got a personal story there, Arthur. We can.

Arthur: yeah. Yeah. We'll move on quickly. But when you are thinking of new [00:40:00] content. The types of jokes and the topics must really vary. Are there some some situations or objects that you're like, I need to cover this, but I just haven't quite found the angle.

Alfie: Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. It's a real balancing act of trying to decide what you would love to joke about and then writing the jokes or just having a joke and then turning that into a bigger topic. And yeah, sometimes there are jokes that I write that are one or two liners and I go, that's great, but it's completely irrelevant.

It's not relevant to anything I want to talk about. I'll give you some examples. I just have them all in my phone. But but then at the other side, like you said, like there's things that I just. I look at and I go, I think I'm in a position to write the definitive bit on X. Like every now and again, there's a, Jim Jeffries has the definitive routine on guns in America.

It's [00:41:00] about 10 years old. You can find it on YouTube. It's 20 minutes and he just hits it from every angle. He's an Australian living in America. He under, he goes about the arguments for guns, against guns, these types of guns. Those types of guns. He does a comparison. He changes, takes guns out, put knives in.

He just, and if I wanted to write a bit about American guns, I just go, there's nothing I can say that he hasn't covered. He smashed it out the park. And I was talking with another chameleon called James Milam, who edits all of my stuff and he films my specials and stuff. And he opens for me when I go on tour.

And like we were just on the train back from a gig and we were like, what could be. My, what could I write? I can't write the definitive bit about guns. I don't live in America. And there's something about the difference between, maybe it would, some, it would have to be something to do with class. It would have to be something to do with being British.

There's a lot of middle class private, educated comedians, but there's not a lot of comedians like me that come from a really old school background in terms [00:42:00] of like traditional values, aristocracy, all of these kind of things. And now we were just, we were ideating and it was like, I would love to do the definitive bit on kind of the difference between like class and wealth.

'cause in America, calling people upper class is just like they're rich and fancy. But in the UK you can be like upper class and broke. You can be like a, one of those lords that like walk around London and has no more money. But you'll still see yourself as this grand entitled.

And then you've got Danny Dyer's rich, but if I think if you tried to call him middle class, he'd punch you in the face I was like, oh, that's an interesting tension that not only am I in an interesting intersection of because I have a family name that is associated with the aristocracy, but I'm not part of the inheritance line.

But my mom's quite a successful business woman. So I lived an I was privately educated and have a nice lifestyle, and now we're at like overwhelming peak times of income inequality and people are really struggling. [00:43:00] But then you've also got people online defending the billionaires. You've got people online that can't afford to buy food, defending Elon Musk getting a trillion dollar bonus.

And I'm like, we've all lost the plot a little bit. And I would love to just be like, what's the thing? How could I condense how as many people are feeling as possible into one. And importantly going back to what we said at the start, and it has to be funny. This isn't an essay. This doesn't need to be stats and facts and like a re but a nuanced angle that makes you laugh and also shines a light on the ridiculousness of the situation of the billionaires , and then Britain's place in it where it's like we don't even really, I dunno how much we care about money.

We're, we are now. I saw something the other day. It's like we, in terms of having wealthy people in the country, I think it's people over a certain net worth. We are like 10th in the world. We're behind like Spain. Like we, we don't have billionaires like America has billionaires and yet we hold onto this like [00:44:00] class system.

And I went on the subreddit for Posh or not, which is like r slash posh or not. And people were like, oh, Sain Springs posh. But Tesco isn't posh. And I'm like, I don't even think I really understand what the words mean anymore. It's anyway, that's just an example of something where I'm like, there's so much information and discourse going on and it's partially an internal thing that I want to figure out my place in, but it's also looking outwards being like it, it is something that is affecting people's day-to-day lives.

Either literally economically or just it's a point of conversation in households. And I want to join the discourse because that's something where I feel like I can speak on it. I can't do the definitive bit on what happened with Charlie Kirk. 'cause I'm not American. It's not guns and republic. It's not inherent to me, if that makes sense.

Arthur: It makes total sense. And, you've got this sort of like unique insight. With entrepreneurs who end up raising money. , A lot of the sort of VC whole thing is what unique insight do you have that means that you [00:45:00] know what people want,

that makes a lot of sense. Do you have a superhero in, within the co the comedy space? Because people, com comedy, there's so many different types around types of a comedy, but b expressing comedy. And is there something you really want to hone in and get better at doing or.

Alfie: My favorite comedian, I mean it fluctuates. My favorite is probably an American comedian called John Malaney. Who's quite famous. He came up through SNL and he's got, I think three or four specials on Netflix now. And in that vein of I watch him and I'm like, oh, I wish I could do that a bit better.

Especially what he's very good at is he's in a suit on stage, but not a big guy. He is not like a big shouty guy. He's weedy and self-deprecating, but he's very good at commanding the stage. And I think maybe that is the thing in America that, they're all theater kids, so it's a bit of a different vibe is in Britain we like to hide and muffle and go up on stage in jeans and act like we don't really care.

Whereas in America there's [00:46:00] like a, there's a pride. I'm the performer, I'm going on stage and I don't wanna be that for the sake of it, but I think what I need to do to get better is to be less scared to perform. I think I am. Relatively good at writing jokes and coming up with an angle, and I think what I'm naturally bad at is being is commanding the stage a little bit better.

Act outs, for example, like act, not doing an impression but telling a joke about something and then acting it out. It just doubles the amount of time you have, if you have five minutes of material, but every time you are explaining a concept, you have a, a 32nd act out for it.

You're just doubling your jokes. You're filling an hour much quicker. If you go back now and look at anyone, like you look at Michael McIntyre, you look at Jack Whitehall, you look at any watch how often they're doing an impression or an act out or what, Michael McIntyre's whole thing of the, the [00:47:00]spices on the spice rack.

And then he's got, I am five Spice and he's running around the stage. It's like he's only got X amount of jokes. He's then got double the amount of impressions and that is. Tripling the laughs. And I think for me to get me from, to take myself from a place where I can do a 10 minute set at a club to people want to spend an hour with me and I can keep them entertained and I can go on tour and I can do Edinburg Fringe and all these things, which, what I wanna do next year and do it in a big room.

Do it in a theater, do it in a big club where you're performing to the person at the back of the room. You've gotta make sure they have a good time. And just making myself a little bit bigger, a little bit bolder, and being less kind of 25 and trying to be cool and trying to hide behind the mic and wear a hoodie and that kind of stuff.

Just get a suit on, go bald, commit to the bit, and when it doesn't land, yeah, you're gonna fall flat on your face, but when it hits, it's gonna hit so much harder and you're gonna, and you're gonna be doing, and more importantly, you're gonna be doing something [00:48:00] interesting. And that's where I need to go.

And there's some comedians in the US Alini looking back, Chris Rock, cat Williams. And then some of the up and cut like Robbie Hoffman. They're just so good at doubling down on the persona and they don't just say a joke and get out. They stay there and they stay and they stay bold with it.

And I think looking at some of my stuff, that's what I'm lacking.

Arthur: Super interesting.. I think one interesting thing to think about is just like why people do what they do and how do they reset? Like before they're going on stage what are they going through? What's their goal, how do they want to feel? Do you feel like for me.

Perspective seems to be important in that process, right? I've set this up to hopefully help people, inspire people and, create curiosity in different unique areas. And when I, before I have whoever on, yeah, like it's nerve wracking and not ways, but then I'm like, wait, hold on. This is the goal.

This isn't for me, this is for the audience. Do [00:49:00] you relate to that? How important is perspective to you? You've got so much to people can learn about it. In constantly being on stage and fighting, fighting those nerves.

Alfie: Yeah. I think it's a really good exercise in taking control over your own adrenaline because you, if you do comedy, you're, you need to temper it. You can't freak out, otherwise you won't perform, but you also need to have a little bit, because otherwise you won't be good. You need a little bit of. Not necessarily nerves, but definitely adrenaline to get you going.

You can't just waltz on stage and take 10 minutes to warm up. You need to be ready on the first joke, and we're not always good at doing that. I a hundred percent relate to what you mean in terms of putting it into perspective. I I've always seen it as like zooming out. So the thing I took from tennis, weird.

I used to play a lot of tennis and like sport and I remember studying what Nadal and Federer would do and trying to see it more like an athlete. And in tennis the sort of [00:50:00] famous mindset is you focus on every point, like it's the most important point in the world. And then the minute the second it is over, you completely forget that it happened.

Because Federer famously, he did a, I think a Harvard University kind of graduation talk recently. And he was like, I only one 54% of my points. You won half his points and he is the most successful tennis player of all time. And in comedy, it's the same thing. It's I need to commit to every joke, like it's the most important thing in the world and be present.

And then the second that joke is over, I need to not let it affect me going into the next one. So if I commit and it bombs, I then need to stay confident and go into the next one. I cannot let that create a loop of self-doubt. That means I then throw the next point, throw the next point, throw the, you need to stay confident no matter what's happening.

And just before I go on stage, I try and sometimes I will feel a bit overwhelmed by this gig has to go well, otherwise I'm shit. And it doesn't, [00:51:00] I'll just remember that I've got a year or two years planned of bigger things I want to do. This is just one small stepping stone in building a show.

Doing the clubs and building a tour, building an Edinburgh show, whatever it is, I have to remind myself of the higher purpose that I'm working towards. Otherwise, you'll get scared and you just won't perform well. So yeah, so it's a weird balance of getting yourself hyped up so you're ready to go and you're like, I'm gonna kill this gig without putting so much pressure on it that you overflow.

And so I try and nurture that balance where I'm like, I'm really excited by this and I want to give it my all present in the moment. But in the grand scheme, doesn't matter at all. You have to be a bit nihilistic about it.

Arthur: Yeah, there's quite a few components. I'm sometimes surprised by people who are top of their field and they and they really struggle with something. Maybe it's with various things. It could even be, nerves that're absolutely breaking up, but they're so good at what they do, but you just don't see that, you humans, when you are [00:52:00] seeing people do so well and look so great, you just don't see that vulnerable nature.

And that's what comedy does very cleverly is connect to you and makes you realize, actually we're on the same page type thing.

Alfie: And people always say oh, I can't believe you do that. Every time someone watches someone I know or even don't know, and I see them after a gig and they'll be like, I can't believe you go on stage and you're not scared. I might have been scared and I just was acting or I wasn't scared, but the only reason I wasn't scared was because I was scared 300 times last year.

And it's worn off now. And, in the spirit of trying to inspire people to do things on this podcast, like if anybody's listening to this I would recommend to anyone in the world to add, doing an open mic comedy show. To their bucket list and not really bucket list. Do it now because sign up to an open mic.

Don't tell anyone. An open mic is where 10 new comedians will go on in front of very few people in the audience, and you'll do five minutes and a lot of the people in [00:53:00] the room, it'll be their first ever gig, but everybody else, it'll be, they'll be under 50 gigs and you'll all be nervous and you will all be rubbish.

Like you'll just not be funny, but it doesn't matter. It's a really supportive environment. You're not going onto the Apollo where people have paid 60 quid. You're going onto a free gig at a pub and just Google how to write standup and just try and write five minutes, write three minutes, it doesn't matter.

Go on stage, do it. You overcome so much by just doing one gig. You get on to a stage, you get blinded by the light, you hold the mic, you deliver to the room. Some of the laughs will get a giggle. Some of the laughs will go to silent and you'll feel it in your stomach. But I guarantee you, you go to work the next week and someone calls you into a meeting or a presentation, you will feel no fear because if you can go on stage and get through talking to strangers in the back of a pub where you don't think you're very funny, you can a hundred percent manage that presentation that you're actually in the grand scheme of things quite well prepped for.[00:54:00]

So the earliest you can do something like stand up or open mic music, it's the same atmosphere or improv, but especially standup 'cause it's so raw and it's so win, it's so all or nothing. I think the rest of your week at work gets a hell of a lot easier and meeting new people, going on first dates going into work, like you just will have this confidence of, look, if I can survive that.

I can survive this presentation.

Arthur: Yeah. And, some people who really care about outcomes, it, you can almost, you, you can meet people can very easily over gear into, oh, I must do well, like that doesn't necessarily mean you do well. Like caring less. I keep on hearing about when people c care less about outcome, it doesn't mean that they're trying hard, they want it that much, but when they drop the pressure, oh, it doesn't matter if it goes to shit, they can sometimes just match the execution.

And it's just almost building that acceptance in the head if it doesn't go right. Okay. That's fine. And that's such a healthy mentality, to a lot [00:55:00] of life.

Alfie: And comedy forces you to have that because sometimes you can write the best joke in the world and you can go to a gig and it's a bad gig and there's five people in the audience and they don't laugh. And that's when you have to come to the realization that. It's not all about the outcome. It's not about what?

'cause I could go on stage and slip over and they can laugh. It doesn't mean I was a good standup comedian. They just, you gotta do it purely because you're doing it. There are some things you just have to do for the sake of it, and you're not gonna get anything material out of it.

It's like going to the gym. It's like you're not gonna be jacked the first day you go to the gym. You are gonna feel better and you are gonna have done the work and it is going to build about a habit. And it's the exact same thing. You just gotta see it as a hurdle. And the trick is to find a way to enjoy the slightly boring thing, the slightly scary thing.

Find a way to just enjoy it, see it as an experience. I did my first standup gig when I was at uni, and I just didn't tell anyone and I just went and did it. And I thought, if it goes horrifically, I'll never tell anyone. No one will ever know. And you [00:56:00] just gotta take that leap. You can't reason your way into it.

Arthur: Lowering the barrier. Fuck, I'm gonna put pain on the wall. Like

Alfie: Just send an email. If you're listening to this, after this finishes, send an email to a local open mic and be like, can I do an open mic next week? And just do it. Don't think about it isn't, don't worry about it. You'll be absolutely fine.

Arthur: We're never Move to the quick flow question. So three things you get joy from

Alfie: Standup comedy my relationship with my partner and Arsenal Football Club,

Arthur: a mantra you want to embrace now would be

Alfie: a mantra I want to embrace now would be

Arthur: yeah. A motto.

Alfie: Okay. Oh crap. Something real. I'm just, I so caught up in standup. I'm thinking of live, love, laugh, all those things I take the piss out of, every day. It's your last, and it's I don't think I want to do that.

Arthur: Yeah.

Alfie: One I heard recently that I really like is Go where your loved.

Arthur: Go away on odds. That's fantastic. One unusual thing that gives you pleasure.

Alfie: Reddit, [00:57:00] maybe not that unusual, so I'll be more specific. R slash font spotting where people upload photos of like signs and fonts that they don't know, and then people identify them in the comments, oh, it's the best. I,

Arthur: A favorite film, book or artist isn't obvious.

Alfie: There's an old animated film called Hoodwinked that for some reason I watched as a child and I think was the funniest film I ever saw, and I now literally cannot find it on any streaming platform. I think there might be a conspiracy

Arthur: One thing you can add to your bucket list a.

Alfie: Go to all continents before I die.

Arthur: Afi, thank you so much for today. It's been such a privilege to have you on

Alfie: thank you very much for having me. This has been a thoroughly nice way , to spend a Monday.