Legend

On writing for myself

Tickets for my Edinburgh show are now on sale here.

As someone who never thought they would do one, that’s a strange sentence to write.

Longtime readers will know that I started doing stand-up by accident, expecting to write it off as an embarrassing detour. Instead I am now doing nearly 30 shows over a month in the world’s biggest arts festival essentially because I had a dream where Michael McIntyre told me to.

Maybe Ronan Keating was right about life being a rollercoaster.

Writing for myself - as oppose to for other people - has been an interesting experience and I thought it might be interesting to expand on why.

Stand-up, like any high-stakes physical pursuit, is a bit of a laboratory for finding out things about yourself you didn’t want to know (and might also, on rare occasions, be pleasantly surprised by). But it also demands a different kind of discipline to other forms of writing because…. you yourself have to say the words.

You’re originator and delivery mechanism. Painter and painting.

This is much more important than I expected when I started.

As a writer, I can enjoy rolling the words around in my head. As a stand-up, I have to enjoy the sensation of them coming out of my face, the expression on the audience’s faces when they are receiving them and the feeling that - for better or worse - they create in the room. It’s made me much more sympathetic to stand-ups rejecting workable jokes for nebulous vibes-based reasons like “merely thinking about saying this joke conjures the faint taste of vomit”, which in the past seemed to me sort of mysterious or even slightly unfair (if I had a favourite joke I wanted to sneak through the production process) but are, I have learned, actually the only thing that matters.

Because writing a joke is one thing. Fronting it out onstage is another. This brings me to my first discovery about stand-up which is: your connection to the material is everything.

Sure, this is true of all writing to some extent. But it’s more vital to stand-up, syllable by syllable, moment by moment, because the audience can spot the slightest flicker of inauthenticity and/or the feeling that you don’t want to be there - sometimes before you do. This is not the same as saying your routines have to be “true” in some literal sense. But they have to be true to a feeling. An excellent joke told by someone who feels no particular way about it is just a trash bag of syllables dumped over the audience’s heads. Conversely, as a longtime pun hater, I recently saw an entirely wordplay-based set that I absolutely adored based on the deranged brio with which the performer brute-forced it through an unwilling room. Commitment is all and the art of joke-writing for others (apart from the technical aspects) is about locating what the performer is excited to do/say and doubling down on that. This is why I think performing has made me better at writing for other stand-ups, specifically the psychological part: sensing their red lines, the ways they do/don’t want to talk about themselves on stage and the weird nobbly little things they find funny.

Because funny is a feeling. In a clown class I took recently (because, of course) we did an exercise where we looked at ourselves laughing in a mirror until we began laughing for real, then turned around and shared that with the audience until they began laughing too.

That, in a nutshell, is live comedy.

Because of this, most of my techniques for writing for other performers assembled over the years - sitting down with a laptop or scrawling spider diagrams in scruffy notebooks - have proved utterly useless when it comes to generating things to say onstage. Okay not useless, but it’s striking that most of the stuff that’s ended up staying in the set - through the previews, the rough club nights and the silent open mics - are things that just occurred to me as I was doing something entirely unrelated.

Grr!

It makes sense, though. After all, things that strike me in the moment are shaped by my brain in real time and sparked by a peculiar collision of circumstances and life history meaning they’re inevitably more authentic and more felt. This has also proved true of structure. Any attempt to force a shape on my longer show has been stubbornly resisted by the material. It has meant instead of “planning” I’ve had to water the routines and see, with a bit of gentle training, which bits naturally grow and which bits wither and die.

It’s also why a stand-up set - like a sourdough starter - needs constant feeding. Little bits need skimming off when they stop working, and new bits need adding to keep it fizzy. This is both slightly annoying (it can’t be forced) but also pleasing (I like a bit of magic).

Because of all of this, you also have no real control over why you’re funny. You may like to think of yourself as a refined philosophical wit, but the audience may like it when you fart and follow through. Your job isn’t to only do only the latter (pandering) or retreat into the former (self-indulgence) it’s to find a secret third thing: the stuff you like doing that they like watching you do. For this reason, I didn’t find it helped to go into stand-up with too rigid a sense of “I’m going to do it like this…” I reckon ideally the reason why you’re funny should be something that you’re aware of but that’s a little bit out of your control. Something you’re being rather than doing. I think that’s true of all really good stand-ups. They’ve got the reason they’re funny on a leash (otherwise it’s awkward), but they haven’t got complete control over it (otherwise it’s cute). I tried to abandon any hope that I would be seen a certain way and just sort of bowled onstage to see what happened. Have I managed to do that? Who knows. But I’m trying! (Or rather, trying not to try too hard).

The audience’s sensitivity to how you feel about your material also applies to how you feel about yourself. A state of robust emotional and physical vitality is very helpful and there are times in my life I don’t think I could have done stand-up because I just don’t think I would have been in a position to bring that to the stage. The old saying, “I’m OK - You’re OK,” is a good mentality for performing and when I throw a gig (or see stand-ups that consistently struggle despite solid material) it’s normally, in my view, because one of those is broken - and often both. No matter how acrid your comic worldview, how loserish your gait, how aggressively you hector the audience or how nervously you stammer into the mic, it helps if underneath it all that the audience senses - if not in life then at least for the brief period you’re onstage - that you’re a healthy fellow pack member rather than predator or prey.

Then there are the physical constraints. What you look and sound like is a massive restriction on what you can sell. In other forms of writing I might be able to pull off certain kinds of lyricism, chin-stroking, tenderness, maximalism etc etc. In live performance, none of these things suit me at present and I’ve just gotta suck it up. This has been a big adjustment. When writing fiction or dialogue I can inhabit any worldview and say almost anything. When it’s just me onstage, I can’t pretend I’m going to bang out a saxophone solo if the audience sees a flute.

Then there’s the issue of time. Stage time runs slower than reading time and the sound of the blood beating in your ears as you crawl your way through a hostile silence tends to sharpen your ear for redundancy. In a set, ideally every phrase should be some combination of clear, vivid, engaging, unexpected and building on what has gone before (or humorously subverting the audience’s desire for all of the above). By comparison, a lot of prose gets away with murder. That’s not to say prose should be held to the same standards (indeed there are certain things it does - subtle long-form storytelling, abstraction, emotional breadth - that stand-up, because of its particular constraints, struggles to) but it has made me read prose with a different eye and less patience for writing that meanders (like I’m doing here) or states the same idea three different ways with diminishing returns (like I’ve done repeatedly and am about to do again). Stand-up writing is load-bearing. It’s muscly. And it needs to provoke a physical reaction so phrasing that’s merely witty or wry, without a robust enough comic persona to prop it up, doesn’t cut it. You can sometimes see otherwise intelligent and funny performers working this out, with a panicked look in their eye, in real time.

And finally, standing in front of an audience when you’re blowing the roof off and seeing one woman in the corner scrolling through her phone with look of irritation is a healthy reminder that even the best version of what you’re doing will be disliked by someone - and that’s OK. The very things about you that make some people’s eyes light up will make others yawn or recoil - and that is something it’s probably helpful to make peace with.

If I could sum up in one word what stand-up helps you hone it’s this: presence. In the words of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies it encourages you to “trust in the you of now.”

Anyway, if you want to see me ignore all of that for fifty minutes tickets for my Edinburgh show Legend, at the Gilded Balloon in August, are now on sale here and my final work-in-progress in London is on July 8 At Top Secret here.

This is what it’s all about:

What does it take to become a legend? Fuelled by pork scratchings and a lust for glory, 2025's So You Think You're Funny? winner Madeleine Brettingham presents her highly anticipated debut hour of stand-up, exploring what growing up in a world of booze-soaked bad behaviour taught her about how man becomes myth.

Also…

I wanted to take a moment to say goodbye to a brilliant friend and colleague Steve Burge who sadly passed away in April.

Steve was an absolute genius and an incredible writer of comedy whose head was a seemingly endless font of funny and completely unique ideas. Given this ability, he could have been an arrogant dickhead, but somehow wasn’t. He was a lovely, generous and exuberant person and the world feels a little bit less magical without him. I don’t know if a newsletter is an appropriate place to say this, but unfortunately he isn’t answering his emails anymore.

RIP Steve, you will be missed xxx