Three young Claphamites walk into a bar.
The start of a bad joke, and also the start of this article.
Three young Claphamites walk into a bar, pay the best part of a tenner for a pint of lager, before climbing the back stairs to a dingy room to take their seats for the show.
“If you desire the spleen, and will laugh yourselves into stitches, follow me” says the witty servant Maria to Sir Toby Belch in Shakespeare’s romantic comedy, Twelfth Night. It was also what the emcee of a comedy night in the upstairs of a South London pub announced to the audience on a Thursday in November 2025. Well, thereabouts.
Shakespeare’s reference to the “spleen” organ cites theories of 18th-century medicine in which physical states, including laughter, were said to determine human emotions. According to Galen’s humoral theory, the spleen organ was a source of black bile, which, in excess, was thought to make people moody and mean. But the spleen, as Maria’s line shows, could also have a remedial function — in that laughter could cleanse the spleen of its nasty and depressive muck.
Long story short: laughter is the best medicine.
As I sat in that pub on a rickety bench next to my mates, with a pint in my hand and the stage set for 90 minutes of entertainment, my emotional state was certainly physically determined. The occasion in its entirety had set itself up for laughter. Enjoyment was almost guaranteed.
And enjoyment there was. Richard Stott did a very funny gag about Sabrina Carpenter being a northern lass. Merry grew merrier as more beer was bought. Despite a few cringey flops from the emcee, it was everything you could want from a ten-quid midweek mixed bill.
Later that evening, as I conducted my usual brain-rot bedtime routine (ignore book by bedside table for the billionth time and reach for phone), my emotions were also determined by my physical state: bleary, squinting red eyes, hunched posture and the slightly icky feeling induced by watching AI slop for 30 minutes too long. If any laughter at an Italian Bach skit did make its way to the surface, it was in the form of a brief exhale and the faintest contortion on my facial muscles — but certainly not enough to rid any excess black bile.
The interesting thing is that some of the content I was consuming could definitely brand itself as “comedy”, and probably did somewhere amidst hundreds of hashtags. But the circumstances in which I was engaging with it — alone, through a screen — compared to the convivial setting of the pub, elicited a completely opposite emotional reaction.
Live comedy is still in demand. The 2024 UK Live Comedy Sector Survey revealed that 50% of venues organise at least 100 comedy events per year. The beauty of live performance is of course in the community and in the affective experience. Investments within the built environment of the comedy club, from the seats you sit in to the food you consume, are structured to be congruent with the expectations of a venue in which you laugh.
“The seating is always very tight, and that’s very intentional. You’re meant to be brushing shoulders with people. You are served drinks and food, usually. That’s part of the audio backdrop,” explained researcher and comic Professor Beck Krefting, who specialises in histories and historiographies of stand-up comedy at Skidmore University.
“You are absolutely meant to be feeling what you’re feeling, because all those things are working to do that.”
She said: “We found in research that the kinds of comedy, the styles of comedy don’t vary across platforms. Comics are taking the same staple styles of offensive humour or self-deprecatory humour or taboo, and they’re transplanting it into another platform.”
“But online, you are completely removed from other people, and so whatever’s happening is happening in isolation. Sometimes you can watch something that’s funny, but do you emote? Do you actually laugh out loud?”
So material signifiers in a real-life venue are working overtime to reinforce a boundary between those in the room and those who have not actively chosen to be there by buying a ticket or paying a fee. Straying from the normalcy of everyday life by attending an event induces a mood-shift that makes laughter easier to come by, or at the very least, brings an expectation of a good time.
Online, those boundaries are non-existent. A funny skit or clip about Trump, for example, can become involved in the amalgamation of consumed goop, the contingents of which can rarely be differentiated from one another. 15 seconds later and you’re looking at fascist propaganda. A number of swipes reveals a disturbing porosity between humour and harm.
We might have an impression of social media as democratising art forms like comedy: more people are able to access vast amounts of material. But of course, as the paradox goes, the algorithm is simultaneously acting as a hyperspecific blinker, working to project a dangerously narrow reality, as Professor Krefting explained: “People think that they have access to everything and they’re consuming everything, but they’re consuming a very narrow kind of content.
“We imagine that other people are feeling and experiencing the world in the same way, and sometimes in the same racist ways or sexist ways, when many other people are not.
“I think of this as ideological tribalism, where you express appreciation for a particular kind of humor that tracks you so quickly that, again, we’re talking about a matter of a few clicks.”
Scrolling from laughter through to violence fosters a kind of irrational thinking on the part of the consumer, our sense of shared community deranged by the fact that the algorithm has caught us entirely on our own, and kept us there.
Community is something that live comedy not only creates, but needs. Bo Burnham captured this exactly in his musical comedy Inside. Shot, performed and edited, alone, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it documents the psychological breakdown of a quarantined entertainer without an audience. It makes for a bleak viewing that in many ways is more tragic than comic, but it does give a fascinating deep-dive into the hollowness of the internet-addled brain.
Now to take a step back for a moment and turn to a different, perhaps wider issue. Should we even be talking about live comedy and TikTok skits in the same sentence? Can we really compare the layered process of writing scripts, crafting original joke structures, perfecting delivery and stage-presence and consistently maintaining the notion of an authentic persona during a ten-minute live stand-up set to a 30-second video made flawless with few CapCut edits?
This question was asked of four TikTok comedians who turned their hand at stand-up in the show Knock Knock at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe. Reviews were mixed, as expected. Stand-up purists railed against the fact that clearly none of the performers had the miles on the clock to seek anything but the most superficial gag, while more liberal viewers simply admired their bravery at getting up on stage. However both camps were in agreement that any of those on the bill — who shared six million followers between them — could certainly cut it on the circuit, but on the merit of honing their live skills as opposed to their offerings online.
TikToker Henry Rowley, who is known for his cartoonish Gen Z archetype sketches online, was one of the performers in Knock Knock. Regardless of whether you’re anti-influencer, he is one of those people who seem easy to hate. Posh, good-looking, successful and worst of all, has stupid hair. But he certainly had the last laugh just a year after that first performance at the Fringe — 800 of them, to be precise, of a sold-out Alexandra Palace Theatre audience during his analogue stand-up tour, Just Literally.
Evidence, if nothing else, that phones have become the sharpest marketing tool.
The debate of high and low cultural forms, of distinctions between elite, complex art and mass-produced, accessible entertainment is age-old. But in this era of infinitely available and reproducible digital content, it hits a zeitgeisty nerve.
London-based open mic comic Chris Wilkinson said: “It still feels as though some comics turn their noses up at viral acts who haven’t necessarily done their time on the circuit, and yet can sell out established venues via online followings.
“But if the result is still an entertained crowd who feel they’ve got value for money, who’s to say this is any less valid than a night hinged on more seasoned pros?
“If this is the gateway experience required to turn a doom-scroller into a regular attendant of varied live comedy then clearly everyone wins.”
However, when it comes to polishing material, Wilkinson explained how there is no real online equivalent of a new act or new material night: “Even the most experienced professionals need an understanding and neutral audience to help cultivate brand new routines,” he said.
“Crude material at an open mic gig might more often be attributed to incompetence than malice. However, comedians ought to be wary of sharing something which needs refining with an online audience who owe them nothing and don’t appreciate this process.”
So where do we go from here? Shall we be equally accepting of purist forms and their newer, modified counterparts?
My father used to play tennis every Thursday and has done for the past 20 years. When his mates began to trade their strings in for carbon fibre padel bats all of a sudden, he turned his nose up and refused to take part. Six months and a few stern words at the pub was all it took for him to be the proud owner of a Wilson Carbon Force.
But for dad, playing padel in a converted warehouse in Stroud has enabled an afternoon of tennis, outside in the fresh air, to take on a new novelty.
Something similar happens, argued scholar and historian Jim Cullen, when a cultural form has popular origin. At first, elites will criticise these forms as vulgar or dangerous and might even associate them with moral decline, but this changes over time. Universities study them. Museums and concert halls adopt them. Critics redefine them as “art”. Once this happens, the same form may be reclassified as “high culture”. Starting this article with a quote from Shakespeare might seem high-brow and poncy now, but there was once a time when the masses enjoyed the bard’s bawdy jokes in the theatre.
So, it’s only a matter of time before another popular cultural form takes its origin to displace TikTok and Instagram as the butt of the joke in conversations about what “art” is in 2026. Which is terrifying, but also semi-reassuring.
Live comedy pulls us in because of the community it creates. We laugh with others and so we connect with others. And if the sad reality is that human connection has been made unusual by the paradoxical disconnection afforded by the internet, where people are just a fingerstroke away — then we can at least revel in its novelty.
