How to Compere a Comedy Night Without Losing the Room

Geoff Whiting carries ten minutes he might never use

Geoff Whiting has compered literally thousands of comedy shows and events. The first thing he does on stage is try not to use his own material. He told the stand-up coach Chris Head how it works. “My strategy is to start off riffing and then use material as a fallback if the riffing isn’t working.” The fallback isn’t a couple of throwaways, either. “I have about ten minutes material in the back of my mind and occasionally use all of it and occasionally none of it, depending on how the room feels and the audience are reacting.” Ten minutes, written and carried in and rehearsed, on the understanding that a decent Friday might never need a word of it.

That’s an awkward trade for anyone who got into stand-up to do their bits. But there’s no quicker way on the circuit to learn how a room actually behaves, which is a separate skill from writing a good joke and a more useful one at eleven on a wet Tuesday. Ollie Horn is a circuit compere who wrote a ten-point piece for Chortle in September 2025 called How not to be an MC. He gets it out of the way in his first heading.

This might sound counterintuitive, but the main job of an MC is not to be funny.

Horn, who teaches an MC workshop, isn’t recommending you be dull for ninety minutes. He’s saying that the laughs the audience carries out to the car park are meant to belong to the acts you brought on. A host who forgets that hands the headliner a crowd that has already had its night. His sixth point is worth taping to your set list. “When you’re new to MCing, I’d suggest not putting pressure on yourself to improvise moments of genius.” Nobody has paid to watch you invent, live, a five-minute routine about a bloke called Dave who fits kitchens.

What does a compere do at a comedy night?

The compere opens the show, tells the audience how the night runs and introduces every act. Then they reset the room after a set that died, keep the running order roughly to time and close the show. Stevie Gray founded Flat Cap Comedy, which runs comedy shows at multiple venues in the East Midlands, and is its resident MC. He wrote the most usable version of that job description for Chortle in January 2022: “If the audience is sat down, facing the front, know how many acts there are, how many breaks, not to talk or heckle during the show, and you as the MC ensure that all acts are name-checked and thanked at the end of the night, then you have done your job.”

Read that back and count how much of it is admin. Horn makes the same point from the audience’s side. He tells MCs to “Explain that there’ll be breaks, how they can go to the bar or take a toilet break, and how you expect them to behave during the night.” A decent share of any Saturday crowd has never been in a comedy room before. They don’t know whether there’s an interval, whether the bar stays open, or whether standing up during a punchline is rude. They will find out by doing it, mid-punchline, unless you get there first.

One thing Horn specifically warns against is announcing your intentions before you talk to anyone. His line is simply, “If you want to speak to the audience, then go for it as you would any other conversation.” Telling a room you’re now going to chat to a few people is the compering equivalent of clearing your throat into the mic. It gives the front two rows about four seconds to start staring at their shoes.

Mopping up blood, catching their breath

Danny McGinlay’s 2011 Chortle piece How to MC is still the clearest thing written on what you do in the gaps. Its three sub-headings are the only three reasons he allows for doing material between acts: “Mopping up blood”, “Catching their breath” and “You have complimentary material”. Everything else is you enjoying yourself at the expense of the running order. His rule for the rest of the evening is blunt: “If the audience is warm, if they are laughing at jokes and having a good time, then get off stage.”

McGinlay also passes on an analogy he credits to Justin Hamilton. It’s the one I’ve heard repeated most in green rooms by people who have no idea where it came from: “Treat the audience as if they’re a new friend, and all the comics appearing on the show are your old friends who you are introducing your new friends to.” It sounds soft until you notice it solves the introduction problem entirely. You don’t oversell an act you’ve never seen, you vouch for them the way you’d vouch for a mate.

Worth saying, because it’s a live risk rather than a theoretical one, that riffing with the front row has legal edges now. A Tel Aviv magistrates’ court fined the 22-year-old comic Vova Tamarkin NIS 10,000, about £2,500, over crowd work aimed at an audience member. The judge found the exchange amounted to defamation, and Tamarkin denied making the remarks at all. That’s one court in one country, but the compere is the person on stage doing the most talking directly to individual punters. Worth a thought before you ask the man in row two what he does for a living.

£150 of a £500 night

Here’s the money, because nobody publishes it and everybody wants it. Iszi Lawrence writes on her own site about what promoters should pay comedians. She sets out a split for a promoter who is, in her words, “left with £500” after promotion costs and £20 for a mate on the door. (In my experience that £20 is £20 and two pints, and the pints are never in anyone’s budget.) Her breakdown reads: “MC £150, Opening Act £125, Middle act/s £50, Headliner £175”. So the compere takes the second-biggest cheque of the night, ahead of the opener and ahead of the middle.

That’s what Lawrence thinks a promoter ought to pay, and she’s explicit that plenty don’t: “A lot of clubs do not pay the MC more than the opening act. I feel that the MC is the most important act of the night and their fee should reflect this.” My own experience of asking, on both sides of the door split, matches the first half of that sentence more often than the second. For a US comparison, our write-up of the Comedy Fee Tracker documented opening acts at publicly funded venues at between $500 and $5,000. Adam Ray was listed at $500 for a half-hour set on a bill where the headliner took $51,500.

Get the fee agreed in writing before you take the gig, and get it agreed as a fee rather than a share of something you can’t audit. The initial creditors report for Big Difference Company, the charity behind Leicester Comedy Festival, put the total debt in excess of £215,000. It listed more than 100 people and organisations owed money. Several of them held the mic in between the acts who did get paid.

Don’t do anything after the headliner

Horn’s eighth point is the one most new comperes ignore. After ninety minutes of unglamorous work, there’s a strong pull to take one last go at the room. “For that matter, don’t do anything after the headliner,” he writes. By then, in his words, “they’re already thinking about where their car is parked and whether they have time for chips on the way home”. Anyone who has compered above a pub with a nine-space car park and a chip shop that shuts at eleven will recognise that.

There’s a genuine disagreement here between two working comperes, and it’s worth knowing about rather than resolving. McGinlay’s closing instruction is to “Make sure all the people who are working get a round of applause, the bar staff, floor staff, sound, door staff.” Gray’s minimum standard has all acts “name-checked and thanked at the end of the night”. Horn’s advice is to stop dead once the headliner has landed their last joke. My read is that the thanks are worth thirty seconds and no more, and that whether you bother at all depends on whether you’ll be back in that room next Thursday having to look the sound bloke in the eye.

The upside of all this dogsbody work is stage time nobody else on the bill gets. Michael Monkhouse, writing for Chortle in 2012, put it in terms that make the maths obvious: “As MC you have as many opportunities as there are performers, and if one gag gets stupefied silence, no one cares because you’ll get another chance later”. Gray frames the same thing as writing: “If you run one gig a month and write a new five minutes to trial at each gig, you have essentially written an hour via your MC gigs.” Twelve nights of the least fashionable job on the bill, and you’re carrying an hour written in link-sized chunks, most of it scrawled on the back of the running order in biro.

Two questions that come up after your first month hosting

Do you need to be an experienced act before you compere? Nobody in these sources says you need a certain number of gigs first, but Horn is direct about the timescale: “It takes a really long time to become a bulletproof MC.” Lawrence’s argument for paying the MC most rests on skilled hosts being “experienced headliners in their own right”. That’s the top of the ladder. The bottom rung is whoever happens to be in the room at half seven when the booked host texts to say his car won’t start.

How long should the compere talk between acts? None of the comperes quoted here put a number on it, which is itself the answer. McGinlay’s test is the state of the room rather than the clock: if they’re warm and laughing, get off. Monkhouse reckons “As MC all you need are a couple of minutes opening, a couple of minutes closing, and a dashing of good humour in the meantime.” Whiting’s ten minutes is the ceiling, and he says himself that on a good night he uses none of it.

Sources

One last practical thing, and it isn’t in any of the sources because it’s too boring to write down. Before doors, find out where the toilets are, whether the card machine works, and what time the bar calls last orders. You will be asked all three from the stage, usually by a man in row two during your first link. A compere who knows the answer gets a bigger laugh out of the plumbing than out of anything they wrote at home. Underbelly Boulevard in Soho is a 200-seat room that has hosted more than 1,700 performances since October 2023, and it plays its final show on 10 January 2027. Somebody stood in front of that room and pointed at the toilets on most of those nights, and not one of them is in the programme.

About River Leanox

River Leanox edits Open Comedy's newsroom. Coverage runs across stand-up's full ecosystem: comics on the rise, club owners booking the rooms, festivals, specials, and the working-comic economics behind the laughs. Tips, corrections, and counter-arguments welcome at river@opencomedy.com.

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How to compere a comedy night without losing the room