How to Write a Tight Five That Survives a Gong Show

Thirty comics, five minutes each, three red cards

The Comedy Store’s King Gong runs on the last Monday of every month. The club’s own listing spells out the deal without any softening: it welcomes “30 budding new comics on to our stage and challenge them to remain there for 5 minutes”. Three audience members are handed the power to end you, described on the page as “3 people randomly assigned as judges”. When all three cards go up, “the comic is gonged off the stage”. Tickets are “From £12”. You register by emailing gong@thecomedystore.co.uk, and the night is strictly 18+.

Nobody standing in that queue is workshopping an idea. They have all brought the same object, built to the same spec, and the spec is a tight five. It’s the unit British and American clubs both run on. That’s why it turns up at open spots, at competition heats, at TV submission deadlines and in the DM you send a booker who has never heard of you. The Store’s own copy gongs the acts off “….. usually with sighs of relief from the audience”. And yes, that’s a five-dot ellipsis on a professional venue’s website, which I find oddly comforting.

How long is a tight five?

A tight five is five minutes of stage time. At the three UK rooms most new acts aim at, the numbers on the running order are five, five and seven. King Gong gives you five, as above. The Stand’s Red Raw, which runs weekly in three cities, says “Successful applicants are usually offered two five-minute slots” and that performers “can request feedback” afterwards. The club’s page describes “up to ten new acts” a week, Monday in Edinburgh, Tuesday in Glasgow, Wednesday in Newcastle. So You Think You’re Funny asks for more. Its rules state “The performer’s must have 7 minutes of their own completely original material” (their apostrophe, not mine), with regional contestants performing “up to 7 minutes of original material”.

The gap between written length and clock length is where new acts get caught. Five minutes of material read aloud in your kitchen is not five minutes on stage. Laughs cost seconds, and you can’t spend them twice. My rule, and it’s mine rather than anyone’s official guidance, is to write to four and let the room fill the rest. If nobody laughs you finish early, which has never once got an act in trouble with a booker. Overrunning has. Ask any MC who’s had to wave at a new act while the headliner’s train is leaving. The compering guide we ran last week covers what that looks like from the other side of the stage.

One script, three rooms: the SYTYF material rule

So You Think You’re Funny’s essential info includes a line that quietly changes how you should build the thing: “You should use the same material throughout the competition, judges do not want you to change it unless it is minor tweaks.” That single sentence rules out the standard new-act habit of swapping in a fresher bit each time. Your seven has to survive a regional showcase, then an Edinburgh heat, then a room with judges in it, and you’re expected to turn up with the same words on all three nights.

Which means demographic-dependent material is a liability. If a bit only lands with people who recognise the reference, it will land in one of those rooms and die in the other two. The competition’s other rules are just as blunt about who it’s for. Entrants must “not have performed more than 15 stand-up spots (including open spots) before 1 June 2025”, and must be “unsigned from any comedy agent or management company at the time of applying”. Fifteen is a lower bar than it sounds, incidentally – you can burn through that in a fortnight of Wednesdays if you’re prepared to drive. There’s also “a maximum of 14 slots per heat”. Chortle reported that the 2025 competition drew “over 435 initial applications” and that Madeleine Brettingham became “the 38th winner”. Beyond The Joke’s write-up says the judges watched “7 minute sets from all 10 finalists” – ten sets and seventy minutes of material, sat through in one go. We covered this year’s final at Teviot and the train company sponsoring it.

Jill Edwards’s trimming rule, and where the words go

The most useful sentence I’ve read about cutting a set this year came in Chortle’s Correspondents column. It’s from the musical comedian Ashley Frieze, writing about how much time to sink into perfecting material:

The amazing comedy coach, Jill Edwards, teaches that a joke needs to be trimmed and trimmed until there’s nothing unnecessary in it.

Frieze’s piece (Chortle, April 2026) is mostly about musical comedy and social video. He’s honest that “The biggest thief of time, though, is perfectionism”. Both halves matter for a tight five: trim past the point of comfort, then stop trimming and go and do it, because the room finds the fat faster than you do. Trimming at the kitchen table has no laughs in it to trim around, which is most of the problem.

In practice that means the setup carries only what the punch needs to work. Anything that shows you were clever enough to notice the topic first can go. Take the funniest word to the end of the line. When you find a spare thirty seconds, spend it on tags to a bit that already works rather than importing a new premise that needs its own setup. A five has room for maybe three ideas, and a fourth one usually arrives as a rushed version of itself, delivered at the pace of someone who has just clocked the red light. Amy Hawthorne, a comedian who has booked for New York clubs, makes a related point about grouping: “It’s also usually better to put bits together that all have a single throughline.”

The tape is a different set from the room

Hawthorne’s advice comes via Matt Ruby’s Funny How newsletter, in a piece about building a submission tape. Her framing is that this set isn’t simply your five best jokes. “Generally this will be more personal/introductory than a typical set,” she says. She adds that it often “doesn’t need to be literally autobiographical, as long as the jokes really focus on introducing you, your background and your perspective.” For the opener she suggests “Some variation on the easy ‘I look like’ opener you probably dropped ages ago because it felt a bit like low hanging fruit”. Her reasoning is that the opener you binned for being obvious does the introducing work a stranger needs done before anything cleverer can land.

That distinction is live in the UK right now, because entry to the BBC New Comedy Awards runs on video. Beyond The Joke reported that Amy Gledhill is head judge for the 2026 series, and that “all the heats will be filmed this September” in Coventry. The winner “will receive a paid commission to write and perform their own 30-minute audio pilot under the mentorship of a BBC Comedy Commissioner, plus a trophy and £1,000 cash”. A judge scrubbing through a pile of entries is a different audience from a King Gong crowd holding red cards, and the same five minutes will read differently to each. If your set’s best moment is a slow build with a silence in the middle, the silence looks like a technical fault on a phone recording.

Two questions that come up in every smoking area

Should there be crowd work in a tight five? Not in a competition set, and not in a tape. The SYTYF rule about keeping the same material throughout effectively bans anything you can’t repeat. There’s also the risk end of it, which is not theoretical. A comic was fined £2,500 in Tel Aviv over a joke aimed at a front-row punter. Save the riffing for club spots where the MC has already warmed the room.

Is a tight five worth anything financially? Directly, almost nothing – Red Raw slots are unpaid beginner spots, and King Gong is a night you pay to watch (the crowd knows it too, which is why those red cards go up so cheerfully). Indirectly, it’s the audition currency for everything else. Our piece on UK comedian earnings in 2025 is the sobering context for anyone treating a heat win as a career plan.

Worth knowing what the biggest newcomer prizes carry, though. Beyond The Joke’s rundown of the So You Think You’re Funny winner’s package lists “A cash prize” and “A fully paid for solo show (or mixed bill) run”. It also names “Up to 4 mentorship meetings (virtual or in person) with Channel 4’s Comedy Commissioning team” and “A paid performance slot in the Comedy Arena and weekend pass at Latitude Festival”. Four meetings with commissioners is more access than most acts get out of five years of emailing, and it sits on the list below the cash like an afterthought.

Sources

If you want a test that costs nothing, run your five at Red Raw twice, since the Stand offers successful applicants two five-minute slots and will give you feedback if you ask. Applications there go in windows rather than staying open, so check the page rather than assuming. Then time the recording with the laughs left in, not the version you rehearsed in the car. Whatever the stopwatch says is the real length of your tight five, and it’s longer than the version in your notes app – by enough that the MC starts doing that little circling motion with one finger.

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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Writing a tight five that survives King Gong’s three red cards