How to do crowd work without wrecking your own set

Jeff Arcuri’s crowd work started because he ran out of jokes at sea. “It really started when I started doing cruise ships,” he told A Martínez on NPR’s Morning Edition on 12 August. He did so many shows on board that the ships let him repeat them: “I can’t have, like, 6 hours’ worth of material.” Six hours is a lot of writing to be short of when the boat isn’t stopping.

His fix wasn’t to write faster. “I would basically cut my sets in half and then supplement it with crowd work,” he said on the same programme. The trick was to “ask the audience about a premise before I’d get into it”. That is a scheduling bodge invented by a man doing repeat shows to people who’d already seen him that week. It has since become the engine of a Netflix hour. Nice to Meet You premiered globally on 7 July, taped in the round at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix, Arizona, across five sold-out shows.

Most comics asking how to do crowd work are really asking three separate questions at once. The answers differ depending on whether you’re doing five minutes, twenty, or an hour of your own. Here’s the useful version, with the bits that can actually cost you money.

What counts as crowd work?

Crowd work is anything you say to a specific person in the room that you couldn’t have said in any other room. Their name, their job, the fact they proposed without getting on one knee, and whatever you build on top of it. Arcuri draws the line hard at the lazy version. “I don’t just point at an audience member and ask them to work for me,” he told NPR. Elsewhere in the same interview: “Like, I don’t just walk up and say, what’s your story? – to fill time.”

Answering a heckle is a different job with a different clock on it. Someone else has started that one, and you’re taking the room back rather than building anything. That is why we wrote about handling a heckler without losing the rest of the room as its own problem. You choose to open that door. The heckle is the door coming off its hinges while you’re mid-setup about your nan.

Arcuri cut his sets in half and asked about the premise first

The thing worth nicking from that NPR interview is the order he does things in. He asks the audience about a premise before he does the material on it. The room hands over the setup and he keeps the punchline he already had. “And I was finding that there was a lot of fun to be found in premises from the audience’s perspective,” he said. That’s a rehearsal method disguised as spontaneity. You already know where the bit goes; you’re just letting a stranger walk you to the door.

“I kind of use them as a pivot point or a catalyst to talk about what I want to talk about and kind of bring the audience on the same level as me, where we’re going to make this funny together.”

That’s Arcuri to NPR again, and it’s the second half of that sentence most acts never get round to doing. “I want them to take half the credit for how the show goes,” he said. Which is a generous read on a man who, in the same special, established that a bloke in row one had wanted a Furby as a child. Then he told him to look under his seat. A grown man cheering for a Furby is a strange noise, and this one was 42.

The speech before the show that made everything worse

Arcuri used to open with house rules. “For a few months, when I was on the road, I would start the show by saying, this is kind of how it works,” he told NPR. “Like, I’m going to engage with you guys. I don’t want you randomly yelling out.” He binned it: “It just felt very condescending to tell them how to listen to me. So I just figured – I just stopped doing that, and I started kind of adjusting on the fly.”

What replaced it is worth stealing, because it solves the problem every compere has at 21:40 when one table has had four rounds. Rather than shutting the shouter down, he converts them. “When somebody is being a jerk or whatever, I like to find an avenue for them to become someone that we clap for.” In practice that’s checking back in twenty minutes later with “You haven’t yelled out in 20 minutes” and “I’m so proud of you”. The room then applauds a man for behaving, which is roughly the instinct that keeps a decent MC in work on a Saturday second show.

How much crowd work belongs in a five, a twenty and a headline set

This next bit is my read rather than anyone’s reported advice, so weigh it accordingly. On a five, none. You have roughly forty seconds to establish who you are, and “what do you do for work?” is not it. A question to a stranger spends all of that on someone who isn’t you, so a tight five has to survive without the room’s help. It’s the same discipline as writing a clean set that still gets laughs without the easy shock. On a twenty, one exchange, early, to buy yourself a real relationship with the front two rows before the material gets specific. On your own hour you can do what you like, because everyone in the building bought a ticket with your face on it.

The risk scales with how little cover you’ve got. Ian Bagg, in an interview with Joel Byars for the Hot Breath newsletter, put it as “crowd work is like flying a plane, you’ve gotta be prepared for anything”. The honest version of that for a middle spot is that you’re flying a plane you don’t own. And a booker is timing you from the back, usually stood next to a fridge that hums. Arcuri has been at it fifteen years, incidentally: “I’ve been doing this 15 years, and I’ve been – lived in basements. I’ve slept next to rats.” The looseness turns up last, somewhere after the rats.

A front-row seat is now worth something in court

In August a Tel Aviv magistrates’ court ordered the 22-year-old comic Vova Tamarkin to pay NIS 10,000, roughly £2,500. The case was over crowd work at a Russian-language show in Bat Yam. The woman who sued had asked for NIS 50,000, and the court knocked it down to a fifth of that. The reason is worth noting: the judge weighed the fact that she had deliberately chosen to sit in the front row. That made it more likely the comedian would interact with her.

Read that the way a lawyer would. Sitting down the front counts in mitigation, so the further back you go for your material, the less the room has consented to – nobody has yet established where row F sits on that scale. Tamarkin denied saying it and was still out NIS 10,000, which is more than a month of gigs for most acts. No promoter is covering it for you.

Ali Brice went to the shows and found no crowdwork

The other reason comics are suddenly desperate to do this is that the clips travel. Writing for Chortle’s correspondents section on 29 July, the comedian Ali Brice was blunt about what that’s done to the promise on the poster:

“There’s a trend at the moment – or a clever marketing technique, some would say – where comedians upload clips of themselves doing crowdwork to lure people into seeing their shows. I love most of the clips. I’ve been to the shows and there’s been little to no crowdwork. That’s false advertising. Give me the good stuff.”

Brice’s position is that “The magical thing about crowdwork is that it can’t be repeated”. He pushes it further than that: it shouldn’t be. Megan Gailey, quoted in Matt Ruby’s Funny How newsletter, lands in the same place from the business end. “We’re playing to the lowest common denominator, and I don’t think that’s beneficial for the audience or the comedian in the long run,” she said. Then she admitted she’s hired someone to cut her clips anyway, and that “I’m probably a hypocrite”. Arcuri has profited from the format more than almost anyone. He told NPR there had been “a epidemic of it for a while”, and that “I think you don’t need to post crowd work to succeed.” If you are cutting clips regardless, the filming rules that get bookers to actually watch still apply, and they apply to crowd work exactly as they do to written bits.

Two things people ask in the smoking area afterwards

Can you rehearse crowd work? You can rehearse the frame. The content arrives with whoever bought the aisle seat. Arcuri’s method of asking the room about a premise he already has jokes for is exactly that: fixed rails, variable passengers. Write down the three questions that reliably hand you a setup and stop treating the rest as improvisation you have to win.

What if the person gives you nothing? Take the blame and move. “That’s my fault, you were having a lovely night” gets a laugh and returns you to your set inside eight seconds. Standing there re-interrogating a shy accountant is where the room turns, and it’s almost always the comic who dragged it out that far.

What’s actually usable here is the running order. Ask about the premise before you do the material on it, keep the exchange on the front two rows – the court and the lighting rig both assume those people knew what they were signing up for – and get out on your own punchline rather than theirs. And if you’re currently sat on a boat with twenty minutes of material and six hours to fill, at least you’re in good company.