How to film a comedy clip that bookers actually watch

“We love hosts, but not in your clip.” That line is sitting in a festival submission guide written by Ariel Julie. It exists because so many entries open with a compere saying a name and an applause break. Then the comic walks to a mic stand that’s set for someone eight inches taller. Fifteen seconds gone, none of it yours.

The tape now arrives before you do. Kerry Godliman talked to Chortle in September 2025 about Live At The Apollo. “Now it’s just seen as a high production value gig that you can clip up and put on your socials,” she said. In the same interview she said, “Now, it feels like it’s more phone-based and tape-based. And that’s sad to me.” Sad or not, that’s the job now. If you want a paid weekend spot or a place in a competition heat, someone is going to judge you off a rectangle on a laptop. That happens long before anyone stands at the back of a room and watches you work.

So here’s the practical version: how long a comedy clip should be, and what the actual UK entry rules say. Then there are the two decisions, the audio and which gig you film, that determine whether anyone gets as far as your second joke.

Ariel Julie wants the host cut out

Julie describes herself on the Windy City Comedy Fest site as “a working comedian, producer, and the Artistic Director and Founder of the first annual Windy City Comedy Fest”. She’s on both ends of this: she sends tapes and she watches them. Her submission guide is blunt about the opening:

Sets that open with big laughs stand out. The first 30 seconds to one minute should be a punch, not a warm-up.

She’s equally blunt about length: “Not 3 minutes. Not 13.” And about crowd work, which acts love putting in tapes because it proves they’re quick: “Bring the bits. Bring the punchlines.” A booker watching forty entries in an evening is looking for material they can put on a bill next month. Improvised chat with a hen party in row two doesn’t tell them what your twenty minutes looks like. It tells them you can talk to a hen party, which, fair enough, is a skill, but it isn’t the one being assessed here. Start the file the second you’ve got the mic in your hand. The compere had their moment already, and if you want to know how much work that job actually is, it’s a whole separate craft.

How long should a comedy clip be?

Five minutes is the default across the main UK entry routes, and seven is the outlier. The Funny Women Stage Award asks entrants to “submit a 5-minute YouTube video of a single, continuous performance (i.e., your set)”. The terms spell out that “Funny Women’s panel of industry judges will watch only 5 minutes of your recorded performance”. The Chortle Student Comedy Award’s first round is judged on video. Acts do five minutes at the semi-finals and seven in the final, “with 30 seconds leeway either side”. So You Think You’re Funny asks for seven minutes of completely original material. It also adds a rule that catches people out: “You should use the same material throughout the competition, judges do not want you to change it unless it is minor tweaks.”

Clubs are looser but not by much. Comedy Carnival’s FAQ page tells acts to “send a CV and a video”, with no length stated. In practice the first five minutes are what gets watched, and the rest is you being optimistic about someone’s attention span. If you’re building that five from scratch, the structural work is the same as any tight five you’d take to a gong show: the difference is that a comedy clip can’t lean on the room’s goodwill, because the room isn’t there.

Ninety per cent audio, ten per cent video

The Comedy Houston filming guide puts it at exactly that ratio: “stand-up comedy is 90% audio, 10% video.” Its other instruction is in capitals, which tells you how often it gets ignored: “NEVER record a stand up comedy show using camera audio only.” A phone at the back of a 90-seat room picks up laughter beautifully and your voice like a tannoy announcement at Crewe.

The fix is a board feed. The guide says to “Run the cable from the board into a portable recorder like a Zoom H5 or Tascam DR-40X”, which gets you the mic signal clean, then you sync it to the picture afterwards. If the venue’s desk is a mystery box guarded by a sound tech who’s already annoyed with you, there’s a fallback. The guide says to “prop your phone on the edge of the stage or on a stool near the PA speaker, open the voice recorder app, and hit record. This is your emergency backup.” Its rule for anyone serious about it: “Never rely on a single audio source.”

Worth knowing that a board feed alone can sound weirdly lonely, because it captures you and almost none of the crowd. A tape where nobody laughs is not a good comedy clip even when the audience were laughing hard, which is a genuinely miserable thing to discover at 1am with the file already exported.

Where to put the phone, and who you have to ask

Comedy Houston’s camera position is specific: “Place your camera at the back of the venue, center of the room, at approximately neck to chin height of the performer on stage.” Framing: “Frame a medium shot: the performer from roughly the waist up, with some stage context visible on either side.” And on headroom, “About 10-15% space above their head is the sweet spot.” That’s it. No slow zoom, nobody’s mate handheld from the front row with their arm slowly dropping.

Lighting you mostly surrender to. The guide accepts that “you have zero control over the lighting” in most rooms, and suggests spot metering and dialling exposure down a little so the spotlight doesn’t blow your face out into a white smear. Basements are the worst offenders here, along with any pub back room where the “stage light” is a domestic uplighter behind a red gel.

Ask the promoter before you set anything up, and ask early rather than at the interval. Some rooms have a filming policy, some have punters who paid to be in a dark room and not on YouTube, and a camera pointed at the crowd changes how a crowd behaves. If someone in the audience decides tonight is their night to join in, that’s a different problem with its own set of rules, and it will be on the tape forever.

Pick the gig before you pick the camera

The room does more for a comedy clip than any lens. So You Think You’re Funny’s own guidance for acts is “Make the audience laugh within the first 30 seconds of being on stage”. That’s easy advice on paper, and largely a function of whether the previous act closed strong and whether the bar is directly behind the seating. Film the gig where you know the audience, know the mic, and have done the material enough times that you’re not thinking about it.

Chortle’s rules are explicit that the entry link has to be “a link to their performance in front of a live audience (which we will not publish)”. Semi-final places go to whoever shows “the best material, originality and performance skills in their videos”. Nobody says the audience has to be big. A packed 40-seater beats a half-empty 200-seater on tape every single time – the mic hears the density of a laugh, not the seat count. Judges are watching this on laptop speakers with the volume at about 60 per cent anyway.

One scheduling note that trips people up. Chortle’s 2026 entries closed “by 11.59pm on February 14, 2026”, which means the filming had to happen weeks before, in January, in whatever room would have you. (January audiences are half dry-January and half still not back from their mum’s, and a thin crowd is an audio problem before it’s anything else.) If you’re aiming at the student award and its £1,000 top prize with £250 for the runner-up, book the tape into your diary as its own gig, the way you’d book a paid weekend, instead of waiting for a Tuesday to go well on its own.

What goes in the email with the link

An unlisted YouTube link, the date and venue in the title, and nothing attached – nobody wants a 400MB MOV bouncing off their mail server on a Sunday night. Funny Women asks for YouTube specifically and is relaxed about production values: the entry terms say the video “does not need to be a professional-standard video” and that “it can be a home self-tape via your smartphone!” What they won’t take is a stitched-together showreel. “Edited videos comprising more than one performance are not permitted.” One continuous performance, warts included.

Check the eligibility line before you spend a night filming. Funny Women’s Stage Award “is open to all new acts with no or under five years of agency representation”. Chortle’s student award is “open to students aged 18 years or over on January 1, 2026, enrolled in full-time tertiary education in the UK”. So You Think You’re Funny’s essential info states that entrants “must not have performed more than 15 stand-up spots (including open spots) before 1 June 2025”. That’s a tighter gate than most acts assume when they’re already two years into gigging.

And the tape isn’t only for competitions. The BBC New Comedy Awards run their entries through the BBC’s own site, with Amy Gledhill as head judge for 2026. Heats are “filmed in Coventry in September”, and the grand final “will be filmed at Birmingham Town Hall in October”. The prize is a paid commission to write and perform a 30-minute audio pilot under a BBC Comedy Commissioner’s mentorship, plus a trophy and £1,000 cash. It’s the same five minutes of footage you filmed for the student award, going up a different form with a different set of terms nobody reads.

Two things people ask after they’ve filmed one

Can I film a comedy clip at an open mic? Yes, as long as there’s a real audience in the room. Chortle’s rules only require a link to a performance in front of a live audience, and say nothing about the size of the venue. The real risk with open mics is the running order. If you’re on tenth in front of nine other acts and two of their partners, the laughs on the tape will be thin through no fault of the material.

Can I edit out the bit that died? Not for a Funny Women entry, where the requirement is a single continuous performance and edited videos made of more than one performance are barred outright. Trimming the top and tail is standard practice and Julie’s guide effectively asks for it. Surgery on the middle is a different thing, and a booker who’s watched a few thousand of these can usually see the join.

The most useful five minutes you can spend before a filming gig is checking whether the room’s fridge is behind the stage, and if it is, asking whether it can be switched off during your set. That hum is on the board feed and the backup phone, and it’s the one thing you can’t fix later, unlike your ending, which you can rewrite on the train home.