“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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> is blunt about the opening:<\/p>\n Sets that open with big laughs stand out. The first 30 seconds to one minute should be a punch, not a warm-up.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n 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<\/a>: the difference is that a comedy clip can’t lean on the room’s goodwill, because the room isn’t there.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n\n
How long should a comedy clip be?<\/h2>\n
Ninety per cent audio, ten per cent video<\/h2>\n
Where to put the phone, and who you have to ask<\/h2>\n