‘The diversity of the industry will be hit’: NextUp founder on the impact of Covid on comedy

Telling jokes to live audiences over Zoom has offered an alternative for standup comics since comedy clubs shut last year.

It has also presented them with a new set of occupational hazards, as the comedian Andrew Maxwell discovered during an online gig where he got momentarily upstaged by an audience member’s cat showing its bum to the webcam.

This feline masterclass in heckling took place at the virtual NextUp Comedy Festival last summer. NextUp, a UK streaming service that before the pandemic featured comedy specials pre-recorded at gigs, switched instead to livestreaming online comedy for Zoom audiences when clubs closed, including the Leicester Comedy Festival in February.

And although venues are reopening in England and Scotland with socially distanced audiences, tech will still play an important role, with the streaming of gigs looking set to continue.

Sarah Henley, the founder of NextUp, recently won an Innovate UK Women In Innovation award for her efforts to keep the comedy industry going and boost diversity. Having created productions from comedians’ homes during the last year, NextUp plans to livestream shows from comedy clubs when they reopen, sharing revenue with them.

The live standup industry has struggled during the past year, with venues mostly shut, or – when briefly open – having to contend with restrictions on audience numbers. Almost half of comedy workers are considering leaving the industry, according to a survey from the Live Comedy Association, a figure that rises to 60% among BAME workers. “Most of comedy under the TV level operates on a hand-to-mouth basis. It’s inevitable that the diversity of the industry will be hit going forward, impacting working-class comedians,” says Henley, who launched a campaign through NextUp, called Heckle The Virus, to raise funds for comics who have lost their livelihoods because of the pandemic.

Henley first launched NextUp, with co-founders Daniel Berg and Kenny Cavey, in 2016, to showcase up and coming comics. She initially trained in law but soon realised it wasn’t the career for her and switched to comedy writing. “I wrote my first play based on the law firm I’d worked at,” she says. Her love of live comedy inspired her to film and stream shows at festivals, pubs and clubs. She also wanted to change a male-dominated industry and make it more diverse. “Comedy is traditionally linked with lad culture,” she says. “I think comedy should be for everyone.”

When Henley started in the industry more than a decade ago, running a comedy night and YouTube channel, ComComedy, with Berg, the lineups she chose stood out because they had an equal number of female to male comics. It evolved into a subscription service dedicated to shows in venues around the country from comedians, many of whom have since gone on to become big names, such as Nish Kumar, James Acaster and Mae Martin.

It splits subscriber revenue (£4.99 a month for an annual membership) 50:50 with comedians, allocating it according to the time viewers spend watching their material.

NextUp’s business model relies on a thriving comedy scene, and last year Henley seized on Zoom as a way to keep connecting the platform’s audiences with comedians. “Our bread and butter had been to run recorded comedy specials [of live gigs] but suddenly we couldn’t record them any more, so we moved to streaming live comedy,” she says. NextUp moderated the audiences and spotlighted the individuals that the comics wanted to banter with to help build up a rapport. “The overwhelming response from the comics was they loved doing it and it was the closest thing to a gig they could have gotten at the time.”

Some clubs have streamed fundraising gigs (without live audiences) from their venues, including Liverpool’s Hot Water Comedy Club and Edinburgh venue The Stand. As well as taking part in virtual gigs and festivals, many standup comics have been using social media to stay connected to fans, or online platforms that enable performers to make money from their content, such as Patreon and Ko-fi.

So far, NextUp has raised £1.6m in investment. However, a major challenge it still faces is securing a large enough audience. Since the first lockdown in March 2020, the number of subscribers is up 30% and revenue up 50%, says Henley. But the extent to which viewers are willing to pay to watch lesser known acts online remains to be seen, with subscriber numbers currently in their thousands.

Also, with plenty of standup comedy available on streaming platforms such as Netflix, will viewers sign up for a separate comedy subscription? Henley argues that NextUp’s focus on community and on showcasing comics before they take off sets it apart.

Her award from Women in Innovation comes with a grant that she plans to use to digitise six UK comedy venues, allowing them to stream their live comedy events to an online audience, and to keep their businesses going in the face of any future lockdowns.

She also wants to get more women into comedy, recently setting up Burn Bright, a nonprofit supporting women in the industry. “Comedy is still quite bad for women,” she says. “Lineups invariably have one female spot.”

Henley herself still feels like a novelty in the male-dominated worlds of comedy and tech. When she started raising investment for NextUp she was pregnant with her first child and felt she had to hide the fact from potential investors. “I wore a baggy top so no one would notice,” she says “There’s definitely a judgement around women.”