Last week I wrote about Hannibal Buress’s standup routine about Bill Cosby – the one that propelled those rape allegations into the news – and wondered whether smartphones in comedy clubs might begin to jeopardise such outspoken standup. One week later, and it’s one of the things worrying Chris Rock in the interview he has given to New York magazine. “If you think you don’t have room to make mistakes,” Rock told Frank Rich, “it’s going to lead to safer, gooier standup. You can’t think the thoughts you want to think if you think you’re being watched.”

And, let’s face it, they are being watched – by which I mean (and he means) recorded, and apt to be broadcast – out of context, probably, and whether or not their material is ready. Few are the comedy gigs these days when I’m not distracted now and then by the winking lights of a smartphone screen. It’s clearly affecting the nature of the performer-audience relationship, and I’m not just talking about the notorious incidents when comedians, justifiably anxious that ownership and control of their jokes is being undermined, attack or traduce members of their audience for training their cameraphones on the stage. Sarah Millican is just one example.

At two gigs in the past fortnight, I’ve seen two comics seek to defuse the threat in the same way. Both Dave Gorman and Aziz Ansari offered to pose for audience photographs at the top of the show, after which the audience were required to power down the cameras and concentrate on the comedy. Cue not so hilarious pouting and posturing on the comics’ part, as hundreds of punters pointed their iPhones and flashed. Cue comedians’ gags about the fact that “you’ll never even look at these crummy photos anyway”. It’s all a bit dispiriting, turning the comic into a performing monkey, and the audience into pliant celebrity-worshipping drones. It’s got nothing to do with comedy.

Enduring these staged photo ops from my seat in the stalls, I pine for the zero tolerance approach that Richard Griffiths, for example, made his own. But you can’t blame Gorman and Ansari – the onus shouldn’t be on the comic to bawl out phone users. Not all comedians are Stewart Lee; most of them don’t want to risk antagonising their fanbase – or risk being taken to court, as Lee Hurst was.

Aziz Ansari offred to pose for audience members at the start of his show. Photograph: Anthony Behar/Sipa USA/Rex

Rock – less concerned with joke theft than with comics’ freedom to experiment – makes a comparison to cigarettes, which probably points the right way forward. “If you would have told me years ago,” he said to Rich, “that they were going to get rid of smoking in comedy clubs, I would have thought you were crazy.” The same has to happen with phones and recording devices. It’ll be harder to police; as with cigarettes, there’ll need to be an awareness-raising campaign about what’s at stake. Cigarettes kill people; smartphones kill mouthy, adventurous comedy.

There’s a contradiction here, of course, in that last week I celebrated Buress’s outspokenness about Cosby – which I’d never have known about had it not been illicitly filmed. Whoever recorded the gig probably feels like a hero now; they’re as responsible as Buress for the current Cosby scandal.

As Rock says, “comedians need a place where we can work on stuff”. Or as US comic Patton Oswalt – whom Rock namechecks – wrote after his own contretemps with a video-happy punter two years ago, “there is absolutely no response too harsh, no public shaming too severe, and nowhere too low to sink when slamming some idiot who digs into their pocket for a cameraphone and begins, with all of the focus and passion of a monkey picking its ass, to film material you’re struggling with at their convenience”. If you prefer a voice like that to a “safe, gooey” voice, put your phone away.

Three to see

Daniel Kitson: A Show for Christmas

If you failed last week to get tickets for his play at the Old Vic, why not fail to see his one-week Christmas show, too? Tickets will – of course – sell out for this one-off festive entertainment by the man Bridget Christie this week called “the best standup in the world”.

• Battersea Arts Centre, to 6 December.

Alfie Brown

What to expect this time out from Alfie Brown? The outspoken standup’s 2012 fringe debut was strikingly bold and unfashionably angry. His 2013 follow-up was a disappointment: less idealistic, more misanthropic. Reviews of this year’s show – in London this week – imply a return to form.

• Soho Theatre, to 6 December.

Susan Calman

Susan Calman was recently voted – she tells us in her new show – the UK’s fourth funniest lesbian. That’s the kind of bathos the Glaswegian Radio 4 favourite is reportedly mining in this touring set about coming to terms with her own flaws.

• Artrix, Bromsgrove, 4 December; Colston Hall, Bristol, 5 December; Lighthouse Poole, 6 December. Tour details here.

More comedy coverage

Chris Rock: ‘When we talk about racial progress in America, it’s all nonsense’

Comedians’ 10 best Christmas cracker jokes

Funz and Gamez: you can’t do that to children, can you?

Revealed: the nation’s No 1 toilet joke

Lee Evans steps down from standup – who else can do what he does?

Shappi Khorsandi review – perky gags about porn and prejudice

Harry Hill on tour: ukuleles, inflatable sausages and Bradley Wiggins’ sideburns – video

Kevin Bridges: ‘I prefer real to surreal’

Stewart Lee review – tricksy gags about liberals, rightwingers and ‘the Islams’

Noel Fielding review – solo standup set is a holiday from reality

Aziz Ansari: ‘It’s time to get serious’