It’s one of the great secrets of standup: that behind almost every successful comic is a director you’ve never heard of.

It seems absurd that, in the age of the superstar comedian, the person directing the shows is anonymous – but then, there’s no way of knowing they’re there. The only time you’ll see a director’s name on the poster is when they’re more famous than the comedian: Noel Fielding directing Paul Foot, for example. Directing in comedy works differently to other art forms. A Martin Scorsese film or a Rupert Goold theatre show has got their fingerprints all over it. In comedy, however much input the director has, the show always belongs to the performer. The comic employs the director, not the other way round.

Yet a comedy director can make or break a show. So what exactly do they do? Those I speak to on the subject offer various suggestions: puppet master, glorified script editor, therapist, cheerleader, builder, a sort of comedy grouter, sounding board, support worker, blue-sky thinker and shepherd.

‘I came to comedy trained as an actor, so I’m a big believer in collaboration’ ... Phil Nichol. Photograph: Steve Ullathorne

The standup Phil Nichol, who won the Perrier award in Edinburgh in 2006, is a top comedy director himself. “I came to comedy trained as an actor, so I’m a big believer in collaboration, and the same applies to comedy,” he says. “The best comics I know sit around in a lounge and talk ideas through – it may just appear to be a conversation, but it’s an important part of getting better.

“Comics aren’t just mad geniuses who come up with stuff all on their own, feed it to an audience and it works first time.”

One of the comics Nichol has been working with recently is Eunice Olumide, who is new to standup, so Nichol has to be a teacher as much as a mentor. Olumide is already a DJ, rapper and model, so getting up in front of people is no problem. But it’s down to Nichol to alert her to some universal truths– for example, that even your best joke won’t get a laugh every time, so when it doesn’t, don’t let it throw you.

He adds: “There’s a basic formula for writing a joke that new comedians might not be aware of. It starts with a simple observation that needs to be humorous in itself, then you need a twist on it, then at the third level you heighten it, or shrink it. That’s basically it. How you play with that formula is what makes you either Jerry Seinfeld or Eddie Izzard, but in essence you’re doing the same thing.”

Nichol is passing down the wisdom acquired from years of being a standup. So, you might reasonably ask how Paul Byrne has carved a career directing award-winning live acts such as Brendon Burns, Roisin Conaty and Andrew Maxwell, despite having never been a standup himself. As it happens, Byrne believes this is precisely why he’s in a privileged position to give feedback – he is staunchly coming from the audience’s point of view. By dint of being brother of comic Ed Byrne, and living with Burns and Maxwell in London, Paul became enmeshed in the comedy world, and eventually went from being informal adviser to official “director” when Burns started paying for his knowhow.

John Gordillo has worked with Michael McIntyre, Reginald D Hunter, Eddie Izzard, Josh Widdicombe and Dylan Moran, and is regarded as an oracle of comedy directing. He’s been working with Luke Toulson on Toulson’s new show Grandpa, Hitler and Me about the wartime romance between his grandmother and grandfather, who was posted to the Middle East, France and North Africa. Toulson sent home around 200 heartfelt letters home to his wife, and that correspondence is central to the show, which Toulson took to the Edinburgh festival last month.

One of the first obstacles Gordillo identified was that Toulson is “up against the pitch of his show. It’s an epic romance that took place in the war; the whole idea pushes you towards sentimentalism. So how do you play with that expectation, and make it funny?” Gordillo was also concerned with finding Toulson’s “authentic contact” with the show – how he actually feels about what he’s talking about.

Toulson came to the show from a different direction. For 11 months a year, he earns his money in weekend comedy clubs such as Jongleurs and Glee. He’s in the habit of producing Edinburgh shows that are not only funny in their own right, but also contain ready-made chunks of standup he can add to his club set. However, that bundle of letters and the wartime romance were crying out to be turned into a “narrative” comedy show – something he hadn’t done since 2010. And in Edinburgh, a good narrative comedy show can suddenly open doors, so there’s much at stake.

An early draft of Grandpa, Hitler and Me was indeed more “clubby”, with more time devoted to comparing Toulson’s and his grandparents’ relationship, the letters more of a sideshow. But Gordillo says he was adamant the show wasn’t just “a vehicle for contemporary standup about Luke’s life. It had to mean something.”

John Gordillo is regarded as an oracle of comedy directing. Photograph: Steve Ullathorne

The letters were duly brought front and centre. Also, the show was made less strictly chronological, initially because they “forced funny things apart”. The start of the show was made more explanatory, with Toulson preparing the ground for the story (and his reaction to it), before actually telling it. Such preparation pays off later in the show. The pair would meet in Gordillo’s kitchen for a conversation-cum-interrogation. That would in turn inadvertently generate new material.



But it’s Toulson who will stand in the spotlight, every night, making people laugh and taking the applause at the end.

So how can a comic take the back seat as a director? Isn’t being onstage, getting laughs, the most intoxicating bit of being a standup? For Gordillo, this isn’t an issue. “I get all the attention I want as a performer. If I’m taking my own show [to Edinburgh], I usually don’t get involved with anyone else’s, but if you’re directing a standup, you don’t care about any adulation they’re getting and overwhelmingly neither do they. For me, the fun in directing is I’m not in it, so I can think straight.”

A joke starts with a simple humorous observation, then you need a twist, then you heighten it, or shrink it Phil Nichol

One trick of the trade is to decide on the show’s ending first. Normally that means identifying the part of your story with “the most vulnerability or the most jeopardy, or the biggest revelation”. Once you’ve got your ending, work backwards. This method is espoused by Tom Parry of sketch group Pappy’s, who directs sketch acts such as Max and Ivan.

It’s exactly what Pappy’s Fun Club (as they were then known) did with their magnificent 2009 show. They were performing in their biggest venue to date, and wanted a suitably big finish. Their chosen ending was to get the audience to stand up and join Pappy’s in doing a choreographed quaker dance, while Parry lobbed oats at everyone. He says: “The challenge then became, how do we earn that and build up to it? How does it come as a surprise? It became a huge exercise in back-engineering; you really have to turn the cogs and hide things.”

Yet Parry takes just as much pride in an intervention he made to Max and Ivan’s 2013 show The Reunion – which was nominated for the Fosters Best Comedy award. In the show, about a school reunion, tension builds between the nerd, the nerd’s sweetheart and the bully. It’s the same dynamic that leads to a famous screen punch in Back to the Future.

“I said quite specifically, this needs a ‘Back to the Future punch’ moment,” he says. “They nearly did it, nearly, and I said just do it – it’ll get a round of applause every night. I’m very proud of that as I had to push for it. But even so, I just gave the example. They went away and wrote their own ‘moment’. It wouldn’t have been theirs otherwise.”