Hello, Sean Morley speaking

Hello friend & reader.

My name is Sean Morley. My interests are comedy, interactive art and small communities.

Like capitalism, loneliness exacerbates all existing social problems — building community protects ourselves and others. Also, and this cannot be stressed enough, it is fun to have a laugh. That is my thesis; thank you for reading. Goodnight!

My background is in comedy. I started in University doing terrible sketch comedy before graduating to perform terrible stand-up to save on train fare and scheduling conflicts. But on September 26th 2015 in the function room of a small pub in Chesterfield I became good at comedy. I’ve since been featured on BBC Radio, The Guardian and performed internationally - but unless you are a seventh level comedy gremlin please do not wrack your brain: you will not have heard of me. I exist happily in the bowels of UK Comedy’s weirdo fringe.

When I first began putting on live events I was in university, and I was producing shows so me and my friends could perform. Then when I became a producer for real looking to go professional, I began producing smaller events for the community (open mics, writing workshops) because I realised what I needed was the support of a comedy scene, not simply more facebook ads. What I gained from this was a comedy community, many of whom are close friends to this day.

My longest continuous comedy club was in a room above a vegetable warehouse in a converted horn-handle factory (where deer horn was processed into handles for knives and forks). For a while I trialled something called ‘friend corner’ where people who had come on their own were invited to sit together in a designated place and I would check back on them later to see how their friendship was progressing. This led to several genuine friendships and one marriage.

Overtime I became way more focussed on giving the audience more agency in shows. I made a show called Scab Hour, which begins as a focus group asking the audience what elements their ideal comedy show would have - then the show continues until all those elements are realised and we all learn not to trust our own desires. I directed a show called Or, which initially starts split down the middle between an Easter bonnet arts and crafts group and a play about the Chilcot report - eventually the show continually splits in order to offer the audience more options until there’s more than a dozen tiny shows across the venue. The biggest success has been The Glang Show: a complete arena of chaos where the audience are given absolute free reign to manipulate the show in whatever way they like at any time for any reason. It’s great.

When the big germ hit and lockdown wiped out my calendar I turned to livestreaming. Here people who are capable and willing to interact meaningfully with their audience have an advantage over an oversaturated market of sallow webcam mumblers. Here my one joke of giving the audience an increasingly irresponsible amount of agency felt appropriate. What I wasn’t expecting is how a digital environment would overhaul what I thought a comedy community would be. When I set-up a discord the conversations from the stream would continue indefinitely. Here people began to forge new relationships and bi-monthly Toby Carvery meet-ups. It was a vision of a model society, with me at the top beaming down on everyone like those drawings from the Chinese cultural revolution with Mao Zedong smiling at an agricultural worker from inside a cloud.

Since live shows returned I have been trying to take the lessons from both environments and continue to build live shows and livestreams about community, interactivity and communication.

My fascination with community got me interested in how we need to think smaller to be more effective and more economically viable as artists and performers. Creatives are encouraged to imagine themselves on a national stage or even the global stage thanks to the increasing role social media plays. But it doesn’t help a comedian in Ipswich to have a burgeoning fanbase of Californian teenagers - not when they’re trying to sell tickets at a pub-theatre around the road.

I want to make the case for small arts and little shows. And write practically about how you can make one yourself; it isn’t as scary as it might sound and that doing so is, in fact, a good idea.

would you go to a little after hours show at a cafe which was just people from nearby talking about their favourite things? do you think you could be the person to make it?

thank you