If there’s one issue that gets comics hot under the collar as a collective group, it’s reviews and reviewers.  As the festival begins, they’re keen to get media outlets into the audience in order to get a review.  After the reviewer has been and the review is written, often their attitude can change significantly.  The same performer once complaining that nobody will come review their show can now be found spilling bile and hatred for reviewers one-and-all.  It’s a phenomenon that is pretty unique to comedy, and as somebody who has reviewed for, and edited, a comedy publication for a number years, one I’m very familiar with.

As Dave Hughes discusses in a recent article in The Age, often a less-than-positive review will stick with a performer for a very long time.  This is also apparent when listening to one of Tim Minchin’s new songs from this year’s show, which he dedicates to a bad review he received three years ago.  Yes, three.  On one hand, this is very understandable.  Anyone, no matter how confident, is bound to dislike hearing how under-appreciated their creative work is.  Having somebody cast a critical eye over your performance and pick every flaw, magnify every bumble and sit in judgement of your talents would surely be difficult to accept.  It would lead you to question who this person was, to sit in judgement of your work.  Some say, “If you can’t do, teach”… other say “if you can’t do, review”.  Given the frequency with which some comedy reviewers cross over to performing comedy here in Melbourne it can be easy to see where the saying comes from.

On the other hand, reviewing is a key factor in the publicity-factory for festivals.  A good review can make or break a show, can assist in building an audience, can elevate an unheard of name to a show with remarkable buzz around it.  Audiences read reviews to get some idea what a show is like.  The festival program offers few words, written by performers themselves, and perhaps a short quote from a previous review.  It can be hard, from this tiny bit of information, to judge you should spend your hard earned cash on one show or another.  And should you judge a show by its poster?  Should you look at the advertisements on television, in newspapers?  Do they really give you any idea what to expect?  Like it or not, reading someone else’s experience of a given show is likely to offer more of an idea about what will take place after you buy your ticket than anything else.

On one side of the fence, comics who have been burned by a bad review can often be found defensively spouting that reviewers are out to get them, want to give bad reviews, get off on destroying shows, don’t know anything about comedy in the first place, don’t represent ‘real’ audiences or are frustrated performers themselves.  On the other side of the fence, reviewers will point out that they are unwilling to let poor performances go unchecked, save audiences from wasting money on sub-standard shows, comics can’t take criticism, it’s not their job to keep shows happy, they have a duty to be honest about a show’s faults.  They are courted, and then derided if their review finds even the smallest criticism.  There is truth on both sides.  And the relationship between reviewer and reviewed is symbiotic.  Without something to review, the reviewer has no purpose.  Without a review, a performer has difficulty getting the word out about their show.  The only potentially unhappy party in the case of a positive review is the reader/audience member, in the case where a reviewer has ‘gone soft’ and not been honest about a poor performance.  They have trusted a reviewer (or publication) to provide them with a fair assessment about a show, and if the show is weak (but the review didn’t make this apparent) they feel let down by both the show and the publication.  Nobody wins.

Particularly in comedy, where the lines between the performer and the character they inhabit on stage can be blurry, or in some cases knife thin, the criticism of a reviewer can strike very close to home.  It is rare to have a vitriolic email in response to a review from an actor, director, film producer, musician or dancer.  It’s almost as if, when reading a review, they can separate the criticism of the performance from the criticism of themselves.  For comics, this appears harder to do.  Many take criticism of their routine, performance, material or presentation as personal.  Some reviewers find it hard to separate performer and performance, but it seems some comics also suffer the same problem.  Sad to say, but often comics respond to criticism with burning outrage.  In many cases, as with the recent example of Dave Hughes, the review itself is far from acerbic.  A small comment or criticism can be interpreted as much harsher than it was probably intended (or as most audiences read it).  Listening to Tim Minchin’s ode to his negative reviewer, it’s hard to understand how his steady climb to international success can leave him time to fixate on three-year-old reviews.  But it does.  Enough to write a biting song in response.

Reviews and reviewers serve different purposes depending on who the reviewer is, what the media outlet is and who the (perceived) readership is.  For us here at The Pun, we have a clear understanding of our aims.  We don’t offer a star-rating system because we have a large team.  Given that we review so many shows (significantly more than any other media outlet), we have a varied team of writers, all of whom have differing opinions and tastes.  When you read reviews from a mainstream media outlet such as The Age you often know the individual reviewer, and will know your tastes are the same as (or different from) theirs.  You know if they’re tough to impress, or if they don’t like musical comedy.  It’s a relationship arts reviewers build with their audience over a long time.  For us, we operate on the theory that a review should help match the right show with the right audience.  A reader should read the review and get a good idea if they would like to see it.  We do not claim, or seek, to rate shows, compare them against each other or to attempt to claim an expertise in the field of comedy.  As an editor, I encourage my writers to offer balanced criticism, to think about who would like (or dislike) the show and write a review which offers a flavour of the show without giving away punch-lines.

Easier said than done, frankly.  As a publication we’re routinely criticised as being too soft, too hard, too alternative in our tastes, too mainstream in our tastes, being skewed towards story/musical/theatre shows, skewed towards stand-up, having no idea about comedy, being too involved in comedy, not covering enough locals, going too soft on locals…. and on and on and on.  There’s no accounting for taste, so the saying goes, and no matter what a reviewer’s taste, there is always somebody else with a different taste.

Paramount for us is not what a comic thinks of their review, though I can think of more than one occasion where I’ve felt horrible publishing what I knew was a fair (but not positive) assessment of a show.  Our job, as a reviewer, is to give audiences an accurate idea of what to expect of a show.  Regardless of how the performer feels.  And while it is true that there are reviewers out there who enjoy nothing more than to sink their teeth into any perceived weakness in a show, or see a show with the attitude that the performer will have to work damn hard to get any positive words from them, for the most part they are rare.  And they certainly don’t work for me.  Most reviewers love live performance, and they write about it because they want to dissect it, discuss it, discover it.  They are looking for the good in a show, not the bad.  Unfortunately, if they don’t acknowledge the bad where it is found, all of the reviewer’s work is useless.  A review only serves its purpose if it is able to enlighten the audience to the good/bad/relevant/salient points of the performance, so they can make their own choice about whether the show is for them.

What a reviewer want and a comic want are actually the same thing.  To get an audience who will enjoy the show to see it.

Finished reading this article? You might also like:

• Editor’s Diary April 5
• Critiquing the Critics: A Love Letter to Adrian Martin
• Massive Act-Attacks