(In this edition of SMATTER’s “How To Start A…” Series, writer Nick Atkins looks at the great institution of the comedy review, those amateurish affairs when some lone traveler summons the courage to arrange a line-up of comedians at a bar or pub or what have you, somehow manages to coerce an audience to attend, and then have hilarity ensue for all. Laughter is not for everyone, though, and those people are the absolute worst. We at SMATTER take a no more nuanced view and fully endorse laughing uproariously at most things. To paraphrase Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, those who make jokes in life are covered in a higher grade of shit.)

Sitting in the basement of the Hoxton Underbelly in East London, Luke Ditchfield says not disingenuously, “Personally, I think everyone has a good five minutes in them.” The part time teacher and mullet-sporting Australian is the founder of 2nd Row Comedy, a night he puts on across the capital featuring up-and-coming comedians, including himself.

As a neophyte on the scene, he saw room for improvement, saying, “About three months into starting my comedy ‘career,’ I knew I wanted my own night. There are a few aspects of the system in London that are a bit frustrating… but I’m hoping I can affect change in others.”

So Ditchfield got to work and started his own thing. First was a name. He went with 2nd Row. Why? “Nobody sits in the 1st Row. I can’t tell you the number of nights we’ve had a full room, bar eight empty seats at the front.” In other words, it was catchy and contained a truism, so why not?

Next came the most difficult part, what he refers to as “the admin”—“Booking gigs (as an act), finding a venue and booking acts (as a gig), and finding an audience in both cases.”

This is the nuts and bolts of the comedy night, and it’s a double-edged sword: you have to find a place for comics to show up—somewhere not "too expensive that could commit to a regular night”—but you also have to find comics to show up to this place—lean into your network for this, the network you have accrued from knowing comics, from going around town and doing open mic nights yourself for however long.

Herein lies one of the great fears for the comedy review empressario: dropouts. Since these comics aren’t being paid top dollar (£5, enough for transport; many do not even bother collecting), you may have a situation where a number will drop out at the last minute: “Some weeks, I lose six of the ten booked acts. Those weeks suck. It’s a real panic of trying to fill the spots. Always works out in the end, but the stress is not my favorite.”

With the pieces as fallen into place as anyone can hope, the job then becomes getting the word out: “Instagram ads, Eventbrite ads, flyers, people to hand out flyers, Canva, Capcut, and Confirmed (our booking platform).”

The marketing push works. People do show up. The comics of 2nd Row generally perform to crowds of several scores, and one night last September a room fitting seventy personages was at capacity.

Once the mics, cameras and lenses, speakers and cords are set up in the venue (add this to the start-up costs, but venues will often have equipment), you’re good to go.

The comics, including Ditchfield himself—who does his five minutes in the middle of the line-up—are not your open-mic amateurs, nervously jittering their way through half-baked material. They are semi-pros, on their way to the big leagues—in fact Nabil Abdulrashid, a headliner, has appeared on Live at the Apollo, the British TV showcase of top comedic talent, which hosts everyone from newcomers to the biggest stars of the UK scene and beyond.

The only crash and burn from the evening your humble correspondent attended is Ditchfield’s MacBook, which, during the intro of the second to last comedian, somehow throws itself from the soundboard next to the stage and smashes on the floor with a gut-wrenching, wallet-lightening crunch of screen-on-concrete. The last few acts have to come on without entrance music, which Ditchfield’s laptop was providing. Until the Apple computer accident, it almost felt like a real comedy club. And that’s the beauty of DIY: the unexpected happens, and, at the very least, someone can get a few jokes out of it.

The evening—filled with jollity and mirth—was a successful one. But was it financially successful? Besides a New Act/New Material night (in Shoreditch, venue varying, check insta), which is free of charge), 2nd Row’s main show is the first Thursday of every month at the Hoxton Underbelly. The price for entrance varies according to the headliner, but some weeks Ditchfield comes out several hundred pounds ahead, other weeks he’s several hundred pounds behind. Such is the price of following your passion.

But is it all worth it?

Ditchfield seems to think so: “Sometimes I do yell horrible things at the mirror. But the makeup sex is always incredible.”