Award-winning comedians move from stage to page; launching bureau of comedy writers
Introducing The Punch Up! A freshly formed bureau of Australia’s brightest comedy writers, ready and raring to collaborate on content that needs to be engaging, memorable and, above all else, funny. With a slate of writers currently working in light entertainment and narrative television, radio, print and copy; The Punch Up are sharpening their pencils in readiness to work on your project next.
Sure, the name might conjure up images of a friendly friday night biffo, but a ‘punch up’ is a comedy industry term for taking an existing script and punching it up so it’s funnier, flows better, and really pops off the page. SPOILER ALERT: comedy is not made up on the spot. Comedians make jokes look spontaneous and effortless and that’s the trick. Not all jokes start off golden, most are shit. It’s all about taking that turd and polishing it until it shines!
But it’s not just scripts they give a comedy wash, The Punch Up also collaborate in the ideation phase to create winning concepts across any platform.
The Punch Up was born after one of the founders, Nicolette Minster (above right), having featured in an inordinate number of TVCs, kept seeing campaigns that, despite their best efforts at reaching an audience through humour, still fell short. Yet here she was “a comedian, almost oppressively surrounded by funny, irreverent and influential voices delivering brilliant content on the daily” – srsly, I have so many colleagues dying for the opportunity to sell out. The missing link, was the link itself. So she asked friend and award winning comedian Simon Keck (above left), if he’d be interested in starting a bureau of comedy writers. “It was a no-brainer!” he said, “As a comic you’ll hear someone tell a perfect joke that seemed to be right under your nose the whole time. That’s what The Punch Up is”.
The name of the game is curation. Knowing everyone has a different sense of humour in much the same way that every project is different, The Punch Up excel at finding the writer, amongst their experienced and diverse collection, who is the best possible fit for a project. “If we can help our clients be hilarious, more relatable and influential to their audience by sharing our expertise, then it’s the perfect marriage of creativity and business”.
The Punch Up: we’ve got the write stuff to make your shit shine.
9 Comments
Good luck with that. I think you’ll quickly find out that writing funny stuff is the easy part. Getting clients to buy it is where it all goes wrong.
Love the idea.
But for those working in advertising agencies I don’t think the problem is that they struggle to be funny, it’s that clients are rarely brave enough to approve work that’s genuinely funny.
You’ll soon find agencies don’t write “shit” that needs polishing to be funny. Clients punch the funny out of them.
guys, if you’re a full time writer in an ad agency you ARE NOT a comedy writer.
You write promotional material for money.
Stop bringing people down because they are doing something you wish you could.
This is awesome guys and a great idea. Clients will be getting closer to creators over next few years I think. Trend that was started in influencer marketing and will only continue…
This is a great idea that will be beaten up by clients in the exact same way that the great ideas that get beaten up by clients inspired these guys to have a great idea to try and solve the problem of great ideas being beaten up by clients.
Great idea, go for it! And don’t worry about those ad agency slaggers … there used to be a day when the agencies wore the pants and their clients trusted them to do great work … but now the client wears the pants … and seem to take much delight in bringing the agencies to their knees and the creative suffers for it. Don’t let their co-dependant relationships have any affect on your enthusiasm.
Where there’s funny, there’s money.
The picture’s not very funny is it?
Is that the humour baseline, the Young Ones?
Do me a farkin’ lemon.