Let’s say we’re playing Pictionary and you get the word music.
You might draw this.
Or if you get sports, you might draw this.
For movie, this should do the trick.
But what about the word comedy?
Logo design is fundamentally based on two things: 1) typography – the visual representation
of words, and 2) semiotics and iconography – or conveying meaning through symbols.
The skill of distilling down complex images into simple graphics is a cornerstone of both
logo design and icon design for user interfaces – but one difference is that for an icon,
being generic is a good thing, because more people will immediately grasp the concept
it communicates.
When an icon is used repeatedly it becomes a trope.
The challenge for a logo designer is to take that trope, and give it an original twist.
Today, we’ll take a look at some of the visual tropes of comedy clubs, and some of
the best, worst and weirdest examples.
[Music]
This will be a companion piece to my talk looking at the history of typography in comedy
branding for the AtypI 2020 conference, link somewhere below once that’s gone live on
their channel.
This will be less of a historical timeline, and more a thematic overview.
I spent many years as an aspiring stand up myself here in London, and helped to co-found
the original Angel Comedy night in Islington which became Angel Comedy Club, which I’ll
talk a little about at the end.
I’m going to focus primarily on the logos of comedy clubs, and I’m going to go through
the visual tropes in a loose thematic order.
I’ve collected examples from mostly American clubs, but also some from the UK, Canada and
Australia, from the 1970s right up til the present.
Firstly, we have the court jester, aka joker, as traditionally depicted on playing cards.
A fairly common trope, over the years there have been many clubs with names and logos
derived from this archetype in various permutations.
Of note at the top is the short-lived Laugh Factory flashing joker logo.
The original Laugh Factory opened in 1979 and by the mid-eighties this had disappeared.
Safe to say that this concept for a logo would be *somewhat unlikely* to be approved today.
At the bottom, we have the logo for Jongleurs, a now defunct comedy chain in the UK.
This is visually the most subtle, with the pointed boot of the joker implied typographically
by the J.
The second trope we have is comedians from the 1930s, including Laurel & Hardie, Charlie
Chaplin, but especially Groucho Marx.
The Groucho glasses, which were marketed as a novelty item since the 1940s, have lived
on in popular culture much longer than the man himself.
The kind of vaudeville comedy the Max Brothers performed is pretty disconnected from what
comedy looks like today, but the icon has slowly become entrenched in our shared visual
lexicon.
Aside from a witty quote or two, the direct cultural impact of the Marx Brothers has mostly
petered out after 90 years, of course it has.
Most people on the street will be able to tell you more about Steve Urkel than they
could about Groucho Marx, and possibly might confuse him with the writer of the Communist
Manifesto, but the iconic glasses live on, even if people have forgotten the original
source.
Our oldest trope goes back to Ancient Greece.
The comedy and tragedy masks, or Sock and Buskin, as the stock characters on which these
masks were based on, were called.
It’s well understood as a trope, but it’s not a particularly good icon for comedy because
it signifies theatre as a whole, not comedy specifically.
If only one mask is shown, without the tragedy mask, it has less iconic recognition.
That said, I really like what Vancouver Theatre Sports – an improv theatre – have done
with their spin on it.
Speaking of overlapping iconography, next we have smiles and teeth, which depending
on the execution, can overlap a fair bit with logos for dentistry.
That may be partly why the majority of these mouths only have one row of teeth showing,
to imply laughter.
The Comic’s Lounge and Laugh It Up are both going the route of the more abstract, wind
up, chattering teeth novelty toy, which was also the inspiration for the logo of the alternative
comedy podcast and IFC Show, Comedy Bang Bang.
Giggles have got the creepiest smile of the bunch, and I definitely prefer their older,
stranger typographic logo which I looked at over in my comedy typography talk.
A natural evolution from the smile is the smiley face, and despite the use of the iconic
smile by the character, the comedian, in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, you really don’t see
this come up until the 2000s mostly.
Perhaps it’s a stronger icon now thanks to the spread of emoji.
Also, this is one of my least favourite tropes, I think it’s very hard to make it interesting.
Bonkers is probably the worst, a trope on a trope – very clip-arty, and Ha Ha Café
has to be the most nightmarish!
If you extend your imagination to think of what it would be like to be this wretched
abomination, if it has sentience, I couldn’t imagine it would laugh at all, it would only
screech in pain.
Speaking of abominations, here we have some miscellaneous grinning mascots – the best
of which is from the Laughing Skull Lounge – does what is says on the tin!
Hilarities with its disturbingly large bowtie is giving Off the Rails’ cursed Thomas the
Tank Engine a good run for most unsettling, along with the Laff House being blatantly
the most dead inside.
But as a general rule, mascots tend to be more specific lifeforms.
Here we have animals, on the left we have North American clubs, on the right we have
British clubs.
It seems from this small sample that only Brits find frogs funny, whereas the Hyena,
despite being native only to Africa, has found success on both sides of the Atlantic.
It does have a certain logic, seeing as it’s a famous laughing animal, though it’s not
the easiest to depict.
The most iconic cartoon hyenas are owned by the Disney Corporation, which takes infringement
of its intellectual property fairly seriously.
So, without treading too close to that character design, how you make a mascot read as hyena?
More familiar animals tend to work better for logos and icons, because they can be more
easily simplified and still be recognisable.
Also, can I just say how much I enjoy this Improv Ha Ha Line logo?
If I were the kind of guy to wear vintage t-shirts, I would absolutely want this on
a shirt.
If somebody from the Improv sees this for some reason, I will help you make this into
merch art, just get in touch!
The other lifeform of choice for comedy is fruit, or food more generally, though apart
from cheese, fruit seems the food object of choice, with the banana clearly dominating
as the funniest.
Perhaps this goes back to the slapstick trope of slipping on a banana peel, or equally,
as the name “go bananas” suggests, there is another underlying trope of insanity and
mental illness – something that runs parallel with cartoon slapstick.
The name Looney Tunes is so familiar, it’s easy to miss that the word looney in there,
dating back to when a mental health facility would be casually called a looney bin.
Crazy as a synonym for zany is something that has slowly gone out of fashion – as the
stigma around mental health has lessened, the use of tropes around insanity have become
less prevalent.
Both in the world of comedy, and also in discount retail, where the crazy proprietor was a meme
which was very popular from the 1970s through to early 2000s.
Speaking of memes which have died, there is a strange case of a particular style of illustration
from the 1970s which still lives on in a few comedy clubs, especially the Zanies comedy
club chain.
These laughing figures are all stylistically similar, in a way that no contemporary illustrator
would choose, unless they were deliberately trying to reference the past.
It’s a strangely literal choice for a comedy club to show somebody laughing.
I don’t think there would be many theatres which would choose an illustration of an audience
member sitting and watching for their logo.
On the flip side of this literal interpretation, we have a few logos showing people talking
into microphones.
Side Splitters, weirdly, has the comedian cracking himself up, which is rarely what
you want in a comedy show.
But I think, I really enjoy this logo for this indie show Sauced the most, with it’s
MS Paint aesthetic, I love the juxtaposition of the Venus with a kebab.
That’s pure genius.
One weird subset that doesn’t seem to fit with anything else, and seems particular to
American comedy clubs, is stop sign themed logos.
I am stumped for a plausible hypothesis for the success of this trope – maybe it has
something to do with the American highway system and truck stops and rest stops?
But please, if you have sneaking suspicion as to why the stop signs – leave a comment
below this video, I’d love to know!
Finally we get down to the final, and most successful trope in comedy – the microphone
itself.
Since the very beginning, the mic has been the most iconic symbol of standup comedy – there
is some overlap with singing and karaoke in particular, but when distilled down to its
essence, it makes sense to represent an activity by the tools of the trade.
There are a lot of different microphone logos in comedy – first we have the anthropomorphic
microphones – which are so bizarre.
A mic couldn’t tell jokes!
The feedback would literally deafen the entire audience.
But more interesting than the logistics, is the range in execution.
Particularly this version of the logo for the Funny Bone – which for some reason not
a bone, but a mic – I really enjoy this one.
I couldn’t find a high-quality version of it, since it hasn’t been used in almost
a decade, but clearly whoever did this really had a good eye for cartooning – it’s got
just the perfect amount of detail for a cartoon mascot.
A clearly superior logo to what the Funny Bone now uses…
Which is the clip-arty, vintage, Shure Unidyne 55-style microphone.
This my least favourite group of all these logos, mostly because they’re so samey.
And to get this point out there – firstly this style of microphone is just inaccurate.
This style of mic has never been popular among comedians or comedy clubs.
It’s a singer’s microphone, and one from an era pre-dating standup.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with using an anachronistic icon – it’s understandable
– the save icon is a floppy disk.
A writing app might use a fountain pen as an icon, even though nobody uses those tools
nowadays.
But at least they were used for that purpose at some time in history.
This mic was basically never used for live stand up, and its visual association with
comedy is purely down the popularity of this image on stock photography sites from the
mid-2000s onwards.
I could not find an example of a logo using this style of mic from pre-2000.
But search microphone on any cheap stock photo site and you’ll see this microphone.
Probably the exact stock images used in some of these logos.
It’s not that making a good logo with this image would be impossible, it’s just that
no good logo starts and ends with grabbing a stock photo from the front page of search
results and slapping on lazy typography.
It’s also a more complicated design, and therefore reproduces worse at smaller sizes,
than the actual style of mic they should be using!
The Shure SM58 and is *the* comedy microphone.
The SM58 and its variants and knockoffs have been used by every comedy club in living memory.
It’s universally recognisable, and unlike those retro style microphones, can be visually
condensed down into a few gestural lines – a stem, a ball and a few lines through that
ball.
As I mentioned at the beginning, the logo designer’s challenge is to take the generic
icon, and spin it into something unique and own-able.
I quite like the logo in the centre here for Coit Comedy that combines the mic and local
landmark, or how the Running Joke implies the exclamation point with their mic.
So, that brings us to the end of our roundtrip through comedy’s iconic tropes – I don’t
think is any perfect symbol for comedy, there are multiple icons that work, just some are
speak clearer than others.
Now, perhaps I have a bit of a soft-spot of the SM58, since I chose it as the basis for
my logo for Angel Comedy Club.
I threw together the original flyer for this comedy night back in 2010, when it started
as a little comedy night above a pub in Angel, and now it’s grown to be the UK’s only
full-time independent comedy club that is run by comedians.
At the time, I didn’t put a lot of development into the logo, so since then I’ve come back
every few years to update the identity when I could as a bit of a passion project.
This year, I’ve had a bit more time to play around with it and develop a more complete
visual system, but what I’m showing you is still work in progress, that hasn’t yet
gone live.
The logo of course is a mic with wings, and a forked tail.
It actually took quite a bit of playing around to get the visual balance right to where it
didn’t look too much like a strip club, which I hope I succeeded in!
For this iteration I was really inspired by two ideas: 1) juxtaposition and 2) street
art and visual layering.
To that end, I wanted to add visual interest to posters, social media promos and other
touchpoints with a visual motif, and so I made a set of stickers which, together with
tag-style of lettering and patterns, could be combined to make distinctive and varied
backgrounds.
I realised that almost all communications from the club involve a big photo of a comedian,
so I didn’t want any human faces in the background pulling focus, instead I focused
on the everyday – the kinds of small things which are very much the bedrock of observational
stand up, with a notable lean towards London life.
There a few British icons in there, but hopefully not just cliches for tourists.
No Big Ben, no London Eye, but yes nightbus, yes chicken shop combo and yes busted umbrella.
These are the kind of details that I don’t expect many people will catch, but those that
do catch it, hopefully it makes them smile.
And that’s the thing about comedy club branding, in my experience, it should be fun and engaging
but not trying too hard to be funny in and of itself.
2020 is a pivotal time for the live entertainment industry, and chances are, live comedy in
the future will look different than before.
Stand up as an art form is relatively young, only in its sixties, but because it’s always
been seen as low art, it’s been poorly documented at best.
I feel this is an important time to take stock and reflect on the visual history of comedy,
while it’s still here and the sources are still accessible.
I hope you enjoyed this look at the visual side of comedy club history.
A special thanks to Ritch Shydner for sharing some of his personal clippings from his time
as a comic in the 1980s comedy boom.
His memoir is called Kicking Through The Ashes, do check it out.
If you’re interested in learning about comedy history then I very much recommend the podcast,
The History of Standup, which I’ve also linked down in the description.
Thanks also to my dear friend Barry Ferns and the team at Angel Comedy.
The club is still very much in survival hibernation through 2020 – if you want to help them
make it to the other side and support live comedy in London, I’ve linked their Patreon
campaign down below as well.
My name is Linus, I’ve been talking at length about logos, thank you so much for watching
and I’ll see you in another video.