WIPped into Shape: Eleanor Morton and Jin Hao Li interview

If you’ve been following Eleanor Morton’s career, you’ll understand why Haunted House feels like a show she was born to make. A childhood connoisseur of Historic Scotland tours and general history buff, she found viral fame as Craig the tour guide, and on the way made 2017’s Ghost Police, a mini web series in which she dragged other comics to top haunted locations to see what they could find. In spite of all this she doesn’t believe in ghosts (but still wants to see one). 

Eleanor Morton. Photo: Trudy Stade

Morton’s bringing Haunted House to Glasgow International Comedy Festival this month as a Work in Progress – she’s one of 60 comics with a WIP on the programme, the first step to building a polished show for festivals and tours. Comedy is the only artform that is immediately shaped by its audience, and as a result it’s always evolving, even from one end of an Edinburgh run to the other. But she points out that stand-up isn’t necessarily as fluid as it appears.

“Even audience interactions might be a lot more pre-planned than the audience assumes, but part of a good show is making the audience feel like it's spontaneous, even if it isn't”

In any case, she says, the point of a Work in Progress isn’t to make the show funny (hopefully it already is), but rather to make it cohere. 

“Part of a WIP is working out those the slightly less funny bits as well, the building blocks that you don't really need in a 20 minute [set].”

Jin Hao Li. Photo: Rui En

The emotion-fuelled standup favoured by the Fringe is closely linked to the idea of the ‘40-minute mark’; that the brain can’t concentrate for a full hour at a time. In order to hold onto the audience they need a narrative. This is an especially timely lesson for Jin Hao Li, who brings his debut WIP to Glasgow. It’s been 12 years since Morton first attempted an hour-long set; for Li it’s been 12 hours, when we talk. His reflections on the previous night are constructive, if not quite positive: “It was really good for half an hour. I've never done longer than that before, so I think beyond 30 minutes I started to maybe flop a bit.”

Part of this, he says, is definitely structure. Like many comics doing their first hour, his WIP set is an amalgamation of individual jokes worked on over several years. He’s used them in club settings before, as well as in his finalist sets for Chortle’s Student Comedy and BBC New Comedy Awards, so knows they can work. For this hour, they were grouped stylistically into three chunks (surrealist, conversational and confessional) rather than having a particular narrative – which also means that when he jumps from surrealist bits featuring cartoonish violence into jokes about his real-life experience doing national service in the Singaporean army, the audience doesn’t know how to respond. Thanks to his first Work in Progress, he already knows how to restructure.

Every comic has a different technique for a Work in Progress which will often change over the year or so that it’s being worked on. As the hour gets closer to being finalised, some standups perform with a word-for-word script; last Fringe, Daniel Kitson gave them out to the audience. 

Li’s process, as terrifying as it seems, is to watch the recording of his set as soon as he’s on the bus home (“I love watching myself flop. How else are you going to improve?”). Morton's WIP process is to start with a theme, collect ideas on stage, then turn that into a rough draft and fine tune from there. Starting with the theme means it’s easier to be a ruthless editor, and ensures the narrative of the show is more natural – she compares it to writing university essays. She’s performed Haunted House around six times, but the show she’s bringing to Glasgow this year is completely different to the WIP she did for GICF 2023, when it was in its earliest stages (an exercise in “get up and ask people if they think any of this is working”).

The Work in Progress is typical of all live comedy, in that the performer has to trust the audience’s judgement. Li mentions a woman in the crowd he fixated on because she was the one face not laughing. He wonders aloud if this is being a narcissist – but we reckon it’s just being a standup.

---

Eleanor Morton: Haunted House (WIP), Oran Mor, 26 Mar, 9pm
@eleanormortoncomedy on Insta / @eleanormorton on Twitter / @eleanormortoncomedian on Tiktok

Jin Hao Li: Rapping at the Bottom of the Ocean (WIP), Van Winkle West End, 17 Mar, 3.30pm
@jin.hao.li on Insta / @jin_hao_li on Twitter

Glasgow International Comedy Festival runs from 13-31 Mar. More info at glasgowcomedyfestival.com