Free Stand-Up Every Single Night of the Year Yes, Actually Free
The Angel Comedy Club at the Camden Head pub in Islington is one of the great comedy institutions in London, and it is free. Not free with a drink purchase. Not free with a ticket booking fee. Not free in the sense that the first drink compensates for the entry charge. Free. No entry fee, no minimum spend, no catch. Every single night of the year, the Angel Comedy Club opens its doors in the upstairs room of the Camden Head on Camden Passage and puts live stand-up comedy in front of whoever turns up. The 811 reviews at a 4.8-star rating confirm that the people who turn up are finding it worth reviewing at maximum rating even though they paid nothing.
The History of the Angel Comedy Club
The Angel Comedy Club was founded with a mission that sounds almost naive in the context of the London entertainment industry: to make stand-up comedy free and accessible to everyone. This is a city where everything costs money, where comedy tickets range from £1 at the Top Secret to £25 at the Comedy Store to considerably more for a major touring show, and where the entry price acts as a filter that excludes a significant portion of the potential comedy audience. The Angel Comedy Club removes the filter.
The result is an audience that is more varied, more economically diverse, and more genuinely mixed than any priced venue in London can achieve. Students sit next to professionals. First-timers sit next to comedy veterans. People who would never spend £20 on a comedy ticket discover that they love stand-up because someone took away the financial barrier to finding out. This is genuinely valuable, and it has been genuinely valued 811 reviews at 4.8 stars from an audience that, at its least committed, wandered in off Camden Passage and stayed because the comedy was good.
The Format and Programme
The Angel Comedy Club runs RAW comedy nights Monday through Thursday and Sunday showcases for newer acts, free, downstairs in the pub. Friday and Saturday nights are the polished shows, with more established acts, upstairs, still free. The range of talent that has passed through both formats is remarkable: Dylan Moran, Simon Amstell, and numerous other major names have used the Angel as a work-in-progress venue precisely because the audience is there for the comedy rather than for a social occasion that happens to include comedy.
This creates a particular quality of comedy interaction at the Angel. The audience is engaged. It is not distracted by the price it paid, the friend who chose the venue, or the social dynamics of a group night out that requires everyone to perform enjoyment simultaneously. People are there because they want to be there, and the comedy responds to this with the kind of spontaneity and risk-taking that higher-priced venues often inhibit.
The Camden Head Pub
The Camden Head is a Victorian pub on Camden Passage the antiques and vintage market street in Islington that has been attracting dealers, collectors, and people who want to buy things that are old and interesting since before most of its current regulars were born. The pub itself has the character that Victorian pubs achieve through age and use rather than through investment in period furniture, and the comedy club upstairs inherits this character. It smells faintly of beer and history. The toilets are exactly as good as the toilets in a Victorian Islington pub should be. The comedy is world-class. This combination is, in its own way, perfect.
The Verdict
The Angel Comedy Club at the Camden Head is one of London’s great cultural treasures a free, nightly comedy venue that has democratised access to professional stand-up comedy for over a decade and has the ratings and the reputation to prove that the model works. If you have never been, go tonight. It will cost you nothing. It will be better than something that cost you considerably more.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: editor@prat.uk
