Five Stars, Forty-Five Reviews, and an Underground Secret Worth Finding
A 5.0-star rating on Google is a statistical anomaly. It should not be possible to maintain a perfect average across any meaningful number of reviews in the unforgiving environment of a central London comedy venue, where the audience includes people who give three stars because the Uber was expensive, people who give two stars because they did not find the comedian funny and believe this reflects poorly on the venue rather than their own taste, and people who give one star because they could not find parking, which is their own fault for driving to Soho. The Soho Comedy Cellar has maintained a 5.0-star rating across 45 reviews. Either it is genuinely perfect or the 45 reviewers are an extraordinarily consistent selection of humanity.
The Underground Appeal
A comedy cellar the designation rather than the specific venue has particular connotations in the history of stand-up. The cellars and basements of New York gave rise to some of the greatest comedians in American history. The basement of the original Comedy Store in LA was where observational comedy was being reinvented in the 1970s. The British alternative comedy movement was born in a Soho rooftop but nurtured in pub back rooms and basement clubs across London. There is something appropriate about a cellar comedy venue something that suggests authenticity, intimacy, a stripping away of the production values that larger venues use to compensate for distance between performer and audience.
The Soho Comedy Cellar operates in this tradition. It is a small venue, underground, in Soho which means it has the intimacy that basements provide, the foot traffic that Soho provides, and the comedy infrastructure of the UK’s most comedy-dense neighbourhood available to draw on for programming. The reviews suggest that it is making the most of all three advantages.
What Forty-Five Perfect Reviews Means
Forty-five reviews is a small sample in the context of London comedy venues, where the Top Secret has nearly twenty thousand and the Comedy Store has over three thousand. But it is large enough to be statistically meaningful certainly large enough to confirm that the 5.0 rating is not an artefact of two very enthusiastic friends posting multiple reviews. Forty-five people, on 45 separate occasions, decided that their experience at the Soho Comedy Cellar was worth a maximum rating. That is a remarkable consistency.
Growing from a Perfect Base
The Soho Comedy Cellar is, by the numbers, a smaller and newer venue than most of its neighbours. Its challenge is to grow its audience and its review base while maintaining the standard that has produced a perfect rating. This is considerably harder than it sounds the comedy venues that have the largest review bases have inevitably accumulated some disappointments along the way. Maintaining 5.0 across thousands of reviews is essentially impossible. But maintaining it across hundreds, and eventually thousands, while continuing to book strong acts and run the show well, is a worthy ambition.
The Verdict
The Soho Comedy Cellar has a perfect rating for a reason. Go and find out what the reason is before the crowds discover it and the averages regress toward the normal.
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
