Curating a comedy night can be complicated...

In one of our recent long-form interviews, with a popular rapper-turned-comedian, talk turned to The Act Before: do comics worry about what the performer before them is doing? We brought it up having once seen this crowd-rocking comedy-rapper go on before a more talky stand-up at a festival, and the latter then spent a fair bit of his set jokily complaining about what a nightmare situation this was. Many a true word...

Curating a comedy line-up is not as straightforward as you might assume. Conventional live-show wisdom suggests that whoever's top of the bill will be on last, whoever's bottom of the bill will be on first, and so on. You'd think the people in those spots would be fairly guessable too: new acts in the opening spots, possibly unpaid, while long-serving crowd-pleasers get the real money spots. Which are different from real money slots, and definitely different from money shots, a term that emerged from a very different type of performance.

But the traditional stand-up club night has evolved its own unique system, over the years. You'll usually get someone good on first (who will often then head off to play a later slot at a rival club) then a mix of newer and what used to be known as 'spesh' acts, before the headliner. In the old club world, any musical comic tended to be cursed with the 'spesh act' tag, which meant they'd be stuck in the middle of club bills for ever, never to reach headline status.

But that could prove a problem for the actual headliner, if the act before them blows the roof off the gaff. It's a delicate balance, the comedy-night ecosystem. In between the various slots is the compere, who's a sort of comedy graphic equaliser, keeping the levels at just the right pitch for each new performer. If the preceding act stinks the place out, they need to get the energy back up or the whole night might never recover. And if the compere isn't great - then you're definitely in trouble.

That's one of the unspoken agonies of dying onstage. Not only have you endured the soul-crushing trauma of public professional failure, but the following acts - and the promoter - might well blame you for knackering their night. It's like a defender scoring a catastrophic, career-damaging own goal: sympathy isn't always as forthcoming from your colleagues as you'd hope, as you've just ruined their evening too. And the crowd response is similar: die onstage or make an on-field cock-up, and you'll probably get heckled, not a hug.

That's why touring comics need to be a bit careful when choosing their support acts. You don't want someone so inexperienced or unsuitable that their half-hour puts the audience in a worse mood than when they walked into the venue. With your name on the ticket, that crowd will blame you for putting them through it.

On the other hand, you'd probably rather not book someone so good that you - the headliner - seem a bit of a disappointment afterwards; nobody wants to actively turn themselves into an anti-climax. So in the comedy-curating business, it's all about striking a happy medium. And, yes, a comedy medium would definitely be a 'spesh' act, somewhere in the middle. Let's just hope no one strikes them.