From Stratford to the Comedy Stratosphere: An Interview with Victor Daniels

Into the Fire

Few people find their calling as easily as Victor Daniels. A comedy veteran with twenty years in the game, Daniels remembers exactly where he was sitting when a friend at university suggested he should do comedy. The decision turned out to be a pretty simple one. “I was like, ‘yeah, why not?’,” Daniels says, “and just did it”.

From there, Daniels was thrown into the deep end of stand-up. His first gig had been planned in secret by a friend. Daniels recalls sitting in the audience of The Richard Blackwood Show, when the eponymous host said, “‘I heard there’s a comedian in the house. Can a Victor Daniels come down?’”

Being put on the spot in front of a live audience is enough to make anyone’s stomach drop and Daniels certainly felt the pressure. He says he sat there thinking, “he’s calling my name. I gotta go down there… I’ve just gotta talk, there’s no way around this.” Incredibly, he rose to the task. The jokes, he says, were made up on the spot. Of the three jokes he told, one bombed, one was okay and the other was a total hit.  

He concedes the experience was nerve-wracking but nevertheless, it only made him more certain he was on the right path.  There was a lot to love about performing, he says. For him, “the minute I was on stage, it just seemed to work instantly.” 

Stand-up comedy offers opportunities for spontaneity and to play off the audience’s energy. One of the best things, Daniels says, are moments when he can “think of something off the top of my head and the audience just goes with it.”

His eyes light up as he talks about being on stage, recounting an instance where he watched a woman in the audience spit out her drink while laughing at one of his jokes.

Putting in the Work

Even in his early days, a lifetime of making people laugh made Daniels confident he could entertain a crowd. The real challenges arose once he stepped off the stage.

Daniels admits he didn’t always take the most professional approach to comedy. “I didn’t get an agent,” Daniels explains. Instead, he booked his early gigs by contacting venues directly. In one of the first shows of his career, he secured the gig by standing outside the Comedy Store in London and declaring, “I’m not leaving here until I get a gig.”

Comedy in the Digital Age 

The comedy scene has shifted dramatically in the two decades since Daniel’s career began. While he was coming up in the stand-up world, the best way to get his name out there was by performing on stage and promoting his shows with flyers.

For Daniels, the rise of social media has been “both a blessing and a curse”. Today, many new comedians start by building their following on social media. It’s an approach that has its flaws. Daniels says, “some people with larger social media followings, they might get more gigs, but they’re not as strong as comedians.” 

In his experience, jokes that play well on social media focus on current events and hot topics. In contrast, with standup, “you don’t know what the audience has seen… the material is more personal, about how you view the world.” 

Daniels has taken the shift to social media in his stride. In an era where most comedy fans consume most of their content online, it’s become more important than ever to leverage platforms like Instagram and Facebook to get his name out there. “During lockdown, I was doing a comedy video every day.” He credits those videos for pushing his material to a larger audience and opening up new opportunities.

Navigating Cancel Culture

Part of the job as a stand-up comic is learning how to tell the right jokes for the right crowd. Daniels finds himself performing for a variety of different audiences with different tastes. With some Black audiences, he can “talk more about [the culture] because that audience understands it,” but factors beyond race, like class and the audience’s age, also influence what lands and what doesn’t.

When asked about what jokes no longer fly with audiences today, Daniels concedes he finds the sensitivity of younger audiences “annoying”. The issue is less with particular groups that he picks on in his jokes and more with other members of the audience who aren’t sure whether he’s gone too far. 

Worrying about what he can and cannot say doesn’t keep him up at night. As a comedian, his job is to get the crowd laughing. He works hard to figure out what works for whoever is in the room. When writing new material, he says, “I might go to a show with a smaller audience, and I try out the joke, and if the joke doesn’t work, then fair enough.” 

Some of his fondest memories of performing are his sold out shows at Theatre Royal Stratford East and also being on Quincy The Comedian’s roster. This Stratford resident of Nigerian heritage has never forgotten his roots and where he got started. A long way from the university student standing outside comedy clubs trying to book a gig, Victor Daniels has much in his career to be proud of. As the comedy scene continues to change, he’ll change with it, and never stop making us laugh. 

Highlights of the full interview with Victor can be seen below.

Full interview with Victor Daniels can be found here and you can follow him on Facebook and Instagram.