Beneath Sheffield’s domed Abbeydale Picturehouse you will find a gig with more than a little character. Since 2007 Gareth Urwin and Simon Gunnell, joined thereafter by Lev Stern, have cultivated a something of a cult following for a comedy club that feels a lot like going to your local. “It kind of has a family feeling to it,” Gareth tells me. “You know the people there. It’s a bit like Cheers. A comedy Cheers.”

Gareth Urwin & Simon Gunnell

I spoke to Gareth and Lev not long after Simon had become a father, so the absence of his comments is due to sleepless nights and nappy changing, not just his being the quieter of the three. To be honest I was pretty lucky Gareth could make it, what with it being his gran’s birthday. Having met at uni in Sheffield the two had known each other for years before they had a pop at comedy.

It started when one of Gareth’s colleagues, noting his knack for a laugh and a joke, asked him if he’d like to join in with an improv night she was involved with at Trippets in the city centre. It went well, so after a couple of months of improv Gareth tried a bit of stand-up. Before long the troupe became Comedy Republik, a regularly packed out night at West Street Live featuring improv, sketches and stand-up. With an untapped talent as a jokesmith, Gunnell then got on board to pen the sketches.

Over the course of a year they put more focus on their stand-up and invited other comedians to perform, such as Pete Smith from Derby who would later join Gareth on his radio chat show on Sheffield Live. But the rest of the troupe were on the ‘thespy’ side of comedy so when they came across Bar Abbey, Urwin and Gunnell decided to make it home to their own purely stand-up gig. Abbcom was born.

It got off to an impressive start, with good audience numbers off the bat and early gigs featuring the likes of Chris Ramsay and Adam Tempest. But this wasn’t down to talent scouting, Gareth explains. “Me and Gunnell weren’t doing the circuit when we first started, we didn’t know who these people were, so we were just booking acts who’d do it for free. We didn’t know if they’d be any good or not, and we got lucky. So it was only after the first two or three months when we started doing more open spots and gongs that we cherry picked people that we liked in the open spot circuit.”

Ramsay would subsequently return to the venue, notably to preview his 2010 Edinburgh show, breaking the mic in the process. During a bit in which he swung the mic with the the cable, the end flew off and into the audience. They needed a new one anyway, but surprising, haphazard moments like that help give Abbcom its character. No one would describe Bar Abbey as plush, but its unpretentious pluck adds to a “kind of underground, chaotic, dirty feel,” suggests Gareth. “That’s what we like about it, that it is raw, and it’s the chaos and the rawness that the audience likes,” he explains. “It’s like comedy clubs used to be,” says Lev.

Obviously there are other factors besides its filthy gorgeousness that have helped Abbcom survive into its fourth year. Its affordability and the fact that the locals don’t have to schlep into town makes comedy accessible to an audience that might not otherwise have bothered but have since become hooked. In no sense is Abbcom competing with the premier league line-ups on offer at Sheffield’s and Yorkshire’s longest running comedy club, The Last Laugh and its littler sister. Like all good new act and new material nights, Abbcom nurtures nascent comedy. The audience knows some will be rubbish, some will be good, and a few might be on the telly some day. It’s a lottery that always pays out, courtesy of a solid headliner.

The fact that Simon has booked so many acts with potential over the years certainly doesn’t hurt, but how do you maintain a standard people will return for while providing much needed stage time for brand new acts? Gareth tells me: “We were lucky at first, getting people who’ve continued to do well in stand-up, but since then we’ve tried to maintain a balance with three acts who we’ve seen and we know and three acts who we don’t know; give them a chance, see how they do. That’s the ethos by which Gunnell books it all.” However it is that Abbcom keeps people coming back, you do tend to see many of the same faces each month.

One face that is always missed is Gareth’s. “The regulars are important to us and that’s what I like as a compère. It’s nice to compère when during the break you get people coming up to you and speaking to you like they know you or they’re a mate. If you get that then you know you’ve done your job as a compère because they feel you’re a mate. And that’s what you get at Abbcom. I feel sorry for the guest compères because it is hard. It shouldn’t be but for some reason it is, because they try and play it like a normal gig. I think that’s the difference. You can’t play it like a normal gig.”

Such is the crowd’s fondness for Gareth and aversion to any visiting not-Gareths that even when the task falls to Lev, a familiar face, he takes to sporting a disguise. “I went on stage with a mask of Gareth’s face on and it was great until I took the mask off.”

In fact, Lev became a very familiar face not long after Abbcom started. “Being as I lived just round the corner, and every month someone dropped out, I ended up having something like a 4 or 5 month residency and then started gigging in other places and stuff. And then I started my own gig up in Hillsborough called ‘Up The Wrong ‘Un’.” Gareth illustrates the idea: “‘What did you do last night mate? Oh, I took my missus ‘Up The Wrong ‘Un’.” Lev suggests that ultimate responsibility for the name lies elsewhere. “I was bandying some ideas around and it was James Christopher’s idea.”

Gareth is surprised. “Was it?”

“Yeah, it was actually his baby that one,” says Lev.

“Up The Wrong ‘Un?” repeats Gareth, unconvinced.

“Up the wrong ‘Un,” Lev nods. “Because James Christopher and I were on Facebook or something and we were throwing ideas back and forth for the night and I think he came up with it and we eventually whittled it down to ‘Up The Wrong ‘Un’ but as I remember it that was down to James.”

“Really? Didn’t know that,” says Gareth, satisfied.

The flyer featured a bottle of Henderson’s Relish standing in a Sheffield street, rebranded with an ‘Up The Wrong ‘Un’ label. Despite a good first night the gig wasn’t the right ‘un for Lev but his knack for promotion and experience gained running a magazine in Beijing were needed by Gareth and Simon. “Me and Si aren’t the most proactive of people and the numbers started to dip after a year or two because we weren’t advertising it very well. We aren’t the most outgoing of people either, whereas Lev would go around meeting people in the local area saying ‘here you are, come to our comedy night, blah blah blah’.”

Lev explains: “Basically what I saw was that you had the Abbeydale Picturehouse, you’ve got Abbcom and you’ve got two really talented guys running it, and it seemed very marketable. So what I did was got a friend of mine to use the Abbeydale Picturehouse to make a logo, a graphic, to brand it and it went from there. We got the flyers printed up and I was very active on Facebook and in the local community. I know lots of people in the immediate area because I used to live just round the corner from them.”

“So ever since Lev’s been on board we’ve had it pretty much busy most nights, because he does all the publicity, all the marketing, that sort of thing. Gunnell books all the acts, and I just pretty much have to turn up and try and remain relatively sober.”

“When you can,” Lev adds.

“Yeah, when I can,” says Gareth with a knowing smile.

Lev, Simon & Gareth with Wes Zaharuk

Before moving on to their side ventures I ask them about their best gig at Abbcom. Gareth offers a favourite moment. At the time of the notoriously rigged Zimbabwean elections he was talking with the crowd about Robert Mugabe. At some point during the banter someone posited the daft idea that Mugabe might be in the building, prompting Gareth to gesture at the doors, stage right, and announce: “Ladies and gentlemen, Robert Mugabe!” Which was precisely the moment that George arrived at Abbcom for the first ever time. George is now a regular, and the only black man in a predominantly white audience. There then ensued a lot of laughter, a little white guilt and one very confused bloke. “He was just stood there, like: ‘err… what’s going on?’ And we couldn’t say ‘well, you know, you’re black’.”

With such a winning formula at Abbcom (funding their first trip to the Edinburgh festival off the back of it) Gareth and Simon tried to replicate the success at different venues very early on. After half a year at Bar Abbey they put on a few nights at a pub in Matlock which were, says Gareth, “fucking awful. Really horrible. Because the locals just turned up at 10 o’clock at night, after their pool game or darts game had finished, and just shouted out of the audience. And the guy who had the toughest time there was Lee Chamberlain who just got harassed by this drunken mob of people. After that we just stopped doing it.”

They then put on a more successful, more professional night at West Street Live, booking the likes of Gary Delaney, Caimh McDonnell, Duncan Oakley and Roger Monkhouse. But new ownership and a more music-minded manager meant the budget was cut and, despite regularly bringing in a good audience, the gig became unsustainable. “That’s a lesson to young people coming up doing comedy nights,” says Gareth. “You need to have the venue behind you. If they’re not behind you there’s no point doing it.”

Shortly after Lev got involved they responded to a phone call from a pub landlord in Coal Aston. “The racist heart of Sheffield,” says Lev. Gareth explains: “He said ‘it’s in my pub so it’s got to be free entry’, so we thought ‘hmm’. And as any comedian will know, or if they don’t know now they will eventually learn, free entry nights do not work. Ever. And we kind of thought, maybe it will, because we were being greedy, and he gave us the budget and we booked a few acts. The first night went not too bad…”

“It was shit apart from Alfie Moore closing,” Lev clarifies. “They hated everyone, including you, apart from Alfie Moore. He stormed it. Second night they hated everyone.” Gareth nods. “Yeah, that was a train wreck. Horrible night. We had a joke competition; what was the difference between someone and something.”

Lev: “Chris Akabusi and a toothbrush or something. I’m not saying what the answer was but it was extremely racist and that got the biggest laugh of the evening. And at that point we all just looked at each other and thought ‘we’re in the wrong place’.”

Gareth: “It was the idea of Chris Akabusi hanging from a tree or something like that. Really racist, and they all pissed themselves laughing. And we thought ‘no’. So we didn’t go back there.”

Their next endeavour was a more pleasant affair entirely, putting on shows for Sheffield University student halls. They ran gigs at four different halls, a different one each week of the month. Some worked a treat, with Chris Ramsay’s and Mike Newall’s visits going particularly well. Some suffered from being free and receiving an apathetic reception by students who weren’t invested it in. Either way the funds dried up and that was that. More recently they tried a gig at a Sheffield community centre which, despite going well, they thought better of when required to spend an hour or two cleaning up afterwards as per a clause in the contract they hadn’t read. “Not doing that again,” Gareth laments.

Almost four years have passed since Abbcom got started and they’re now going slightly further afield to The Venue in Stocksbridge and The Doncaster Little Theatre, with names like Junior Simpson, Isy Suttie, Nick Helm, Mike Newall, Tony Burgess, Steve Day and Gary Delaney comprising very nice line-ups indeed. So that’s two more Abbcom babies to complement Gunnell’s and soon Gareth’s too; he recently announced that he and his wife are expecting. Let’s hope fatherhood doesn’t impinge on his compering duties. If it does whoever guest MCs may wish they were changing shitty nappies.

If you’re yet to pop your Abbcom cherry, it runs on the last Thursday of every month. Check the website for full listings.