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On the “pay what you want” episode of the podcast, Josh Spector, Jordan Cooper, Chelcie Rice and Josh Homer discuss the backlash towards the recent Connected Comedy post posing a concept where the audience decides a comedian’s pay, whether or not this would be good for comics, question if a crowd can even judge good comedy in the first place, and if the negativity highlights how much comics actually hate club audiences.
In addition, we continue on the topic on a broader level and into the psyche of stand-up comics. Are we relying too heavily on the security of the live comedy infrastructure? What do we do when the club “circuit” goes away? Does the industry truly want us or really just want our audience?
[powerpress]
Links from this episode:
The Most Annoying Thing Comics Do And More Stuff I’m Thinking About This Week [Connected Comedy]
Chirpify – The Social Commerce & Payments Platform
You Know What Comics Really Hate? The Audience. [Connected Comedy]
6 Lessons You Can Learn From The Success Of “Jackass” [Connected Comedy]
The New Movie Stars: How Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain and Ryan Gosling Are Redefining Stardom [The Wrap]
Comedy Living Room: It’s Comedy…in a Living Room [LA Weekly]
Participate with the community in our Connected Comedy Facebook group or post your questions, suggestions or topics to cover in the future on our Facebook page. We always welcome your comments!
What do you guys use to create this podcast? Since you are all in different areas, I’m curious how you do it. What program do you use?
I think you made a good point about how those comics who don’t like comedy audiences will fail.
It’s just a Skype conference call recorded using a program called Ecamm: http://www.ecamm.com/mac/callrecorder/
My ranking on who should be paid the most for this specific episode of the podcast:
1. Jordan Cooper
2. Josh Spector
3. Josh Homer
4. Chelcie Rice
And just to add to you discussion about the top ten money making comedians performing comedy that is dumbed down, I would prefer to see a comedian with mediocre material who I like as opposed to a comedian with great material who I do not like.
I compare it to pro wrestling, as hillbilly as that sounds. Hulk Hogan was a great pro wrestler , not because of his great wrestling skills and ability to do back flips, but because of his charisma and likability.
I see comics all the time that have funny jokes but no charisma and likability. Those comics are not ones that I would pay to see.
I actually had a similar idea a while back that I introduced to some comics in my area and they shot it down very quickly. My idea was to let the audience rate each comic so we could decide who got to perform in the next show, instead of one guy who chooses his friends for every show. I like the challenge of performing at shows where nobody knows me and getting them all to like me by the end of the night.
While I agree you have to like your audience, I do know of one successful comic who hates his audience, Doug Stanhope. I just heard him say it in a podcast. The difference is his audience probably loves that he hates them.
I like the idea of the audience deciding how much the comic gets paid. During the Edinburgh festival in August I do solo shows which are part of the free festival.
These shows have a collection at the end and the audience are asked to put in a donation depending on how much the show is worth.
There is a definite correlation between how good the show is and how much you get paid.
I’m thinking about doing a weekly show in Glasgow based on this idea as well.
Keep up the good work.
Obie 🙂