Comedians Are No Longer Artists. We Are Content Mercenaries.

When I began doing stand-up in 2003 I had no idea whether I would be good, whether I would enjoy it and how long I would do it.  It has now been 21 years since my first open mic and I am proud of what I have produced and how good I have become.  However, I am somewhat regretful of having spent so much of my adult life working, striving and stressing over an art form that has changed so much over that time that I’m not sure it’s an art anymore.  I actually believe getting into comedy when I did was the worst possible time – just enough exposure to how comedy used to be to somewhat resist the marketplace of content mercenaries it has become.

I have lamented with some comedians in my generation about how bad our timing was.  To sum it up, we emerged when stand up was the only form of comedic expression for stand-up comedians, Comedy Central played tons of stand-up comedy, podcasts and social media did not exist and YouTube was in its embryonic stage.  The only advice a veteran comedian would give to a new comedian would be, “write a lot and get on stage as much as you can.” And that was good advice because the assumption was that you wanted to become good at stand-up comedy, to then become a successful stand-up comedian.  But every generation that entered after us was born into a new framework that did not require them to de-program themselves of the romantic notion that being good at stand-up was not only the priority, but the sole focus of a stand-up comedian.  YouTube, Podcasts, Social Media and then Tik Tok (the Apollo Moon Landing to YouTube’s Wright Brothers) have grounded aspiring comedians content creators in more useful ways to gain success, but decreasing the means and motivations to become good. And if the desire, focus and talent of each successive comedy generation becomes more attached to algorithms and less attached to the art, eventually the art will cease to progress and will eventually become nothing but an app on people’s phone to distract them (i.e. I think we might already be there).

Friends and fans of mine know that I am a huge Bo Burnham fan.  Like Eddie Murphy I think Burnham is a singular, generational talent and the best argument for the Internet launching great artists.  But I think Bo Bunham is not just an immense talent, I think he is also an aberration or an anomaly.  I think he began so young on YouTube (the term wunderkind certainly applies) because he had work he wanted to share, not because he had unlocked some code guaranteeing success.  And all his future work from his early YouTube days, has shown an artist critiquing, rather than embcracing, the degradation of art and culture in society (In 2015, during a special, he said of Celebrity Lip Sync, “So I guess culture is dead.”  And yet that dead horse is being kicked for immense profit to this day.

Even someone like Dane Cook, who occupies that same space as Amy Schumer where, because of his immense success, was an acceptable target of many comedians and comedy fans’ groupthink of unjustified personal and artistic hate (whereas mocking Louis CK in 2013 was a very divisive choice), was much more of an original than what we see today.  Cook used social media, not as a lemming, but as a pioneer. In the desire to expose his art to more people he used the tool of MySpace in ways no one else had.  In other words, he used the tools of the Internet to share his original (you don’t have to like it, but Dane Cook was an original) work. He did not shape his work to fit the tools of the Internet.

Keeping the Boston theme going, one of my favorite comedians, and someone I consider a friend, is Gary Gulman.  Before Sirius XM got wise to it and required a minimum length for tracks, there was a period recently when comedians were creating albums with 30+ tracks for an album under an hour to get more streams (and money) from satellite radio.  As someone who is sometimes prone to longer tracks (not to sound like a pretentious jazz artist, but the tracks are as long as the tracks are – I have some tracks that barely reach a minute and I have a track on an album that exceeded 15 minutes).  But I wrote years ago that I was thankful that a comedian like Gary Gulman would continue to write Homeric poems (or Jim Steinman-Meat Loaf epics if you prefer rock analogies to English Lit ones) on fruit, cookies, mental health, abbreviating states and whatever popped into his head because he was enough of an artist (and perhaps secure and safe in his career – this cannot be entirely discounted and must be at least acknowledged as something that does vex us lesser known and less successful comedians) to continue to make his art.

But we are in a different era now, pretty much unrecognizable from when I got into stand-up comedy.  People used to say “it takes ten years to find your voice” as a comedian.  Today they might as well say “who gives a shit about your voice – if you haven’t got 100K Tik Tok followers by year 3 it might be time to get out.”  Crowd work videos, from comedians who still can’t put together a strong feature set, are becoming Internet superstars (not who you are thinking of – calm down).  Comedians who should be solid features are selling out arenas (exactly who you are thinking of).  Rather than give a list of all the individual injustices occurring in stand-up, I will give an example that truly shows the core of how algorithms define stand-up comedy content creation today.

Everyone puts captions on their videos now.  This began as a way to help hearing impaired people appreciate the work (though I did have to tell someone one time that reading the dialogue of my impersonations really was borderline useless, no matter how funny my dialogue is).  But it was “the algorithm likes the flashing and changing of text to engage eyeballs” that made text in videos omnipresent.  In other words, it has nothing to do with its original purpose anymore (who cares about the hearing impaired!?).  If Tik Tok’s algorithm wanted comedians content creators to kick old ladies down stairwells for content/channel engagement, probably 1/3 of comedians would invite their grandmothers over to their homes that afternoon.

But comedians are not the only ones at fault.  Comedy audiences have gotten dumber. As younger generations grow up in informational and content silos of their own (sometimes unintentional) making, general knowledge seems to be diminishing, as are cultural references, which people used to know collectively.  I had a younger club employee tell me last year that I was like Dennis Miller.  That says a lot more about us then me and Dennis Miller.  Dennis Miller used to confuse me with references to things that only my philosophy major friends in college could reference.  Me discussing The Godfather and Mary Magdalene should not evoke similar bouts of confusion among the general population.  But alas here we are.

So comedians obey the algorithm as their master, micro-target their material for that algorithm and sell tickets to at best, a charismatic, empty performance, and at worse to an hour of desecrating what a comedy club used to stand for.  And soulless content creators and a navel gazing, cell phone zombie audience are only 2/3 of the equation.  Clubs have become sanctuaries for the Trojan Horse that is the content creator who does not care about stand up comedy.  I used to post jokes when I would be performing at a club and see a pro wrestler or a Real Housewife performing appearing the next week. But now it’s every week, everywhere.  At this point, I see the direction we are in and I understand the need to sell tickets, but then we should just start calling comedy clubs “event spaces.”

Some reading this may be saying, “but J-L, you made it big on social media so what gives?”  That is true. I was doing impersonations since before I got into stand-up.  As my stand up skills matured and I found my voice and became a prolific writer I put my impressions into sketches and kept my stand-up mostly free of them.  And the parallel paths served me well. But during the pandemic, it was my Trump impersonation, which had been toiling in obscurity, with the rest of my catalogue, that brought me more money and prominence than the previous 16 years of my comedy career combined.  But in my naive belief, born in 2003 when I began doing stand-up, I thought that if they like the humor behind my impressions then they will really enjoy my stand-up, which is overdue for a mainstream discovery. And now these millions who’ve seen my impressions and hundreds of thousands who have chosen to follow me, will certainly care about this great and funny catalogue of mine.

Not really.

I remember a somewhat recent conversation I had with a comedian who was much more successful than me. And I said. “it’s like nobody cares about the art.” And he said, “We do.”  Without doubting the sincerity of what he said, when you are in a position where you’ve built up your fan base pre-social media and especially pre-Tik Tok, you are sort of grandfathered in. Real comedy fans will appreciate and newer, fairweather fans will at least respect your clout and reach as a major player.  But the art of stand-up comedy will not continue if younger comedians and younger generations don’t put originality and the art on at least an equal footing as the algorithm (baby steps). The business of comedy is booming. The art feels like it’s dying.  I have always said stand up could never have a guild or a union because the default mindset of a comedian is already that of a scab.  And I said that well before Tik Tok opened up the gates of virality-chasing Hell.

I do not know how much longer I can do stand-up. The writing on the wall appears to be clear that my talent and work is really best described as a pleasant distraction to the vast majority of my fans.  I am now 45, but sometimes I feel physically and mentally like I am 65, and I might as well be with my antiquated wishes for the art of stand-up comedy.  I often ask myself a question my mother used ask me during the darkest days of my comedy career.  “Who are you doing this for?”  I was spending half of my very low pay at the time on video edits and making sketches all while trying to get booked as a middle act and self-producing my albums, not to get famous or to win over an algorithm or because streaming and YouTube were lucrative (which at the time I was making $0 from both), but because I had lots of funny stuff to share and held out belief that something would catch on, leading people to a vast library of comedy work.  And that was what I told my Mom at the time.  And I am of the belief that if that is not your motivation for being in comedy, then you shouldn’t do it.

Last year, after sales of my album Tall Boy were far less than even my measured/pessimistic expectations (in 2020 my 2nd album as Trump debuted at 34 on the entire iTunes charts, right behind the Frozen II soundtrack and sat atop the comedy charts of iTunes and Amazon for two weeks) it was a rude awakening.  I then decided for the final year of my podcast as Trump (Making Podcasts Great Again) I would charge $1 a month for access to full audio and video of weekly episodes.  Many fans (though only about 5% of our audience) signed up.  But at least a dozen fans chose this time to vent hostility at me with comments like “See ya!” and “Welp, won’t be listening anymore” despite the singular nature of the show that I had put out for free since 2018 with my partner Jay.  I see the irony of complaining about the art, but feeling disrespected for fans not paying for it, but unless the Medici show up to patronize me, the only way to make good art at the volume I do is for some folks to pay for it. There are some realities I cannot avoid, not matter how many realities I try to avoid in this blog.

So to answer, my Mom’s question, at this point I still “do this” for me, hoping that the audience I need finds me.  But that audience may no longer exist.