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Category: Comedy

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Comedy Economics

After paying all the comedians, I wound up earning $30 for doing about 15 minutes of stand up. There’s two interesting calculations you could do:

1) $30 for 15 minutes means I’m making $120 an hour. If I were to work a standard 40 hour work week for 50 weeks, that’d be $120 * 2000, or $240,000 a year. Pretty good. Even if I only work an hour per night, which is much more feasible, that’s $3,600 a month ($120 * 30) or $43,200 a year. Still livable.

2) After factoring in train costs ($18), I’m down to $12 profit. I left my house at 4PM to get to the show and didn’t get back home until 1am. Putting the flyer together took me 2 hours and booking all the comics took another hour. That’s 9 hours yesterday and 12 hours in the past two weeks. Factor in the time it took me to write and practice the jokes this past week alone, and that’s 12 more hours. That’s a total of 24 hours of my time, which works out to 50 cents an hour, or $1,000 a year if I’m doing this full time. If it’s the more reasonable one hour per night calculation, I’m gonna be earning $180 a year.

Don’t misunderstand: I’m not complaining at all. I love comedy, being on stage and making people laugh. I just find it interesting to analyze the business side of comedy. If it were about the money I’d be spending my free time doing investment banki… umm… something more profitable.

One quick comedy example: Norm McDonalad earns $40,000 a night in Vegas, which sounds astronomical ($12 million a year if he works 300 nights). But if his analysis time breakdown is anything like mine, what Norm gets isn’t as good as it sounds. (I recommend that article.)

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New Camera and New Dates

Great news for all of you that have been complaining about the video and audio quality on my recordings: I got a new high definition 1080i digital video camera. Recordings from now on should be much better quality… until someone swipes the camera at least.

 

Also, I have three great shows coming up in the next few weeks:

Sunday December 7th – Rutgers University: Perry Hall on Cook Campus (I’m hosting and it’s free) (map)

Flyer for the Rutgers Show

Thursday December 11th – 10 minutes @ The Grind (free show) (map)

Thursday December 18th – 10 minutes @ New York Comedy Club ($10 cover + 2 drinks) (map)

Come see me live, it’ll be even better than seeing me in high def!

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I Killed

“Stand-up comedy is more a sport than an art — like a boxer, you know exactly how the fight went by the time you get off stage.” -Jerry Seinfeld (poorly paraphrased)

“In football, you’re never as bad as you seem, and you’re never as good as you seem.” -Greg Schiano, Rutgers Football Head Coach (less poorly paraphrased)

On Saturday I had my best response from a crowd to date. I was so pumped with how well I paced myself and how many laughs I got that I spent the rest of the night drinking to the point where I couldn’t speak.

The next morning I reviewed the video. While it confirmed that I did great, I noticed a bunch of places where I could’ve done significantly better. I’ve heard top notch professional comics say that if you can get big laughs at 80% of your shows, you’re doing great. My long term goal is still 100% but 80% is the new road marker.

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Posting all my material

“Only post a small preview of your material online” seems to be the accepted truth about stand-up comedians website’s and how they should do their marketing and promotion. The thinking is, if all of your material is online, nobody is going to want to see your show. I disagree with this for a few reasons:

  • Videotaped performance is not a substitute to the live thing, it’s a compliment. Taped performances can also be turned into a souveneir for fans to take the performance home
  • For every person who might not see you live because they see your video (and I’m sure there’s a few, but they probably wouldn’t have come out anyway), you may get two new people to see you who wouldn’t have otherwise
  • It forces you to keep writing new material
  • If the purpose of your site is to get a person to come to one of your shows, then you don’t want to post the whole show online. If your purpose is to develop a relationship with fans, and maybe even lead a tribe, then you want to show your fans how you’re growing and improving, and leave room for their suggestions. (Just one example, the broadway musical Cats was so successful because there were people who’d seen the show ten, twenty and even sixty times. This in turn generates an additional buzz and awareness among people.)
  • Some of your fans may live far away or be unable to make shows live, the more they can see of you, the more likely they’ll want to come by when you’re live and in their area
  • Information (even humorous information) wants to be free

My philosophy, until proven otherwise, is to upload as much of my material and sets as possible.

Before anyone calls me a hypocrite, let me do it myself: I don’t post all my sets onto my homepage, I have 2-3 good videos there and post the rest of the videos to this blog, where I think the true fans will go. If someone is taking a 2 minute look at me before deciding to come out and see me, they don’t need to see the videos of me trying out new material and bombing.

Comments, especially those calling me crazy, are welcome 🙂

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Treat it like a job

After Sunday’s show, a few of us grabbed some drinks and started discussing how each of us goes about writing.

One comment which I can sympathize with was that writing is a “little guy talking to me”. This is what Steven Pressfield would call your “inner muse”. Basically, when you’re sitting (or standing) and writing (or coming up with material aloud), you feel as if it’s someone other than “you” that’s giving you the ideas.

Another interesting thing I learned about writing techniques was most comics there do the standard suggested technique of writing premises down, then coming up with punchlines, then cutting down on words and finding the funniest part. While one comic comes up with punchlines first, then writes the premises. I think I’ll try this method soon to see if it works for me.

The last thing that struck me about the conversation was how a few of the comics put in 2-3 hours a day writing. One said, “If you want to make it, you gotta treat this like a second job.”

Wanna try stand-up comedy yourself? Consider taking my NYC Comedy Class or booking a private one-on-one comedy coaching session (in person or via Zoom)

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