Comedy Central: "We try to own everything."
There's a remarkable piece in the Wall Street Journal today about the growing diversification of Comedy Central. The channel (owned by MTV Networks / Viacom) has expanded from simply being a cable channel to being a record company, non-traditional media content provider, and tour manager.
In a way, it's good news: the power of Viacom is getting behind comedy. It's also bad news, however, as Comedy Central extends it's hegemony in the comedy (and particularly standup comedy) media world.
It's clear that channel boss Doug Herzog's goal is to make CC the go-to brand for comedy entertainment. As he says in the article, "A guy can tell a joke Sunday night at the comedy club, and we can deliver it to our audience in six different ways the next day."
What Comedy Central is offering here is "a brand and a platform." One of the central problems in the standup business is this: most people like good comedy, but they aren't familiar with the talent the way they might be with a band or a TV star. Getting familiar with a comic usually means seeing their act -- and once you've seen it, well, you've seen it already. So why go see them?
So the brand platform (not to be confused with the brand and platform) becomes important -- if people trust the club they're going to, or "Comedy Central Presents," or "Blue Collar Comedy" or whatever, then they can go see something (or buy something) without seeing it first free and ruining the joke.
But it worries me nonetheless... mostly because there's not another brand to compete.
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In a way, it's good news: the power of Viacom is getting behind comedy. It's also bad news, however, as Comedy Central extends it's hegemony in the comedy (and particularly standup comedy) media world.
It's clear that channel boss Doug Herzog's goal is to make CC the go-to brand for comedy entertainment. As he says in the article, "A guy can tell a joke Sunday night at the comedy club, and we can deliver it to our audience in six different ways the next day."
What Comedy Central is offering here is "a brand and a platform." One of the central problems in the standup business is this: most people like good comedy, but they aren't familiar with the talent the way they might be with a band or a TV star. Getting familiar with a comic usually means seeing their act -- and once you've seen it, well, you've seen it already. So why go see them?
So the brand platform (not to be confused with the brand and platform) becomes important -- if people trust the club they're going to, or "Comedy Central Presents," or "Blue Collar Comedy" or whatever, then they can go see something (or buy something) without seeing it first free and ruining the joke.
But it worries me nonetheless... mostly because there's not another brand to compete.
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posted by Jesse Thorn at Monday, May 08, 2006
3 Comments:
If what you're saying happens, and I suppose it might already be happening, it might force comedians to have more new material. That could be a good thing, but my understanding is most comics perfect their acts for their specials, so we might get mediocre specials because of the overabundance of specials. I don't know; is that already happening? Is this sort of thing causing comics to update their material more often?
Ultimately, developing standup comedy material is incredibly difficult. It often takes two or three years for a standup to get a solid 15 minutes.
Even the best standups can only develop a solid forty five minutes to an hour (which is a headlining set, or a special) every year or two at most. Even a super-prolific comic like Patton Oswalt still has like two years between specials.
The main reason is that standup comedy is so DENSE. There isn't really any other form where the laughs come so closely packed -- if you're not getting a laugh every ten seconds or so, you're out on your butt.
What I'm worried about, honestly, is comics getting screwed.ix
This kind of thing scares me. It really narrows the options for exposure that up and comers have, no matter what kind of comedy they do. There's going to be so many people who are tube-fed there comedy through comedy central. I've seen a lot of amazing comics who've never been on comedy central, and a lot of horrible ones who have. It seems like unless you've got a comedy central credit, you'll be doing open mics forever.
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