8 Great Reasons Why Every Comedian Should Bend Over Backwards To Fill The House
This post may make you rethink how you're doing comedy altogether
FYI! Catch me live in NYC tonight at Union Hall with Jena Friedman.
Last week, I gave a talk (is that how the kids say it?) about how to fill the house at any comedy show (or event, party, show, performance, yard sale, whatever!) that you ever put together.
The talk was a lot of fun to put together. My mom showed up, some friends and subscribers (friends to be?) popped in, and I even walked away with some cool insights at the end of it all.
If you are a subscriber, you can watch (or listen to) the playback video here.
Today, I’m also sharing a segment of the talk featuring 8 great reasons WHY comedians should want to work very hard to fill the room for every comedy show that we perform in, whether we produce it or just show up and do a spot somewhere. I’ve edited it for clarity and removed a shit ton of “ums.”
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So, why do we want to fill a comedy room? There are obvious reasons, and a lot of people are like, I don't want to be a publicist, I don't want to do PR, I don't want to fill the room, I'm a comedian. I want to tell my jokes, why do I have to do this work? And it sucks that you have to do this work, and honestly, you don't have to do it. You can pay someone else to do it. Good luck finding someone who you can trust and who will be affordable and who will take your direction and who will do it the way that you want them to do it, because it's really, really hard, especially at an independent comedian's level, to hire a publicist who's going to really nail it. I have interviewed a lot of publicists over the years the average price that I have found for publicists ranges from, I found one publicist who'll do $125 a show, but I don't know how legit that is, honestly. Then I've found people who will do it for a thousand or more a month, like, 250 to 350 a week and they do a retainer situation like lawyers do, I don't get it, but whatever.
So, here are the eight reasons that I have put together why I think it's really important to fill a comedy room.
First of all, the industry is watching.
They're watching everything we do. You may not think that they are, and they may not be constantly actually looking at “you,” but they're watching the comedy industry and they’re paying attention; they're looking for people who are making noise, rising to the top. They're listening for names because they make money off of us, it's really important to remember that. We are their bread and butter. We're making them money, it's not the other way around, it really is not. They are they are dependent on us to survive. They are our little critters who ride our backs and eat our snacks off of our fur. Some of them are very nice though—nice uh fur eaters.
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