Comedians As Union Members...

When I was still in college, I wrote a paper about the comedian as a product.

I felt it was a pretty good paper, and tried to address some of the distinctions between showcase comics and road comics. This was a gross oversimplification, but it was a device sufficient to move the paper along.

Today, there was an article in the New York Times that discussed the efforts of some comedians, 300 or so to be more specific, to form a coalition, or union to force the club owners in New York to pay the comedians more money. In a city like New York comedians do not typically have week long engagements, but rather will do sets at a variety of clubs, and will be paid a comparatively small amount of money per set.

The whole article is interesting in my view, and I encourage you to go read it.

I'd love it if we could do a better job of coordinating the efforts of local comedians. I don't see a reason why we couldn't be featuring the work of our good local comics in those more abbreviated sets on a more frequent basis. We've started working on this, and you'll likely see the results of our efforts during 2005.

Then, when we've created a comedy community large enough, then some subset of that community to come forward for a greater amount of pay - but first things first.....