In November of 2001, I found myself standing in front of at least fifty Alfred State College students who were attending my comedy show. After the President of the college, Bill Rezak, decided not to participate in the imaginary goat auction, I had to fill time before the band was ready to perform. I started on this riff about college life at Alfred. Which, to be honest, is like making fun of someone with irritable bowl syndrome if you like to make fart jokes.
During this impromptu stand-up routine, I was thinking that college comedians must have it made. I’ve promoted a lot of events at college campuses and other entertainment venues, and comedians, especially at college campuses, always draw a solid crowd. I think it is because we as students need the relief after all the bullshit we have to put up with. And since the entertainment industry doesn’t seem to get why we’re tuning the traditional media out, our entertainment options are usually limited to the bar, the local movie theater, and comedians.
So here we have comedians with a built in audience and plenty of college related material to work with. What could go wrong? Apparently everything. Since everything is way too broad a subject to take on, I have three theories about why most of the comedians on the college circuit blow.
1) The students who book comedians consistently flunk personality tests. Maybe campuses get bad comedians because selfish people do their booking. Some organizations that use your campus activity money often have no oversight and book what they want, not what you want.
This theory gets some momentum when you consider some of these dopey bastards usually spend your campus activity money on an annual visit to NACA (the National Association Of College Activities.) NACA, as a grizzled veteran of student booking once told me, used to be a place where “evil promoters” offered students cocaine in hotel rooms in exchange for booking the act they represented.
I can’t tell you if that was true or not, but I know conventions where you have to go and put something together are often cluster fucks that end in poor results. Most of the students I’ve met who attend these conventions skim through the acts and just pick what they wanted to see, not what the students wanted to see.
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Article comments
1 - alesssandro nicolo
Interesting. Nothing worse than being in the audience while a comedian bombs. PC Nazi's don't help as you pointed out.
2 - James Uloth
Hey I do comedy at colleges, maybe I suck.
Lots of things can make a show go wrong, the over all setup of the room can have a big effect. Many stags in colleges are more for bands or public speaking and give a big warehouse feel as opposed to a tight creepy attic feel that goes good for comedy.
There is also an abundance of shitty comics working, that could be a factor also and maybe more likely.
Stand up comedy is going through a revolution, I compare it to the X games. It use to be awesome in the bmx best trick when they would do a no handed landing, now they do a back flip 360 and land with no hands. Same thing is happening to stand up, its a "comedy revolution"
get on board with the revolution,
James Uloth
3 - Jamison Yoder
Nice post. While I agree that the comedy market has become saturated by a lot of comics that aren't quite ready to make the jump to performing for paying gig (thanks in large part to sites like MySpace and Youtube on which anyone can promote themselves without having been vetted); I do take issue with the idea that there NO good college comics out there. Here are some great ones.
4 - C Willi Myles
As I ran across this blog, I thought to myself that comedy is a lot like meeting someone for the first time, if you don't practice good etiquette it can go pretty bad and you you wind up saying things that are in inappropriate. While I agree with some of your theories, the most important thing for both the comedians and the colleges is to find the right fit and if you don't do the leg work then you get what you get. I have performed over 500 colleges shows in my career and have been rebooked over and over again at the same college because of the shows I do are non offensive. You can be funny without being dirty, inappropriate and disrespectful. What you say is very true in regards to college giving comics do's & don't on stage!! I just made my 3rd appearance in 3 years at UND for the simply reason they had a bad experience and don't want to go through it again, however, I know that there are plenty on entertainers out there that have the right stuff to step onto any campus and be sucessful. They just have to do the leg work to find us, we are out here!!