Old School Comedians Complain About The Internet

from the when-I-was-your-age-I-performed-to-3-people-in-a-shack-and-I-liked-it dept

Well, it seems bound to happen in just about any profession that has been impacted by the internet in some way. Eventually, the "older generation" is going to whine and complain about "the way things used to be." Apparently that's even true of stand up comedians. A bunch of stand up comedians are apparently worried about the internet's impact on young up-and-coming stand-ups, because (I kid you not), they're worried that the internet lets young standups have too big an audience. The reasoning is basically that it's better for young comics to fail in front of small audiences, learn their lesson and get better. Of course, what none of the complaining comics explain is why those "bad" young comics will have that big an audience in the first place if they're so bad. No one's going to watch them.

These same comics seem to ignore the flip side of the coin -- which is that a good young comedian can actually use the internet to amplify his or her comedic talents in order to get noticed and move on to bigger and better things. A great example of this would be Andy Samberg, who basically made a name for himself online, before being snapped up by Saturday Night Live. It certainly doesn't seem like there's any lack of young comedic talent these days compared to in the past, and it seems like the internet often creates a much better feedback loop for those young comics. But, of course, since it's "not the way we did it"(TM) it must be bad.

Filed Under: comedians, culture, internet, stand up comics