As the WGA nears the third month of the writers strike, one section of entertainment remains thriving amid the work stoppage: stand-up comedy.
Since stand-up — assuming it’s not being recorded for a special or other studio content — is not connected to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, it’s not restricted by the strike’s guild rules, and therefore has seen a surge of writers turning to the stage to either make money or scratch a creative itch. Regulars (and WGA members) like Nick Kroll, John Mulaney, Brett Goldstein, Fred Armisen and Sarah Silverman have all been doing gigs during the strike, as well as stars who less frequently do live shows like Quinta Brunson, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel and Ted Lasso‘s Phil Dunster. Many late-night TV writers also decided to pursue stand-up after their shows went dark starting on May 2.
Jimmy Kimmel Live! writer Jesse Joyce, who has been a comedian for 23 years but largely stopped doing stand-up once he began working on the show in 2017, is now back and booking shows across the U.S. for the last several weeks.
“This was literally just a strike thing where it was like, ‘Oh, I guess I have this skill I could dust off as the sole provider of income for my family to try to get back in there,'” Joyce tells The Hollywood Reporter, admitting it’s “super weird to have stand-up as your fall-back safety net.”
Joyce recently teamed up with fellow Kimmel writers Troy Walker and Devin Field for three nights in Denver, and has a show booked at Kimmel’s Vegas comedy club in September with five of the staff writers. (“He’s trying to help everybody,” Joyce says of Kimmel, noting he’s letting the writers use the Jimmy Kimmel Live! name which makes it easier for them to book gigs.) Some late night shows, like Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, covered their writers’ pay for the first two weeks of the strike — with Meyers and Fallon then covering a third week — but that compensation has now ended.
“One of the writers has an Etsy snow-globe-making business now, so everybody’s just cobbling together whatever they can. It’s just my skill set lies in stand-up and not snow globes, so that’s where I’m headed,” Joyce jokes, adding he also recently wrote a notable person’s graduation commencement speech for extra cash.
Matt Koff, a writer at The Daily Show since 2013, says he’s always had stand-up as his side hustle but has pivoted to it full-time during the strike, getting on stage four to five nights a week and booking road gigs, which typically pay more than nights in Los Angeles or New York. Nevertheless, it still doesn’t compare to his regular TV writing paycheck.
“I haven’t really talked to anyone who’s like, ‘I’m going to make just as much money doing stand-up as I did writing for a successful late night show.’ The sense I get is that, much like me, they’re on a quest for validation that maybe they’re not getting — validation they would normally get from their late night writing job. Making a joke in a room and getting a laugh can be a pretty good replacement for doing a good stand-up set, and vice versa,” Koff says. “I think a lot of people are sort of like me where they’re like, ‘I don’t really have any other skills and so I can either stay at home playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom or I could try and stay sharp with my joke writing.'”
He notes that stand-up also gives his life some schedule that the strike has taken away, adding, “As someone who often flounders when left to his own devices, one thing that I really like about writing for The Daily Show is it gives me a very rigid structure. And now I don’t have that, but stand-up, if I know I have to do a spot at 8 p.m. today, I’m like, OK, I know I need to put my pants on at 7 p.m.”
Koff and fellow writer Matt Goldich, of Late Night with Seth Meyers, started hosting a New York stand-up show called Pencils Down! in March as a space for TV writers trying out new jokes; it ended up becoming much more relevant in May, when “pencils down” became a rallying cry for the WGA.
“When we originally conceived it, we were like, well, it’s writers and we’re putting our pencils down to do stand-up. And then right when it seemed like the strike might happen — because we had a show scheduled for May 3 and the strike happened May 2 — Matt texted me, ‘I really hope we don’t go on strike, but if we do, I think it’s gonna be good for the show,'” recalls Goldich. “We’ve had a couple [of shows] and it’s a good way for people to support striking TV writers.”
Goldich is using the work stoppage to prepare for a set at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August, doing gigs around NYC as he says, “it’s nice to have another creative pursuit of something that is fulfilling and something that is challenging that I’m allowed to do… for me it’s not a paycheck, it’s a negative paycheck in some ways, but creatively it’s pretty exciting.”
Adds Felipe Torres Medina, a writer on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert who is focusing on a one-man comedy show about immigration during the strike, “I think it’s a little bit of a way to do jokes, do comedy, perform and get out there and do what we love. If it’s supplemental income, that’s great, and if it is income [at all] that’s great. But I think it’s more of, at least for me, it’s a love-of-the-game situation rather than a career pivot.”
Writers are also taking varying approaches to addressing the strike in their sets, with some saying they feel audiences are supportive and want them to touch on it, while others think it’s too inside-baseball to really get into on stage, especially when performing outside of New York or L.A.
For those writers who are more full-time comics, they’re also witnessing a change at the clubs; Rachel Feinstein, a comedian, actress and writer on Inside Amy Schumer, says she’s seeing, “People that have done comedy for a while, done stand-up, but they might not be doing it every night because they get busy with writing late night. Now they’re coming back to the clubs a little more, which is fun.” She adds that after the pandemic took a particular beating on the comedy scene, “I feel overall that stand-up is thriving.”
But some say stage time can be hard to come by right now, as Joyce notes he didn’t start reaching out to bookers until the strike started, since he didn’t want to cancel if an agreement was reached in time. “Then the strike happened and suddenly everybody’s like, ‘Ah shit, we need to start booking stand-up’ but like clubs have obviously been booked for months,” he says. “That’s kind of the catch-22 about stand-up for the strike is you had to have been on it months ago, but you couldn’t have because we were all hoping for the best and assuming this wouldn’t happen.”
Caleb Hearon, a comedian and writer on Netflix’s Human Resources, was working in the writers room of new Hulu series Standing By when the strike began but already had some tour dates booked through the summer.
“I’d been working on my hour in the spring and then we had had a couple conversations about if the strike comes through then it’s definitely going to be competitive. If you’re just now getting around to it, I can’t imagine getting a date somewhere that you want to for anything sooner than like December,” Hearon says of the current landscape. He adds that normally his team would be able to book Thursday and Fridays a few months out at popular venues, but now Mondays and Tuesdays are what’s left.
Hearon also says that there may be a misconception that writers who have never done stand-up can turn to it now for the first time, but it’s really only feasible for those who at least have a background in comedy. But, he joked, “I would go see the Grey’s Anatomy staff do a tight 10. That’d be awesome.”
The uncertainty of how long the strike will go also makes it hard to plan long tours, with Hearon booking only through September and then hoping he can get back to work on one of the four projects he has in development. Though, he adds, “I’m operating on pure rage at the studios and I’m happy to let this go on as long as it needs to until we get what we want.”
That sentiment is mirrored by many writers, even those who are able to stay financially afloat and maintain a creative outlet with stand-up. And as some WGA rules around press and project promotion amid the strike are blurred and executed differently by different people, comedians maintain stand-up isn’t a strike workaround.
“What we can’t do right now is write for television and movies because a handful of rich people are refusing to be reasonable. That’s the whole thing, but that doesn’t in any way prevent us from any myriad of other [things] like helping somebody write their website or writing commencement speeches or doing stand-up or writing greeting cards or whatever goofy thing we can do with the ability to write that we feel that doesn’t fall within the parameters of begging Netflix for scraps,” Joyce says. “I don’t feel in any way conflicted about it either because it’s like, stand-up is me being funny on stage. It’s a completely different animal.”
Adds Koff, “It’s good to be able to have a way to generate money and not have the studios get part of it, whether it’s like raking someone’s leaves or doing stand-up. It’s good to be able to do comedy and not have some CEO make money off of it.”
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June 29, 2023 at 10:30PM
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Striking Writers Return to Comedy Club Roots: “Super Weird to Have Stand-Up as Your Safety Net” - Hollywood Reporter
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