Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, and I’m assuming many other talk show hosts crowdsource some of their material. Fallon does Hashtags, Kimmel does his YouTube challenges. Before them, Jay Leno crowdsourced his weird headlines bit, which I assume Carson did before him, and so on.
Is there a certain performer who began the practice of crowdsourcing some of his material? Or was this part of TV (at least, talk shows) from the beginning? Does it even go back to radio?
Similarly, every talk show (that I’m aware of), and every scripted show filmed in front of a studio audience (that I’m aware of), has a stand-up comedian/emcee warm up the crowd before the cameras start rolling. Is there a certain show that one can say with certainty began that tradition? Or has it always been done as long as there has been TV?
Dave Garroway on the original Today Show used to read letters from viewers, and I imagine he got that shtick from radio (although radio is before my time). Does that count as crowd-sourcing? I don’t think the letters were solicited on particular topics, just random stuff from viewers.
When Steve Allen hosted the Tonight show in the 1950s he read newspaper letters to the editor in an appropriate voice (angry, sympathetic, etc.) I’m sure he wasn’t the first.
Having someone warm up the audience goes back to the days of live radio. Here’s an article from 1934 that discusses it. Rudy Vallee, who pretty much invented the variety show format, used comedians from the show to warm up his audiences. It wasn’t always comedians, though. Sometimes comedy shows would use a singer.
Crowdsourcing goes waaaaay back. I’m currently reading G.K. Chesterton’s Heretics, and in one chapter his critiquing “modern journalism” (“modern” being early 20th-century England) he mentions a particular newspaper editor making his paper more successful by being very controversial, prompting a crapton of angry letters. Chesterton put it, “… [he] discovered that, if you make people angry enough, they will write half of your newspaper for you, for free.”