If it’s any consolation to anyone, this issue is awfully old. A long, long time ago the guys who hung around on open mike night, ready to eat a rat for five minutes onstage at the Punch Line, were engrossed in the same question. I think it’s very odd that many of the names being discussed (Poundstone, Boosler, Ladman, Rudner, Sykes, DeGeneres, Ford, Leifer, Madigan, Butler) have been around for going on twenty years, and a few (Tomlin, Goldberg) for a lot more. Somebody’s paying the cover charge and for two watery cocktails.
I’ll offer a couple of observations, with the caveat that I haven’t spoken into a microphone in over a decade, and never had better than a middle act’s view of things.
One: A better question might be, “Why aren’t more comedians any good at what they do?” Years after the comedy club boom of the mid-to-late 1980s went bang, and the proliferation of cable-TV venues leveled off, there’s still an astonishingly high percentage of bad comedy. In my opinion, the reasons for this are (a) It’s just plain hard to do. Many people have no grasp of the distance between the funniest guy they know and the guy who can hold the attention of a room full of drunks for twenty minutes, and make them laugh; (b) there’s a huge amount of turnover among comedians, so there are always lots of practitioners who haven’t developed much stagecraft or material, and most of them will quit before they do; © there’s very little rigor or discipline imposed that might create an actual profession out of comedy (how many jobs requiring memory, timing and articulation are so fraught with drug and alcohol use, among both practicioners and those who judge the performance?) – nobody teaches this stuff, and the Learning Annex doesn’t count. The bottom line is, audiences stand for a lot of bad comedy while they’re waiting for the good stuff, club owners tolerate whatever the audience will, and young comedians will never know the difference until they see a really good set – if they’re paying attention.
Two: A related question might be, "Are female comedians somehow better equipped to survive the process? Without addressing the question of talent, I think there’s evidence for this. Remember how so many of the names we’re discussing go back a while? Back when it was thought that every city could support four or five comedy clubs, and comedians were a hot commodity, the “talent” was almost 100% male and not that great. You had a bunch of guys doing Jay Leno’s routine, a bunch of guys doing Robert Schimmel’s routine, a bunch of guys doing Richard Pryor’s routine and a few hip guys doing Steven Wright’s routine. Not much originality, not much variety, not, frankly, much funny. Hiring women was an attempt to relieve the awful monotony on stage, both in appearance and in content. And it was an improvement. Some women who showed some chops might have moved up the ladder from M.C. to headliner a little faster, and that could have kept the better ones from quitting at the same rate similarly-received male acts did. Many of the women in the business whom I knew also had far fewer hang-ups about asking for and taking advice, and the men tended to be much more likely to be helpful to women than to men. The women also tended to be somewhat more likely to treat the job as a job, rather than as this amazingly cool way to have fun and make money and sometimes even get laid. Club owners love it when they hire you and you show up on time and sober. At one time or another, I opened for about a half-dozen of the women named so far. They were all very smart, extremely driven, except for a couple instances pretty much sober, and usually much funnier offstage than on. I thought I saw a caution in many of them that kept them from taking a lot of chances on stage, which may have made their material expand at a slower rate: there seemed to be a much greater fear of bombing. One kept detailed notes of every performance and did a show in a club once that was almost word for word identical to a show she gave in the same club a year earlier. I asked her about it, and she said, “So?” Good answer. She’s still a headliner, and I’m long gone.
