Why Comedians Are Over Late-Night
The network shows were once the main way forward in a comedy career. With their collapse, comics are finding other avenues.
In 1996, a young and obscure comedian named Ray Romano made his late-night debut on The Late Show with David Letterman. The set was instrumental in his career. It established his relationship with CBS and led to his own sitcom later that year. This was an era when late-night could determine what everybody loved.
Times have changed. The power of late-night talk shows — which for generations served as perhaps the most promising pathway for comedians looking for their big break — has so eroded that many standup comics now eschew late-night platforms in favor of new avenues for bringing their material to the public.
And thank God that they do. Most late-night shows are now crummy fluff: non-threatening, milquetoast, mass-market imitations of what comedy can be.
There are lots of reasons for the shift away from late-night as a guiding force of the comedy world. For starters, the shows have a fraction of the audience that they once did. According to recent figures, the current late-night leader, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, garners an average of 3.82 million viewers per episode. The once-mighty Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon averages just 2.44 million. For some context, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson averaged 6.5 million viewers per year in 1992, its last year on the air before Jay Leno assumed hosting duties, in an America that had some 50-plus million fewer people than it does today.
That decline in viewership probably has something to do with the breadth of options available to today’s oversaturated comedy consumers. “There weren’t as many venues to do late night standup in the eighties,” says Nick Griffin, a legendary New York City-based standup comedian who has made around 20 late-night appearances. “Growing up I probably saw two or three sets per month on TV. It was thrilling every time I saw someone on Letterman, Carson. Now you can watch comedy all day and never see the same person twice.”
Yet while late-night TV may have lost much of its luster, that’s not to say that comedians have written it off entirely. It’s still great exposure in a business built on celebrity as well as talent. And the opportunity holds appeal for comedians whose line of work offers few chances for glory or to be treated with deference.
“From the moment you walk in the building they kiss your ass,” Griffin says. “Someone is taking care of your car, your clothing, your food, your shoes. It feels like real show business. Comics for the most part don’t live that life. So it’s nice to get it once and again. Then three days later you’re in Topeka eating a chicken sandwich after driving eight hours to a gig for nine people.”
But overall, late-night has gone from being the launching pad for comedy careers to being, at most, one among many avenues for aspiring star comics. They yield diminishing returns. Standup sets are typically placed at the worst slot of the show, following the final commercial break. And that’s often without the benefit of the host even being present: Stephen Colbert, for example, is usually not in the room during comics’ performances, which are pre-recorded in back-to-back sets on a different date and slotted into the show when necessary.
The networks’ prurient strictures also run against what comedians want. Comics often have to curtail their sets to suit the censorship demands of the networks. While this is not new —the censorship today is markedly more lax than what was imposed on the late-night comics of yesteryear — it means that comics must find ways around the networks to bring their unmediated work directly to the audience.
So, they do. These days those avenues are most notably provided by social media. Sites and apps like Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube allow comics to post their own material and connect with audiences in ways that few comedians ever previously could, with no network censors pulling out the edgy stuff.
“There are more places [now] where people are watching content,” says Andrew Schulz, a rising star whose social media-centric approach has garnered tens — if not hundreds — of millions of views on his various social media channels. “The most viewed platform in the world is no longer TV, it’s YouTube. And guess what? There’s no executive at YouTube saying you’re not the right fit for their network. You post your shit and let the people decide.”
Aside from social media platforms, there has been perhaps no greater disruptive force in comedy — and entertainment in general — than podcasting. Recent data indicates that there are currently over 700,000 active podcasts, with 165 million Americans reportedly having listened to at least one podcast episode. Trailblazing comedians like Joe Rogan and Marc Maron launched wildly successful podcasts of their own, delivering unfiltered content to the masses without adhering to the antiquated and prissy standards of the late-night comedy circuit.
“[Late-night shows] aren’t plucking talented rebels out of clubs anymore. You are emailing people your club-crafted seven minutes so that they can shave it down to a TV-approved five,” says comedian Corinne Fisher, co-host of the podcast Guys We Fucked, which reportedly boasts an audience of a quarter-million weekly listeners and over a million monthly listens.
That emphasis on standards and practices is all too real. The typical Tonight Show monologue has about as much edginess as an early-bird special at a Saratoga Applebee’s. And why wouldn’t it? With self-deputized internet narcs on the prowl looking to nail anyone for anything deemed cancel-able according to some moral standard conjured up on the spot, the last thing networks usually want is comedic material that challenges audiences’ sensibilities.
“YouTube, Instagram, and podcasting allow those same comedians to say whatever the fuck we want without standards and practices butting in,” Fisher continues. “So why would we let the suits censor us and get paid when we could put out our own stuff uncensored and make money?”
Late-night once meant opportunity in comedy. In today’s world, it mostly just means constraint.
