"99 % of comedians terrible"

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on May 23rd, 2008

There are other websites out there, on the internet, who employ regular citizens to hold forth on various subjects. They take the scribblings of these folks (who are not necessarily experts on their chosen subjects) and build websites– “fan sites” or “fan communities”– and, in some cases, they sell the site to giant corporations for millions of dollars (all the while failing to compensate the contributors). One such site featured a recap of Thursday night’s LCS premiere, which began like this:

Stand-up comedy is unfathomably difficult. I know this because about 99 % of all stand-up comedians are terrible. I laugh easily, and it’s hard to find a theatrical comedy that I won’t squeeze at least a few chuckles out of, but watching stand-up comedy, for me, is often painful.

This particular site gets about a million unique visitors per month, and this article is merely one among many. So it’s not like this opinion will reach all that many readers. But, it’s still rather unsettling when someone burbles out such a dumb and wicked opinion in such a matter-of-fact way.