Last Comic Standing: Red envelope madness

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on June 7th, 2008

Houston auditioner Chris Voth, got what might be called a “provisional” red envelope when he auditioned this past February. He talks about his experience in a lengthy, must-read posting on his website’s blog.

Over the next several weeks, I had numerous conversations via email with producers from the show as details were being dispersed about the semi-finals in Las Vegas. We had to sign a lot of waivers and confidentiality agreements and confirm that we could block off a couple weeks in case we made it into the house, etc.

Less than a week before the semi’s, I got a call from a producer saying a decision was made and I was now being uninvited to the next round. They had overpicked comedians and now were calling some to tell them they were no longer on the show. In fact, they originally picked 46 comics (from all the audition cities), but only 30 were moving on.

Voth and 15 others were cat toys for the LCS producers. It seems a crappy thing to do to a comedian (a working comedian, anyway) to ask him/her to “block off a couple weeks” of the calendar so that dithering producers at the helm of a wildly profitable network reality show can build The Perfect Season.

Are we being unreasonable here? Might they not consider the several weeks between the audition and the eventual kiss-off a period of speculation, and pay the comedians as they would pay someone who is signed to a development retainer? We don’t think that’s too far off base. If you’re going to overstock the talent on your show by more than 50 per cent and ask the “extra talent” to put their livelihood on hold, should you not be obligated to compensate said talent?

What’s that you say? The chance to be on network television is golden– it is a small sacrifice to pay should those idle weeks eventually lead to a shot on NBC. Spoken like a true network executive.

Sure, they signed the release. They knew what they were getting into. We suppose that what we’re saying, now that we know how they overbooked the show, is that they have some sort of obligation to obviate such a gut-wrenching decision on the part of the talent.

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