"If you're smart, you can get out of this alive."

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on July 20th, 2009

So says Festival Just For Laughs boss Bruce Hills. It’s the kind of quote that reporters just love!

It’s the capper on a Montreal Gazette story by Jeff Heinrich about how the recession is affecting standup. (The Fest is kicking into high gear this week, so the Gazette is turning its attention toward comedy.)

Louie Anderson is in town to do a couple nights of Bubbling With Laughter and a gala. This passage gave us pause:

In the U.S., stand-up has had some trouble. To draw the recession-weary crowds, Las Vegas hotels and nightclubs like the Excalibur, where Anderson plays 40 weeks of the year, have cut room and ticket prices in half and now even offer free tickets for local residents– something unheard of before.

“As soon as the recession hit, all of show business – in the sense of live shows – took a dip,” Anderson said. Attendance for his shows dropped 10 per cent, so the promoter brought the ticket price down to $40 from $79 before the recession.

In order to make up for a ten per cent drop in attendance, you cut prices by fifty per cent? That sounds… un-mathematically sound.

From Hills:

“If a tour or a show is overpriced, you’re dead in the water… But if your price point is right, if the artist is great, you’re not hurt at all. That’s what I’m hearing from most promoters. If you’re a mediocre draw and you’re putting on a mediocre show, you’re dead– there’s no patience for that anymore.

Hills also says that standup is doing very well in Canada. And Heinrich reports that the entertainment biz (and, we assume, standup) is also doing well in England.

In the U.S., though, Louie Anderson was seeing a ten per cent falloff, selling tickets at $79 a pop.

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