Modified On September 19, 2009
Back on August 26, we put up a post titled Tap Into A Delicious Vein Of Importantness, which trashed the kooky machinations of one Steve Roye, comedian and entreprenuer. A taste:
He is the developer of that most odious bit of pseudoscience called the PAR Score (PAR standing for Positive Audience Response). It was some sort of software that would calculate a comedian’s ratio of yapping to clapping and come up with a sturdy number that club owners could use to determine who comes back and who doesn’t.
Roye was also agitated about a reality television show concept the he has supposedly registered with the WGA in which a comedy competition is scored using his patented PAR method.
In addition to the PAR software, Roye also offers an over-hyped, over-priced online standup comedy course.
Three days or so after we posted about it, Roye posted a reply on his site titled, “Whacked By Comedian Brian McKim At Shecky Magazine” in which he thanked us for driving traffic to his enterprise (along with “a drastic increase in sales”!!). He then insulted The Male Half (and insinuated that he had a low PAR Score! The horror!)
I feel compelled to respond to comedian Brian McKim’s scathing article about me on his stand-up comedy blog called Shecky Magazine concerning my software and reality TV show concept involving comedians.
Brian– well done! I am more than familiar with “controversy” marketing. Trying to ride my stand-up comedy coattails to promote your blog or whatever is NOT a new concept.
First of all, this sexist douchebag doesn’t understand that the magazine and all its content is generated by Brian McKim and Traci Skene. It says so right at the top. And there’s a picture of the two of us. It’s been that way for ten years. Ten years! We grow weary of reminding people of this fact.
Secondly, Roye errs when he says the following:
And I simply cannot deny the traffic you have sent to my blog from yours. Heck, I sure couldn’t get that kind of attention if I requested it (not that I ever would). Thank you very much!
In point of fact, Roye descended on us back about 2000 or 2001… or maybe it was 2003? Who knows for sure, the point is that Roye sought our assistance in promoting his online standup course. He volunteered to send us a password and he promised to forego the exorbitant course fee. We sniffed around on the site for bit, but didn’t really feel comfortable recommending the course to our readers. At the time we had a policy of not doing “How-to” articles, so endorsing such a course was contrary to our editorial policy. To this day, we prefer to focus on exprienced comedians doing interesting things in and around standup comedy. We’ve never been the go-to for how-to, leaving that to other websites.
And although we can’t find it in our archives (and least not the searchable archives), we seem to recall trashing the concept of the PAR Score software way back when it was first unleashed on an unsuspecting public. We were alarmed when we learned of it. We warned of the disastrous consequences should such a nauseating concept gain any traction among comics or club owners. We recall branding it as one of the worst ideas we’d ever heard. (And, until last month, we were pleased that the notion had been languishing in well-deserved obscurity. Of course, we could be wrong… it might be wildly popular on the Indian subcontinent or among club bookers in Greenland or with agents and managers in Luxembourg. So far, though, North America seems blessedly free of the cancer that is the Par Score.)
We’d like to thank “The Monk” for hipping us to Roye’s rant. (Curiously, three weeks passed before we even heard about Roye’s blathering. If our posting drove so much traffic to him, why did it take three weeks for someone to alert us to his ridiculous maundering? It shall forever remain a mystery.)