Blowback from our USAToday interview

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on April 3rd, 2005

It was late Monday afternoon when we got the phone call asking us to cobble together a list of “10 great places to sit down and watch stand-up.” We knew that we’d disappoint a lot of people. Lists, by their very nature, disappoint. It’s a list, limited to a tidy number (10 in this case). You can’t please everybody. Everybody knows that. Or do they?

Which clubs should we include? Which should we leave off? What if someone took offense at being left off? So many considerations.

And so many competing interests: We’re comics. We’re journalists (sort of). And we’re comedy fans. Ultimately, we abandoned the first two, because, after all, the article was for travelling Americans, who read USAToday, and it would appear in the newspaper’s Travel section. So we made an honest attempt to assemble a list that would blanket the country and reflect the diverse tastes of American standup comedy fans and consider their diverse habits. In the short time span that we had, we consulted some trusted comics and we decided on a solid list that gave the reporter from USAToday what she wanted.

Of course, we knew that somebody out there would be miffed. The article wasn’t circulating for an entire news cycle before we got an email from Matt Komen, talent coordinator for the Improv Comedy Clubs chain:

I was just sent the link from the article in USA Today and thought that not including any one of the 18 Improvs around the country might have been an April Fool’s joke…

Read the rest of our brief exchange. It’s a fascinating look into what happens when two comics risk the enmity of an entire business by playing ball with the MSM.

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