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1. Timmy Mac says:

   July 7, 2006 at 10:25 am

   Personally, I think standup having evolved into little more than a farm system for sitcoms has been bad for sitcoms AND for standup.

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2. Tim Wilkins says:

   July 7, 2006 at 1:25 pm

   Not to mention that a lot of great stand ups with great ideas get them ruined by studio execs. Watered down, dumbed down content is what seems to be helping the death.

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3. Brian McKim & Traci Skene says:

   July 7, 2006 at 7:18 pm

   We take issue with the notion that standup has become “little more than a farm system for sitcoms.” While we will allow that standup has formed a closer bond with Hollywood in the past 20 years, the net effect on standup in general has been negligible.As for the farm system damaging sitcoms, where would you prefer that TV get its sitcom stars? They recruit pop singers, broadway stars, actors from the movies, chefs (Remember <>Emeril<>?), “fresh young faces” from acting classes, familiar faces from commercials, sports stars– the results are unevern as always. But each method of finding the next big sitcom star is touted as the best.For the first 20 or 25 years, TV recruited its comedy stars from Vaudeville. George Burns, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Milton Berle and Bob Hope dominated the medium. (Technically, Skelton, Berle and Hope didn’t do sitcoms, but, had the sitcom been as dominant then as it had in the second 25 years, they would certainly have.) These guys were, basically, comedians. America loved them and their sitcoms are regarded highly to this day.MASH, All In The Family, Mary Tyler Moore, considered to be among the top three sitcoms of all time, had no comics at the top. Seinfeld, Roseanne, Garry Shandling’s Show, The Larry Sanders Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm– all are in someone’s top ten or twenty of all time and all were headed up by comics.Grace Under Fire, King of Queens, Everybody Loves Raymond, Home Improvement, while not heralded as art, were all wildly successful and made tons of money for all associated with them. Their stars, while not master thespians, acquitted themselves as well, if not better than many other sitcoms stars and all had a certain likeability, timing and star quality that comes with being a standup comic.The entertainment biz is not a zero sum game. If Brian Regan wants to eschew the sitcom for live performance, he can… and we are all better off for his concentration on live standup. If another Regan comes along, he can do the same, regardless of whether the suits have turned most Hollywood standup stages into a cavalcade of high-energy, theatrical, automatons with drop-dead good looks. (Disclaimer: This does not represent our feelings exactly about what is going on in L.A., but it no doubt captures the feelings of many when they discuss the tension between pure standup and the interests of commerce, spe

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4. pg says:

   July 7, 2006 at 11:31 pm

   It is so difficult to draw accurate parallels between trends in UK television and what happens in the US. Harder still when we here in the US only get shown the best that the UK has to offer (either through PBS or BBC America.) Triple-y hard when the US didn’t go through the radical explosion of “alternative comedy” the way that the UK did in the late 70’s early 80’s.But whether it is “Absolutely Fabulous” or “Blackadder” or “Father Ted” or “The Office” or “I’m Alan Partridge”–it seems like some quality shows have come from the UK since “The Young Ones” aired…I think, if there is a degredation in quality since the era of “Dad’s Army” “Rising Damp” and “Yes, Minister”–it might simply be that there are many more channels vying for public attention in the UK than there were then…spreading the talent base thinner that it had been before.But again, I live in Seattle…what would I know about UK tv?pg

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5. Timmy Mac says:

   July 8, 2006 at 1:14 pm

   I’m not saying that no standups should ever be cast in sitcoms, nor am I saying that sitcoms are necessarily better or worse than standup as an art form.What I AM saying is that the notion that a comic should be doing comedy IN ORDER TO get a sitcom someday, and that one’s act should be crafted in such a way that TV execs can easily build a sitcom around it has watered standup down horribly.If a comic also happens to be a good actor, great. If someone’s act would also make a good basis for a TV, super. But well-done standup should be the goal in and of itself. Standup can be much more than a source of crappy shows about dysfunctional families, but there are those who think its only purpose is to provide fodder for TV, and that’s selling the artform short.To say nothing of the BAD sitcoms that have been created from boring standups who couldn’t act their way out of a paper bag.That’s why I think the “standup as sitcom farm system” arrangement is bad for everyone.

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6. Brian McKim & Traci Skene says:

   July 8, 2006 at 6:30 pm

   Timmy Mac writes:“What I AM saying is that the notion that a comic should be doing comedy IN ORDER TO get a sitcom someday, and that one’s act should be crafted in such a way that TV execs can easily build a sitcom around it has watered standup down horribly.”We sorta agree…but what you describe is an individual motivation for doing standup. We depart when you say that this individual motivation hurts standup in general or hurts my standup or your standup.There are as many different approaches to standup as there are comedians. And there are as many different motivations as well. And it doesn’t necessarily follow that a comic who crafts his act for eventually shoehorning into a series is going to create an act that is somehow less than artful or less than honest. And it isn’t necessarily true that producers haven’t attempted to take an act that is truly good, well-crafted and artful and tried to somehow build a series around it.Our disagreement probably comes down to whether or not we believe that there is a cause-and-effect here. Does the existence of the television (the ever-present dangling of sick money that is associated with a sitcom) directly and definitively “ruin” standup comedy or “water it down.” When you say that someone, a comic, is “selling the artform short,” We might counter that <>he<> (the individual artist) is selling himself short, but that the artform itself is none the worse for his actions. (To put it another way, we suppose that the artist and the artform exist independently and it’s a big standup world out there.)What say you, Timmy Mac?

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7. Timmy Mac says:

   July 11, 2006 at 10:58 am

   I think what you say makes sense on paper and is a solid piece of philosophic thinking, but when you go to certain industry-centric cities and see one “sitcommy” standup after another, and when you have one “but how can we make this a sitcom” conversation after another, you realize that when the rubber meets the road, either a lot of individual comics had the same idea, or there IS some sort of causality there.

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