Comedy Rape?!?!

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on April 21st, 2005

We just stumbled across this, after receiving an email that’s making the rounds:

Important News To All Our Fellow Comedians

We have recently come across an e-mail that we refer to as Comedy Rape. It seems that a resort with tons of money and an agent using the “this is a great vacation trick ” is trying to get Professional Comedians to work for FREE. If this comes to pass other resorts will want to take advantage of this and the results as you know would be disastrous. This is the last straw!!!!

This is the opening salvo from a website that promises to rally all comedians for the purpose of starting a union and putting an end to such dastardly “tricks” as the one described above.

Turns out the domain name is owned by a comic who’s been in the business for two decades plus. Last time we ran into him, February 7 to be exact, we were working at a resort in the Poconos, that mini-Catskills about two hours north of Philadelphia. (Full disclosure: That gig in the Poconos paid pretty crappy money and often provided the comic with a 1-1/2 star room– but, hey, it was a Monday night, so I took it!)

At the time, he too was regularly working the Poconos, and he was soliciting press kits and videos from comics for, according to him, the purpose of starting a booking agency.

Now, he’s bought a domain name that hosts a website that trashes bookers, owners and agents and calls for a union.

“If you think that these clubs, agents and bookers are not talking to each other about ways to set prices, well guess again…Remember they are only in it for THE MONEY!!!”

To which we reply: Well, DUH!

The site itself is totally anonymous– no indication of who the man is behind the curtain. But, it’s always been easy to find out who owns what when it comes to domain names. The website goes on to promise more things like a forum and a signup and lots more exclamation points and allusions to rape!!!!! (Actually, we threw that last part in… forgive us, we got all caught up– it’s all those exclamation points!!!!!)

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