Comedy Festival on late Sunday TV

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on December 28th, 2004

There’s nothing worse than hearing, just minutes before you’re heading to bed, “Coming up next after Action News, ‘Comedy Festival.’ ” Aaaarrgggh! Now we gotta stay up and investigate!

We were watching Cap Cities’ Philadelphia affiliate, WPVI Channel 6. Turns out ABC 7 up in New York videotaped all the goings on at last month’s New York Comedy Festival and, we speculated, all local ABC affiliates were offered a package of highlights– theirs to air at such inauspicious times as Sunday night after the 11 o’clock news.

It was a good thing that an hour-long special about standup comedy was being sprayed throughout the country (we assume that it was carried in other cities besides just New York and Philly), but, overall, it wasn’t a great ad for live standup comedy! As we watched, it slowly dawned on us how unfunny it was! And it wasn’t immediately clear why.

Unfortunate, really. We were thrilled that there was an hour-long special on standup. But, rather than seeming like a celebration of a gathering of comics in one of the comedy capitals of the world, it seemed to be more like a paid advertisement for the NYC Convention and Visitors Bureau. It was inexplicable– all or most of the people on it were people we’ve seen live in the past who have been funny and capable and professional. And the lineup– the high-profile lineup that they used to sell the whole shebang in the first place Steven Wright (whose name they spelled wrong on the chyron!), Drew Carey, Denis Leary, Roseanne Barr, Mo’Nique– should have made for a dazzling special. But something– the editing? the conditions they were performing under? the sound? Some thing (or combination of things) contributed to a special about comedy that was… oddly unspecial and uncomfortably unfunny.

It seemed more like an awkward cross between a documentary and an infomercial. Of course, because we’re editing a magazine about standup, we’re up to our eyeballs in standup comedy– we’re jaded. Maybe, to the untrained eyeball, it was a dazzling and appealing peek into the world of standup comedy, particularly the world of New York City standup comedy. But we’ve seen this kind of thing done with much more verve and much more of an appreciation for standup done before. On Canadian television, for instance, in connection with the Just For Laughs Festival.

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