How To Promote Stage Comedy In a Geeky Way? 123
shaitand writes "I recently went to a renaissance festival where a man (Arthur Greenleaf Holmes) performed some of the most obscene NSFW and hilarious comedy I've seen in a long while. The show was free and he had CDs and DVDs in his bag and accepted donations. I certainly gave one. But why is this guy doing niche fairs and not HBO specials? I contacted him and he said that he would love to break out and because of his costume he has trouble and the nature of his act he has trouble getting on to traditional stages. How would you promote such an act? On further conversation he said he is an avid supporter of free flow of information and strongly encourages pirating his work far and wide. Since he is primarily interested in making money with live performance and not media sales I thought if he took this to the next level and released a DVD under a creative commons license the exposure and interest generated might help him break into new forums with his act?"
Re:Answer (Score:4, Interesting)
HBO is the wrong place to start. All the comics there have some reputation from the clubs before they get on HBO. If he wants to move beyond RenFair performer, he should be trying to get his DVD in the hands of anyone who headlines their own comedy club shows. If one of them finds him funny, he might get a gig opening for someone with a bit more name recognition. The pay will be almost nil, but that's how people build their reputation to the point where HBO will pay any attention. Even then it's a bit of a long shot...the opening act from the show I saw this past Friday had already been on HBO.
Another option to explore...contact Netflix and offer the DVD royalty free for a year or so. If they accept it, urge anyone and everyone you meet to 5-star it in the hopes that it starts showing up as a suggestion to a wider audience.
But I wonder if his stuff isn't really that funny outside of the RenFair setting. In the context of a RenFair, that would be pretty funny because he's injecting humor into the scene that everyone is participating in. But outside of a RenFair setting, where people wear normal clothes and speak in their normal way, the humor won't play as well.
Re:Answer (Score:4, Interesting)
Quite seriously, read some of his material. 99%, I'm certain, kids won't understand.
I think the main reason that he isn't on HBO is simply that 99% of the adults wouldn't either.
Art, Trade, & Craft -or- Pay, Fame, & Sati (Score:3, Interesting)
Hi! I'm Matt "Breakpoint" Heck. You may know me as "Theodore" from the web series "Aperture R&D" (in which case I assume that's the point in the credits at which YouTube had to pause to re-buffer). Presuming nothing falls victim to arson during post-production, In a little under a year, you might see me in a film and a few other odd detours. If you lived on the Central Coast around, oh, 2001-2003, you might know me for doing stand-up comedy. If you've been to Burning Man over the last few years, you might have seen a 15,000 cubic foot helium airship I helped stick 200 feet over the Nevada desert with a Tesla coil concert under it. It's even VAGUELY possible you know me from my (cough) "music" with The Braindead Monkeys, featuring such classic tracks, god help me, as, "Terrorism!". And, if you clicked on the wrong link somewhere, there's a very outside chance you might even have read some of my short science fiction, in which case I'm very sorry, I didn't mean it, and they all lived happily ever after right after a thorough memory wipe, which I would offer you if I could.
However, in as much as I am ever actually cited or referred to anywhere, it's always from something I wrote (essays or code) in my professional capacity as (primarily) a software engineer. Far more people have used the touchscreen jukeboxes I did for Ecast, or the MPEG decoders I helped write for Xing (or, certainly, the DeCSS keys that were apparently lifted from them), or even the video games beta release I worked on, then are probably ever going to recognize my face or my voice, let alone my name. But even then, what DO people remember my name from? A few off-hand emails about Qt vs wxWindows (now wxWidgets) I wrote a long, long time ago, but which apparently had a larger effect than I had any right to expect. In other words, I am remembered for writing something that was really merely a step or so above a private message.
So, now that you know where I'm coming from, let me give you my take on a few things-- because "Silicon Valley" and "Hollywood" are going to overlap more and more, not less, and the overlap is cultural as much as it is technical. I spend some of my social time with other engineers, actors, writers, stand-up comics science fiction anthology editors, and makers (I helped run TechShop for a year or so). They all have one thing in common: burnout is a problem.
I would propose that practically everything you do in this world for love or money will fall somewhere on an equilateral triangle that we might label "Compensation", with these three vertices:
* Pay
* Fame
* Satisfaction
Somewhere on that triangle is a very specific spot where YOU would be happiest, and it probably isn't dead-center. Likewise, somewhere on that triangle is a spot where YOU are RIGHT NOW, and that is the sum of everything you are currently doing, and everything you have done.
Now, I'm not talking about your whole life, here-- hopefully your marriage isn't done for fame or money-- but I am talking about your (supposedly) 9-5 job, plus the "consulting" work that may or may not really reimburse you for the time you put into it but is damn cool, plus the hobbies and projects you participate in because you really, really want to.
The simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the time, the things we would like to do for pay, fame, and satisfaction do not do all three of those things. Often, they only do one of them. Worse, sometimes you go negative in a category. But the thing to realize-- and this can be maddeningly frustrating to try to explain to people who are more comfortable in (or more easily satisfied with, moo) their lives-- is that those things you do that you can't figure out why in the hell you bother? Those things that you still do even though it seems like they're just not worth it? We do a lot of those things to make the sum of EVERYTHING we do a little closer to where we'd like to be on that triangle.
Or at least, we SHOULD.
Now, I will readily assure you that
AKA "How do I market to geeks?" (Score:4, Interesting)
AKA "How do I market to geeks?"
How can you possibly maintain the following train of thought?
(1) "I think renaissance faire people are geeks"
(2) "I think slashdot people are geeks"
(3) "these groups form an equivalence set"
(4) "ask slashdot how to market to geeks"
(5) "slashdot tells me"
(6) "market to geeks"
(7) "reach the renaissance faire target market"
(8) "Profit!"
Seriously, I hope that the OP doesn't think that geeks form a monolithic market block, any more than Anonymous all hold the same political positions on everything.