Why The Netflix is a Joke Festival is a great idea.
Stand-up has always been Free Speech's coal mine for Canaries. The Festival is showcasing some of it's purtiest little birds
The Netflix is a Joke Festival is finally here and it kicked off with a stellar show this weekend at The Hollywood Bowl. Jeff Ross hosted the evening that had the crowd howling with his one-liners on today’s trials and tribulations and then had them emotionally on edge discussing the recent losses he’s lived through of close friends like Norm McDonald, Gilbert Godfried, and Bob Saget.
Pete Davidson, Donnell Rawlings, Bill Burr, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Carr and Michael Che were all in top form leading up to some of the best sets Dave Chappelle has ever had.
He was loose, happy, raw, and reckless.
The sold-out bowl was on fire with Netflix comedy fans rolling with laughter. It was the perfect tone to kick off a festival that includes over 250 shows at venues all over Los Angeles. Stand-up at every comedy club, concert hall, venue, park, theatre or amphitheater the city has to surrender.
Stand-up comedy is in charge this next two weeks, thanks to Netflix.
It’s smart on them too. It has always been good business, Stand-up comedy. It made Showtime a player in the early days of cable tv’s birth. Gallagher got them up and running by smashing watermelons dressed like a clown version of a French Mime. HBO doubled down, bringing on the visionary director Marty Callner who scooped up top new wave comedians like Robert Klein and Freddie Prinze, then he redressed Ciro’s dance floor into The Comedy Store Main Room for Mitzi Shore and Home Box Office, shooting the annual Young Comedians specials there for years.
Later HBO let Rodney Dangerfield shoot specials at his speakeasy on Manhattan’s upper Eastside offering the first look nationally at everyone from Sam Kinison, to Dice, and Tim Allen.
Comedy was inexpensive compared to sports or movies and long-form series. Audiences loved it and watched it over and over. Comics were made stars overnight on cable specials.
While Netflix got rolling with streaming by spending crazy money on shows like House of Cards, Ted Sarandos was also quietly chumming up with the Stand-up community. He was regularly down at the Comedy Store. Onstage with Kill Tony and Joe Rogan, always at home hanging around at The Comedy Store parking lot.
The first Netflix special stand-up was Bill Burr’s. A finished show they purchased as a pick-up. Before long their secret algorithm was telling them something. It wasn’t Ouji ball wishy-wash either. It was real-time truth. People were watching comics. The service started paying top dollar for Stand-up stars. Off the charts money. Money that made HBO , Showtime, and basically everyone else pretty much back out of the game.
It was a damn smooth move. Yeah, they paid through the roof for Chris Rock and Chappelle and a few others, but they homeschooled themselves a gaggle of Stand-ups stars who they hadn’t been bent-over for.
Acts they then turned into international sensations.
These days Bill Burr sells out arenas all over the planet. As does Sebastion Maniscalco and a Baker’s dozen other Netflix comics. Netflix basically threw Stand-up the fancy life preserver it needed as it was drowning until the podcast medium matured turning the next group of Stand-up icons into their own self controlled media entities.
Well guess what? Now Stand-up can sort of save Netflix. They made all these jokers big shots. They’ve learned how hot the craft is. They understand it better than anyone else. To some people, Netflix’s gone woke to a fault in other areas, but in Stand-up ‘wokes’ been a boon for them. Robbie Praw and his comedy team have brought along a horde of black, brown, gay, Asian, and even Plaid comics. Men and women, who are seriously hilarious as hell.
Yes, these comics, have also saved themselves. They’ve gotten good at not only, Stand-up, but, at developing and producing their own podcasts, social media platforms, Youtube shows and digital series. They know how to market their acts, to create their own ads, to organically grow and foment their followers in cities and countries all over the world with ways and magic methods the comics of decades before had no inkling of. So now, even more than ever Netflix has a reason to cozie up to this goofy group.
That’s the point of this festival. They need each other. Things are changing. Netflix knows how to market Stand-up better than anyone else in the world, except, Stand-ups. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship. It’s like when Obama warmed up to idea of Gay marriage. Yeah, sure, he always liked the Gays. Time came though when he more than liked them, he needed them. “Rahm, Light up the damn White House!!”
There are two other things going for Stand-up in this moment; One is the human brain has morphed itself a tragically short attention span. People don’t have a lot of time or ability to dig into long series anymore. There’s too much going on. There are too many shows. Too many sporting events. Too much other stimuli.
Folks get episode anxiety. That’s why Tik Tok is killing it. You can just look at stuff and wolf down your Ubered meal and not really need to invest too much brainpower. Stand-up is the same thing, and if it’s good Stand-up, if it’s smart, well thought out, if you’re laughing, you can just push play and know that when you’re done you’re done and it’s not going to pull you into some rabbit hole that you won’t come out of for six nights. You don’t feel like you’re going to get sucked into eight or ten more episodes or worse, seasons, of Jason Bateman and his wife making the dumbest decisions you’ve ever seen anyone make even though you know you’d probably make the same decisions.
Stand-up is just laughter. It’s medicinal.
The second thing is that Stand-up, the good Stand-up, breaks down the political correctness crap like old boxes in the garage. That wasn’t always Stand-up’s thing. It got stale there for a spell. All the legions of left-leaning comics playing lazy to audiences like they were trained seals. Making Trump or Bush jokes that they knew would get guaranteed laughs. One joke after another that we knew the punch lines of before they left their lips. Virtue signaling acts that played the party line as if they were performing for their parents and their parents friends in cute furry pajamas in the family living room.
I personally feel Ted Sarandos was a key part of the wave that saved comedy a second time when he stuck with Chappelle against the Twitter-twat mob when The Closer came out. The idea that employees could tell the boss what to do made me dizzy to begin with, but the idea that a dozen or two cranky tweets could threaten a giant corporation? That these rolling wrecks could storm the Netflix conference room and make insane demands about what kind of programing they wanted to make going forward? That I hadn’t had the idea before they did? Boy, I was pissed!
The worse thing though is the fact is most of those ass-hats didn’t even watch Chappelle’s special all the way through. No way. In the end though, Sarandos stuck to his passion for Chappelle, and his love of Stand-up, and the timing was angelic.
Stand-up comics can say what the audience is thinking with humor. They’ve always have been able to. From Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor to George Carlin on to Chris Rock. It also finally got to the point where audiences couldn’t take it anymore. Little simple things like being told a huge part of the problem with life is when we’re born, Doctor’s basically ‘guess’ what sex we are. No one really knows? And if you don’t understand this, you’re a racist butthole, and you don’t get to sit in the good seats at any of the good events anymore. If you even make a joke about it, you should be drummed out of existence. The whole thing started when this irritated little trans-woman that Netflix was paying all kinds of stupid money to write on a show called Dear Black People, a white trans-woman by the way, who went trigger happy and tried to get Chappelle fired.
She went to the press! That’s nuts. She didn’t go to her bosses, or human recourses or a shrink, or her parents, or even Ru-Paul. She went and got a write up in the trades.
There was a time she would have gotten fired for that crap. She should have been. Instantly. She got everyone all tizzy-whipped up. Got us all nuts. As if we were all suddenly Trans. Everyone talking way too fast. I read the article. Also saw the pictures of her. I’m sorry, but she looked like my cousin Melvin. She obviously didn’t put much into trying to be a woman. Slapped a wig on top of her head. Not fair at all.
Taking on the best comedian in the business as he was telling a personal story about a friendship he had made with a trans-woman who wanted to be a Stand-up, who ended up taking her own life. A true story he laid out with a lot of compassion? Did he make jokes? Yes. Did he discuss the truth of the matter? As it had affected him? The absurdity of the issues? Yes of course he did. That’s what a comic does. The good ones at least. They say the things the rest of us want to say but are afraid to say it.
This woman and a bunch of upset Trans-folks paraded around the Netflix parking lot like they were doing the never seen deleted scenes on the Norma Rae DVD.
Netflix took it in. Pondered... thought it over…
Then they gave Dave four more specials.
Am I kissing ass here? You bet I am. Big time. I’m giving a rim job. Why not? Go long or stay home, or something like that, right? I also happen to know they’re in fashion. It’s the number one most searched term on YouPorn. (I’ve been told. I obviously wouldn’t know. *By the way. Their stock is UP forty percent.)
So Ted Sarandos and his Stand-up group backing Chappelle was one of a few clarion calls that the comedians out there in Stand-up-ville heard. It was time to put an end to the game. To not listen to the far right’s garbage, and for sure not the far left’s. Bill Marr did a lot to help convince the pack it was okay to ignore the political consultants on Stand-up do’s and don’t, but in the end it was Chappelle, Gervais, Burr, Attell, Jeff Ross, and young guns like Andrew Schultz, Dan Soder, Big Jay Oakerson, Jessica Kirson, and Luis J. Gomez that showed everyone the audience wanted authenticity and honesty, which translated into the form of millions of Youtube views and crazy amounts of ticket sales. Stand-up comedy was hot as hell.
It was right around the time too that Lorne Michaels, moronically, did the opposite and threw Shane Gillis, one of the best sketch writer-performers and Stand-ups working, out of the boat right at the dock just days after he had hired him, because some of the Twitter-dolts found some old jokes of his they didn’t like. It was the stupidest thing SNL could have done. It was a flare sent up that the show was now officially cooked. Over. Done.
Gillis is a true comic genius. The hell with these carping nitwits. SNL was originally a counter-culture phenomena. The sneaky, tweak-the silly-bad-man’s late night cool kid show to watch. Not some tea time cultured crumpet. That’s why it was once funny, hot, and watchable. Now it’s as entertaining as spending an afternoon with a sweaty great-Aunt that eats naked.
It’s a stale box of Cracker Jacks with no surprise inside. The exception; the rare week that a Stand-up hosts. On those nights, the monologue is always a jump ball.
Lorne Michaels is too happy going to dinner with celebrity icons, and politicians, having ‘backyards’ with old farts and museum curators. Someone needs to take this guy out morning fishing on a foggy lake. Quietly put him out of his misery behind a bog.
If Bill Burr hosts, or Dave Chappelle, or God forbid, Louis C.K., or WHEN Shane Gillis hosts, then you’re going to see some ratings. But other than that? No one gives a rat’s weiner about that show.
BTW, when Netflix gives Shane Gillis his first special? Huge!!
So, yeah. Netflix is the prize pearl still. It’s done a hell of a lot for Stand-up. (And for me.) But Stand-up has done a lot for Netflix. It’s done a lot more then some of these other trendy shows and movies that cost two hundred and fifty million dollars. Stand-ups the future. The truth is the future. The ‘joke’ is Netflix’s future. This festival is just the start. They’re doing ‘The Hall’ with Marty Callner, creating the Stand-up Hall of Fame, and some other really key things related to Stand-up. I have a feeling it’s going to be a beautiful, long term relationship, Netflix and Stand-up. Like an old married couple.
Unless Netflix blows it?
I do know of the two of them, Stand-up’s the one that’s guaranteed to be around in twenty-five years. Just saying.
(photos courtesy Netflix Matheiu Bitton @Candytman)