Dave Barry: evaluation

Transcript context

…But if there are billions of people out there, and say each one is really funny once in their lifetime, and some of that gets captured on YouTube, and you have aggregators or filters — as a professional comedian, you’re competing against the funniest moment of each amateur, often unintentional. So do you think it’s the case that professionals now, they become more like brands? If I watch Stephen Colbert, to me it’s funny — he’s not as funny as that moment by Kelly. He almost to me is a kind of watchman, or he reassures me. And that’s made the comedian, in a sense, deliberately not that funny. They play a different role. How do you see that? I don’t know, I think that the real comedians . . . Colbert, he’s basically delivering jokes written by a staff of writers and curating whatever they got from the Internet, or presenting whatever they curated from the Internet. But guys like Louis C. K. and Dave Chappelle are still creating their own humor, and it’s still really funny. And it’s them, it’s not anybody else. It doesn’t look like anybody else. So yeah, there’s way, way more of it out there. It’s probably tougher to be really original, to sound really original, than it used to be, but there’s an awful lot of consumers as well, and there just seems to be this huge appetite for more funny. I don’t know that it’s worse, and in some ways, it may be easier. If you are a kid who wants to get known as a comedian, you don’t really have to, anymore, go the incredibly difficult route that most of the stand-up comedians I know went, which is starting out at Catch a Rising Star or someplace much worse than that, and doing all those stand-ups in front of three drunks, and slowly getting noticed, and finally getting hired by somebody. You can just go on the Internet, make a funny video, and sometimes that will produce fantastic results for you. Is the half-life of a joke much shorter now?…

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