Instagram is destroying stand up comedy... THE PODCAST.

LINK: https://open.spotify.com/show/533d7BBnHnAFMgc1RZCKIf

First, it was an article. Now it's a podcast episode, expanding and reflecting upon the article. Antics ensue. Discuss.

Instagram is destroying stand up comedy: how not why. An article.

Circa 1994, I saw a good looking woman get kicked off stage (in a branch of Yuk Yuk's Toronto) simply for telling a joke that wasn't funny: she was on stage very briefly, but, from memory, after only the second joke she told, someone backstage pressed the button, and she was suddenly escorted away —as if it were "a gong show", where the performers could be eliminated at any time. I can remember the joke in detail: men were like shoes, she explained, and she didn't like them with the tongues sticking out. Button pressed, performance over, take no bows, give no outros: "hard out". That would never happen today —partly (not entirely) because she was the best looking woman on stage that night, and (lamentably) we still have a culture built around the bigotry of low expectations.

In 2026, (1) venue managers make decisions on the basis of how many Instagram followers a comedian has —and it is venue managers who have taken on the roles abandoned by booking agents, talent agents and entertainment lawyers (because there simply isn't enough money in the game for a percentage to be paid to any of those people anymore). (2) Success on Instagram (and Tiktok) has absolutely nothing to do with the bare minimum competence ("bamico") required to be a stand up comedian.

Let's have a brief digression on what exactly that bamico is, scil., the bare minimum competence:

(i) write original material,
(ii) rehearse original material,
(iii) select from, adapt and perform that material for the particular audience.

There are comedians here who are unbelievably terrible, consistently showing up with no material: they have neither written jokes nor anything else, they just narrate spontaneously off the tops of their heads. In both form and content, a lot of this sounds like it was originally performed for a therapist, not an audience: I cannot count the number of times I have heard a comedian lament, after a flop, "my therapist thought that was really funny". It would be one thing to kick them off stage, it would be another thing to ban them from the club forever: there is the very real option of saying to them, "You can come back only when you've written and rehearsed new material" —which is something very different from an improvised autobiographical monologue. The irony is that I am extremely experienced at improvised autobiographical monologues (and I've had more success with that art form than any of these comedians ever have had or ever will) but I recognize that it is not stand up comedy, and it is basically insulting to the audience to lapse into precisely the same kind of monologue that I managed to rack up eight million views on youtube with. Sincere, unrehearsed personal reflections are not stand up comedy —they may be interesting to an audience on youtube, if you've led an interesting enough life, or if you've got enough intellectual substance, or some kind of intriguing political ambition (and this is absolutely never true of any of these comedians, they uniformly lack all three). Still: not bamico, not comedy.

The problem with Natalie Cuomo is not merely that she is not funny: she demonstrates how Instagram is destroying stand up comedy. There's a surreal sense in which she isn't even trying to be funny: she is trying to be famous on Instagram, and doing absolutely none of the bare minimum things required to be a comedian. This is the comedic equivalent of a sexually attractive man posing (near nude) with a basketball on Instagram, and then touring basketball courts for small audiences because they relate to his combination of sex appeal and autobiographical reflections "on the App" —but he doesn't actually play basketball. He isn't sinking his time and energy into the sport's own bamico.

I am not going to tell you that 90% of Natalie Cuomo's success is a result of her sex appeal: I am going to argue that it's a solid 100% —and, worse, that sex appeal is cycled through several successive stages of commercialization that seem to have corrupted the already corrupt process of auditioning that stand up comedy is supposedly built upon.

Yeah, I said it: auditioning. In New York City, absolutely nobody auditions anymore: comedians are expected to "hang" with other comedians who then "give them the pass" for a particular club —comedians who know comedians get "passed" (this is used as both a verb and a noun) and are then regarded as approved in advance for performance on that stage (or at a cluster of associated clubs). This entails a cyclone of cocaine and bisexual ex-girlfriends who know that they can socialize with the right people (not even necessarily needing to sleep with the right people) to gain access to time on stage. And straight men play the same game of seducing other straight men by the same rules. The Eiffel Tower is not just a tourist attraction in France.

Venue management do not audition comedians as people, and they do not evaluate the material to be performed in specific before a show: there is an unspeakable desperation of comedians to "hang" with anyone who can get them "a pass" to a better club than the one they're performing in now. The role of the talent agent has been supplanted by a decentralized system of sex, drugs and rock and roll conferring legitimacy.

I really wonder why high schools have not replaced university entrance exams with a similar system, frankly —as much less hard work and talent are required to take notes while some moron sermonizes his way through your B.A. Presumably, one student can simply confer "a pass" upon another, on the basis of how they all "hang", with equal rigor, and equally predictable outcomes.

Venue managers may not notice that none of these people are doing the (bamico) work to actually have new material to offer, but they will notice the number of empty seats: thus Instagram becomes the crucial lubricant —and this has ramifications far beyond the cozy confines of New York cocktail parties.

Natalie Cuomo has over one million followers on Instagram: as with Freelee, years before, many of these followers are women who respond to N.C.'s sex appeal with a strange spirit of imitation (wanting to be like her) whereas others are men who are directly aroused by her content —and hearing her talk about her sex life is what's on offer here, not actual sex.

N.C. is not attractive to me, personally, and I do not find her autobiographical anecdotes arousing (nor interesting, nor funny) but I can see the difference between a barfly and the broad side of a barn. My extremely eccentric taste in women is irrelevant to this discussion: Natalie Cuomo offers the intoxicating mix of the relatable and the unattainable —her very mediocrity is a positive part of her appeal. However, if she had been fifty pounds fatter, consistently, for the last ten years, would anyone in their right mind think that this level of success would have been attained by her? Twenty pounds? Ten? Freelee, same question.

So, the venue manager sees that a comedian has a million followers and thinks that ("therefore") seats will be filled and alcoholic beverages will be sold at astronomically inflated prices if only this name is on the billboard. Sometimes it works: it works just often enough to perpetuate the pattern of utterly untalented comedians being booked this way —and never needing to actually write and rehearse material.

This is a problem that can be solved. Venue managers (or whoever will now replace booking agents, talent agents and entertainment lawyers) have to actually call in comedians for auditions, and they have to be prepared to tell comedians, "Come back when you've written some new material". Of course, this can only be possible if the comedians are going to be paid enough to justify the exercise: it is so much cheaper and more time efficient to just glance at your phone and see an Instagram reel (or a Tiktok, etc.) to then make the booking decision on this basis. "Well, if that guy 'gave her the pass', and this video has ten thousand views, I'm sure she can come up with something for next Saturday…" —that's the loop the industry is stuck in, as it spirals ever downward from industrial to charitable status.

In theory, comedians (male and female) could get bookings by having daring acts of physical comedy on social media (jumping off a rubber roof to land on an inflatable mattress made of solid concrete, etc.) but it is almost always sex appeal that's being bartered about here —male or female.

Money, fame, power, respect, sex. Not necessarily in that order.

Against Wayne Hsiung, and in defense of Political Science... AGAIN.