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.
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.
