The Tech-onomy of Stand-Up Comedy

Abstract Emerging technologies and our use of them shape the production, distribution, and consumption, or the economy, of stand-up comedy. New media change the ways fans experience and access comedy, placing pressure on stand-up comics to adapt their content across platforms. Fans will have to be at least as technologically savvy as their favorite comics to get the content they seek. Digital and online technologies have allowed comedy to be self-produced and distributed to a widespread fan base. Increasingly fans can consume streaming media unencumbered by traditional broadcasting barriers to access. Such immediacy changes consumer expectations and purchasing patterns. Consumers, content producers, and entertainment vendors learn to adapt and engage with new media. This chapter examines those material and digital measures of social progress that users deploy to irrevocably change the economy of comedy (e.g., cable TV, VCRs, podcasting, social media, and digital streaming media). A variety of primary sources—newspaper and magazine articles, interviews with comics and industry professionals, histories published on stand-up comedy, comedians’ memoirs and diaries—offers a story of the ways comedians use technologies to transform the production, distribution, and consumption of stand-up comedy.