Good Art Vs Best Practices
Two competing ideologies in the world of content creation
I remember the advice I used to get when I was just beginning my career as a stand-up comedian, way back during the first Obama administration. Older comics would tell me, “Write as much as possible, get on stage as much as possible, go to shows and hang out and show face and network. Eventually something will open up for you.” It feels quaint looking back on it now. The advice they were giving me was wrong, but neither of us knew it yet. It had worked for them and their peers in an earlier generation, but the world at large, and by extension the comedy world, was careening towards an entirely different way of life. Soon enough, we’d all be living and working online.
I was never naturally inclined to use the Internet as a means to advance my comedy career. When Twitter became the de facto platform, I mostly stayed off of it. I found the onslaught of snark and irony to be demoralizing. Once the finger-wagging moralists entered the fray, I had no interest in participating whatsoever. When comedians began treating Facebook like Twitter, posting jokes that they all liked and commented on together as a way to build online solidarity and boost visibility, I kept to the sidelines. Why would you post jokes about current events and assorted online ephemera in a place where high school classmates and extended family members could see it? I refused to download Instagram when it first became popular. I even remember telling a fellow comedian, “I don’t need another app to scroll.” I also said the same thing about Snapchat and TikTok. This is probably a major reason why I’m now writing a Substack about failing at comedy instead of actually making a living at it.
If I have one regret in my fifteen years of doing stand-up comedy, it’s that I didn’t push myself beyond my comfort zone and engage in activities that didn’t appeal to me, but would have benefited my career. I refused to network (online or otherwise) and build relationships, all to my own detriment. I wish I would have gotten over myself and been a little more willing to engage with the comedy community at large. It wouldn’t have killed me to send a few dumb tweets every now and then.
This did change during the last two years or so of my career. Through what was mostly a sense of desperation, I began to regularly post videos on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts. I shared sketches and stand-up clips, typically twice a week. It was all too little, too late, and nothing really moved the needle for me. But I did gain some valuable insight into the push and pull of staying true to yourself while trying to build a following.
Every artist has to face this question when they’re trying to break out, but it’s particularly explicit for comedians who are posting content online. How much of yourself are you willing to compromise in order to reach a wider audience and build a career?
The idealist way to answer is “None,” but this is also typically the non-working artist way to answer. The moral high ground doesn’t feel that great when you’re sitting at home without any gigs booked.
The careerist sociopath answer is “Whatever it takes.” But with whatever success you find, you end up losing parts of yourself that make this whole process fun, interesting, and fulfilling in the first place. You get what you wanted, but you’re not happy.
The correct answer seems to be “I have no fucking idea.” It’s a sliding scale that each individual has to attune to their wants, needs, and beliefs. And the only way to figure it out is with trial and error. Do you want to pursue a smaller audience with less pressure to conform to their needs? Or do you want a larger audience that comes with a risk of audience capture and a sense of obligation to them? Or maybe it’s somewhere in the middle of those two? And what does “somewhere in the middle” even look like?
These are all very general ideas. Let’s get specific. What choices and compromises does a comedian have to make when posting videos online?
The first one that always stood out to me was the use of subtitles in videos. Make no mistake about why these subtitles are so popular. It’s because most people look at their phones and watch these videos with the sound off. They’re in a public space (Maybe on the subway, at their desk at work, or in the bathroom) and can’t be blasting the audio of whatever video scrolls across their screen. This, in effect, means they are reading stand-up comedy clips, not watching them. I did not understand this practice when it first became popular. Why would you take something that, in its ideal form, is meant to be experienced live in a room with other people, and reduce it to text floating across a phone screen? A few sanctimonious comics would say, “Well, it’s for accessibility, for the hearing impaired,” as if comedians suddenly cared about disabled people. I didn’t see any comics building wheelchair ramps into comedy clubs at the same time the subtitle craze took off.
So I didn’t post any videos with subtitles, and felt quite self-satisfied about it. But then I saw comics grow their followings with these videos, and leverage those followings to book gigs, both in the city and on the road. At that point I started reconsidering my notions about subtitles in stand-up videos. Your ideals can only hold out for so long once mimetic desire comes into play.
There’s also the matter of what types of videos you’re going to post. A lot of comics post crowd work videos as a way to avoid burning their material online. Actually, it’s not really a question of burning material (People hearing jokes somewhere else before they see you live), it’s that most comedians don’t have a lot of jokes that can fit into a short Internet clip. If you’re posting multiple times a week, or even just weekly, you’re going to run out of jokes to share pretty fast. Crowd work solves for that, but it’s not without its own set of issues. It can quickly turn boring and hacky. There are only so many interesting answers to questions like “What do you do for a living?” or “How long have you two been together?”
Then there’s the question of utilizing video trends and memes. On TikTok or Reels, there’s always some new trending song you can use, and some pre-outlined action that goes along with it. I know I sound like a huge Boomer here, speaking in vague generalities about TikTok, but I honestly cannot recall a single example of one of these. They all melt away from consciousness within a fortnight (The Taylor Swift Fortnight challenge! There’s one), but they do have a greater potential for virality and growing your following.
I knew I couldn’t fully ignore the online world if I wanted to have one last shot at building a career, but I also knew if I became too beholden to it I would feel miserable. So once I decided to start posting online, I settled on what I felt like was a good middle ground. I would post stand-up clips with subtitles, but I’d make the text as unobtrusive as possible. Other comics were using big, wacky fonts with bright colors to attract the user's attention as they scrolled through their feed. Some even went so far as to slide images in and out of frame to keep the user interested. That was one step too far for me. I didn’t want to do anything that made me feel like I was gamifying my clips and playing to a short attention span. Instead, I posted plain white text (With a slight black highlight to make it stand out against the background) as low in the frame as I could without it being blocked by the caption.
I also posted sketch videos I shot myself on my phone and edited together in Final Cut. These actually brought me an unanticipated bit of satisfaction outside of the amount of views, likes, or follows they generated. I had been compulsively watching Bo Burnham’s filmed-at-home masterpiece Inside over the previous year and I knew there was potential to make something interesting and genuine by yourself, featuring just yourself, if you had the right amount of creativity and ingenuity. A few of these videos I made went mini-viral (I think the most views I ever got on one was like 500k, so nothing crazy or life-changing. The most memorable result was feeling my brain chemistry being rewired in real time from all the excess dopamine), but I found the most enjoyment in the challenge of coming up with an idea, capturing it, and editing it together, all separate from how it might help my career.
As far as video trends and memes, I never did that. I just couldn’t bring myself to cross that line. Also, I was in my mid-30s, so participating in viral trends initiated by Gen Zers would be even more cringe than being a struggling comedian in your mid-30s and desperately posting online to gain a following already is. I’m proud of myself for this one.
So I started posting online. I stuck to the principles I had laid out for myself, and yet I still felt terrible about the whole thing. Because even though I tried to protect myself against it, the mere fact that I was participating in this online attention economy drove me deep into a world of jealousy and comparison that messed with my self-esteem. Some of my videos did better than others, I gained some followers and subscribers, but not enough and not at a fast enough pace to make a difference in my career. Meanwhile, the algorithm places the most viral videos in your feed, so the only thing you’re seeing on your phone is other people who are doing way better than you, which makes you feel like shit, which then nudges you to change yourself to be more like them.
There’s no escaping this when you’re active online. It’s the way the entire system is built. No matter what personal guardrails you put up, it’s hard not to look at other people’s success and get mad that it’s not happening to you. When you’re faced with this day after day, over and over again, you start to convince yourself that you need to start copying the practices utilized by the online victors.
“Maybe I should make my captions more colorful,” I thought to myself. “This guy had over a million views on his stand-up clip and there were tons of images popping in and out of it. Maybe I should try that.” This is how you end up with thousands of YouTube videos making the same dumb face in the thumbnail. The modern Internet doesn’t encourage creativity, it encourages imitation. It throws everyone in a room together, and we all start copying a small subset of the most successful among us.
This is the real fundamental problem with posting online. Before long, an obvious set of “best practices” begins to form, and these best practices are usually in no way related to the type of content you would make if left to your own devices. I can’t even tell you how many hours I wasted stressing over decisions on how to edit a video, or what videos I should or shouldn’t be posting, all because of how it compared to everything else out there. This was time I could have spent writing jokes or going to shows or, I don’t know, being a normal, happy person out in the world.
This is the reality of being online. It provides a great opportunity for growth and advancement, but it comes with an onerous set of rules and norms that you’re compelled to follow at the risk of being left behind. This is unchangeable. What can change is your response to it if you do decide to post. You have to decide how much you’re going to tailor to the platform, how much you’re willing to give up, and how comfortable you are with compromise in the name of your career. I found something that felt decent enough and, more often than not, stuck with it until I gave up. It didn’t feel good while I was participating, but I know it could have felt so much worse.
Because there is something worse than sitting in this weird middle ground between your taste and online best practices. The worst is when you follow all the rules to a T and still fail. You gave up what you believed in, and you didn’t get any success for your troubles. I had a few videos where I followed all of the best practices and they fell flat when I posted them. Trust me, it’s the worst of both worlds.
There’s a famous quote from Jim Carrey about his dad. He knew his dad always wanted to be a comedian or a musician, but he took the safe route and became an accountant. This route suddenly didn’t feel so safe when he was laid off from his accounting job and the family became homeless for a period of time. About this Carrey said, “You can fail at what you don't want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”
This doesn’t just mean becoming an accountant instead of a comedian. It can also mean being a different type of comedian than the one you initially set out to be. If you don’t want to participate in the online economy, that’s fine. Just know it’s going to make the road to success, even moderate success, extremely difficult. This is where everything is now, and if you’re not there it’s going to hinder your chances. And if you decide to go all out and align yourself with the best practices of the Internet, just know that you’re most likely going to feel terrible doing it, no matter what success comes your way. Your actions will be dictated by a piece of code sitting on a server farm somewhere out in the middle of Silicon Valley.
This is what being a comedian is now. Before, you only had to worry whether your jokes were funny, insightful and original enough. Now, you have to worry about that and whether or not the banner on your YouTube page is eye-catching. My advice for staying halfway sane while posting is to find that middle ground, through trial and error, and really listen to yourself and pay attention to how you feel when you’re doing these things. Back off from the actions that make you feel bad or cheap, even if they’re what everyone else is doing. You’ll probably sacrifice some success for this, but I’m pretty sure that the peace of mind will be worth it.
