Roy Wood, Jr. Defends Instagram Comedians

Mmm. Well, we'll... You know, comedy's a bonus. At least somebody on that. We have such a complicated relationship with them because we need them and we don't want to do it. I don't want to fucking run a goddamn comedy club, but we need one. You know, to have some guys dealing with a bunch of maniacs like us day in, day out, every week coming in and telling jokes and getting drunk and smoking weed in the green room and all the chaos that comes... It's essential to the art form. Yeah. The existence of the comedy club is essential. 100%. You ever get scared that the young people don't really go to clubs? Don't really fuck with clubs? Yes. Yes, I do. It's going to change the business model, like in the next decade. Well, one of the beautiful things about comedy clubs though is that we all use them. Like even if you're doing arenas, like you use comedy clubs. You use comedy clubs to exercise. Like Chappelle comes in all the time and does the belly room. That's a 70 seat room. That dude just strolls on in. It'll be half full. Intimate. Yup. And he'll do 40 fucking minutes. That is so critical, man. It's so important to get that work in. That's why I don't like when a lot of the vets attack the, as they call them, Instagram comedians or the Vine or not Vine anymore, but you know what the fucking saying. YouTube comedians. Yeah, they get mad at them because the club will book them and they'll go, well, the live show is trash. It's terrible. And it's true for most of them. It's not the greatest performance because they haven't had the chops yet, but they sold 300 paid tickets and everybody ate and drank. What do you think is keeping the lights on for your 30% selling capacity ass to come back in next year and the next year to go from 30% sold to 40% sold? They're not making no money off of you, but if these IG comedians can come in and at least help keep the lights on, I think in the greater scheme of comedy, there's more good than bad. I agree. It comes from that. And I also feel like there's a level of ignoring the tools that they've been able to use to get an audience in lieu of the fact that they don't put new standup on TV anymore and let's it's contest shit. Comedy Central just started with the live at the seller shit, but other than that, I mean, it hasn't been a lot. Well, no one's even watching TV anymore. I mean, the numbers on regular TV programs are so low now. Like if you're doing a set on Conan, like what is, what did we win over this? Right? Like the numbers are like less than 400,000 people watching a night. Yeah. That's a lot. That might be live plus three. Yeah. That's half of that. That might not even be just live. That might be live plus DVR over the next three days. Yeah. It's crazy. So no one's watching anything anymore. If you can get onto a stage, the way I feel about Instagram comedians or YouTube comedians is if you're doing standup, you're a comic, you might be a shitty comic and you might have be a famous shitty comic because you're famous from vine or whatever the fuck it is. But who can, you're a comic like it's whether or not you decide to become a real comic and actually do the work and put in the time and then one day be, look, I hope we see these YouTube comics and they're fucking terrible. And then you go to see them seven, eight years later and they're murdering, they're crushing great timing, great premises. I'm like, we got one. We got one. We got more. This is a hard gig. Think about what you had to do when you were starting. Think about you traveling around all those fucking things, getting on a bus to do open mics. They had to open mic once a month. That takes a kind of grit and resolve that most people don't have. This shit is like hazing where the old heads feel like, well, they didn't suffer the way I suffered. Therefore your success is invalid. I don't take that. I don't think I'm fighting that. Because you didn't do it the way I did it. This is the only way to do it. The game evolves. The points of access. It's like comedy is like, to me, it's like a fucking grocery store and you've been in line, you've been in this checkout line and then a new checkout line opens and then all these fuckers just cruise through that checkout and you're still stuck in the same waiting to get a tonight show set line and the Instagram line opens and people just start whisking through to success and you don't know whether or not to change lines or stay in this one. The beautiful thing about comedy is you don't have to get out of the line. You just open up a new line, open up an Instagram line, open up a YouTube line. You can do all those things. But they ain't been waiting in line as long as me. So why do they get to leave the store? You know you have that jealousy, that little piece of jealousy when someone has not been in line as long as you leave the grocery store before you. That's comedy now. It is, but it's wasted energy. You can't think about that. You should think about that the same way you think about someone having success in some field that has nothing to do with yours. Like if someone is a Nobel Prize winning scientist, like fuck, I could have done that. Yeah, but you didn't. It's really the same thing. I could have started that app. It has nothing to do with it. But some people are like that. Some people see someone with like a startup, some internet startup and it makes a billion dollars and they get angry. They get angry because, but no, go fucking do something. Don't worry about what other people are doing. It's a giant waste of your energy. Yo, I read a book, Rebel Without a Crew. I think it's, I think Rich Rodriguez, I think is his name. And he was a filmmaker and he made the, I can't remember the name of the movie, but it was the prequel to what became Desperado. Oh, Robert Rodriguez? Yes. That guy? Yeah. And you talked about just shooting that shit gorilla and for essentially pennies, less than $10,000, shot a whole ass film and walks through how we cut the corners. And then you think of how they shot paranormal activity for like $55,000, $50,000 or $60,000. The first paranormal activity was dirt cheap. They shot the first saw for a million dollars in 30 days in one building. Whoa. Every, in every scene in the car, they're just shaking the fucking camera and jump cutting. Billion dollar franchise getting rebooted now. Like that, like when I see shit like that, I don't get jealous. I go, well fuck, I need to go and fucking gorilla some shit together. And so that's why I started trying to learn like in video editing, audio editing, all that shit, man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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