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On Monday, hundreds of professional stand-up comedians flooded Instagram and TikTok with front-facing videos outlining an issue in the comedy community that had been brewing for months.
In April, SiriusXM radio changed the programming of its Raw Comedy channel previously known as Raw Dog — a 24/7 curated broadcast of comedy tracks from the albums of more than 800 living and working comedians — to Sebastian Maniscalco’s Comedy Radio, a curated broadcast of mostly Mansicalco material and an odd mix of dead comedians and household names, cutting about 500 comics from the roster in the process, with zero notice. The nonprofit Stand Up for Stand Up posted a detailed breakdown of the data that outlines a 66% shrinkage in the SiriusXM Raw channel roster.
“This month our payout checks were half what they normally are,” says Liz Miele, the comedian who organized the coordinated posting effort, “Next month they’re going to be zero.” Miele was one of the higher-paid comedians on the channel and had to be informed by her label, Ghost Runner, of what was on the horizon. There is some odd backlash from commenters who have a hard time wrapping their mind around the idea of a creative working class and are calling the comics complainers, but the storm of posts itself was the result of failed negotiations between a group of independent comedy record labels and SiriusXM, and attempts to reach Maniscalco’s team to address the issue privately.
The cuts were alarming because, contrary to the AI-fueled fractional-penny-mess of Spotify, SiriusXM often proved a significant source of revenue for middle-class or working-class comics, the kind who headline local comedy clubs and indie shows, open for larger theater or arena acts, and generally make their living off being on the road, pushing their bodies to be in front of as many crowds across the country as possible. Royalties for SiriusXM paid comics $15 per “spin,” or airing of a track from their comedy albums. Any comedian could submit an album that was vetted and reviewed by a real person and would either be passed on or put in rotation within three months. (I am a comedian but have not submitted work to SiriusXM.)
SiriusXM’s Hollywood office and West Coast headquarters in Hollywood.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Setting aside any appeal about the lives of working comics (“Comedy is not a charity” is a ubiquitous, smooth-brain comment under these posts), squeezing out the middle class of any industry is its death knell. The consolidation of voices at the top kettles the audience into a dead end of diminishing options until we’re all paying $500 to hear a Gen Xer with the complexion of a vintage handbag stomp around in an arena, spouting the vaguest outline of a worldview. And we will be fooled into believing that’s the best, or worst, thing comedy has to offer.
Maniscalco is an incredible businessman, and a pioneer in the craft of shouting a premise and then pausing until the audience agrees it’s a punchline. He is also the face of a growing media empire, which is what a comedian must become to hold sway in the upper echelons of new media fame. The need to broadcast the comedian’s material becomes larger than what the artist alone can deliver. Teams are put in place to ensure the comedian can focus on generating jokes while they scheme new ways to metastasize its distribution and justify their own salaries. “Sebastian is so busy I’d be surprised if he even knew he has an XM channel,” comedian Nick Vatterott joked in his post. On Wednesday, Maniscalco posted an Instagram story saying that he was not part of the decision to remove Raw, but “I want to let you know that I heard you,” promised to “highlight a variety of different voices in stand up comedy” and asked for “a little time” in building out the new channel, which still glosses over the underlying issue of narrowing distribution avenues in stand-up.
There is a particularly American strain of delusion that cloaks bootlicking in the language of bootstrapping — similar to our nation’s enduring habit of voting against our own interests because it’s more alarming to accept that the vast majority of us are closer to homelessness than to ever being a billionaire. There is a tiptoeing tone of wanting to condemn the issue without offending Maniscalco himself, tainted by the dreamy assumption of the working comedian that we are, individually, closer to selling out arenas than we are to being perpetual open-micers, or road dogs. I am feeling it myself, just now — the timidity of possibly displeasing a comic who doesn’t know I exist (for the record, my career is niche but culturally relevant, and my private life is very fulfilling).
“The beauty of the Raw channel is that it was kind of this catchall for people who didn’t fit neatly into the other categories,” says comedian Jasmine Ellis, who had been receiving small, regular payouts from SiriusXM but didn’t notice she was cut from Raw because her material regularly spins on other channels, including Pure, a channel for clean comedy and one of the most popular. “But,” she adds, “a lot of incredibly talented people don’t do clean comedy. To be defined as clean you have to avoid sex and violence, obviously, but you also have to avoid politics, and having an opinion and a point of view. You have to be safe, very corporate. Raw was a channel dedicated to people who were focused on the art form of stand-up without restrictions.”
Sirius released a boilerplate statement to news outlets saying the shift is meant to address what they called an “underperforming” channel, but a venue created to showcase odd, opinionated comedy is necessarily going to have a smaller footprint than what a channel like Pure provides. “Let’s not even get into the logistics of what that channel being called ‘Pure’ implies,” Ellis adds.
Clean comedy is great (shout-out patron saint Brian Regan and Nate Bargatze, a clean arena act who has scaled his career without trampling others), but what is implied by Sirius’ reasoning — that comedy that is inherently unique or uncategorizable is not worthwhile because it has a smaller reach — shows disregard not just for the comedians but the art of stand-up itself, and a patronizing middle finger to comedy fans’ ability to shape their own tastes. The Raw channel was the linchpin of a whole ecosystem of comedy that is more accessible — literally — to fans. The mid-level comedians who tour and do shows with tickets in the $20 to $50 range found their crowds and promoted their tours through that ecosystem and marketed themselves to a class of comedy fans who, like most Americans, are squeezed for disposable entertainment dollars. They share in the struggles of their audience and keep the pool of themes available to comedians varied, interesting and up for grabs.
“Corporations doing these monopolies are keeping the audience from having access to a variety of things they would like,” says Ellis. “We can’t just keep pushing out everything interesting or new, or nothing will ever be interesting or new.”
Martinez, a writer, critic and comedian, is the author of “Aesthetical Relations.” Her stand-up hour ”Modern Times” can be seen Oct. 23 at 2220 Arts + Archives.
