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I've also noticed a few great stand ups posting about low ticket sales on their tours, which might be part of the same basic trend. The bigger name comics have always commanded the audiences, but perhaps it's skewing even further that way now.
There are many reasons for the landscape of comedy to be changing and it's important that things do keep moving, even if it is still a shame that bigger names might be casting a shadow on more interesting projects.
RHLSTP never really recovered from the effects of lockdown - before that, with the zenith of interviewing Palin just before lockdown, things seemed to be flying. But afterwards the live audience never came back in the same way. Obviously lockdown also did a lot to increase the competition.
Recently though I have been wondering whether Elon Musk buying Twitter was really the straw that broke the camel's back. Or again, changed the way comedy reached its audience.
For many years Twitter was such an important part of my work, for promoting gigs and fundraisers, but also for creating comedy. The International Women's Day marathons were the prime example of the latter, but it's also telling that I did all that job solely on Twitter and yet it had an incredible reach. On the first year that I properly tried to raise money for Refuge via my November 19th replies, the total was going up by £10,000 an hour (culminating in a total of something like quarter of a million pounds).
It was also a great way to promote gigs or make a push on kickstarters or introduce people to podcasts. And just do jokes so you could find an audience. It was free to use, but we were also providing free content for the site, so that seemed fair. If they'd wanted payment I wouldn't have resented it though. I had built up an audience of something like 300,000 people. That'd do me.
Once Musk changed the whole nature and business model of the site though, it became more or less useless to comedians like me. Posts no longer reached the same audience, tweets got lost or ignored and the opening of the sewer swamped out subtlety or engagement. You could, of course pay to have your tweets promoted. But not only did I not want to give Elon Musk any money, it would only mean your tweets were promoted to the kind of person who would pay for Twitter. Which I do not think was my audience.
Twitter had without doubt been my main shop window (aside from my own podcasts, but it fed into those) and now my shop window had had paint thrown on it by cunts.
There are other social media sites, but none of them with the reach or impact. In the old days I would tweet about an exciting RHLSTP guest and be able to watch the graphic of the theatre fill up as people bought tickets, but bluesky and facebook don't make much difference.
Perhaps it would have happened anyway, but now the way for comedians to gain an audience was via putting videos on instagram and tiktok. Which worked for some people better than others.
I'm all for change and I am delighted that new comedians get to break through, but again, lots of us in the middle, who were doing OK, but needed that extra push have definitely suffered.
Probably not as bad or important a consequence as it all leading to the rise of the right and the emboldenment of racists, but Elon Musk turning up with a sink and tweeting the worst joke ever written on the platform (up to that point) may have had even greater effects on comedy than that.
It's not the only reason (I am not going to be one of those people who blame anything but themselves for their dwindling powers!) and luckily there are other avenues to explore and we'll be OK, but I think I have blamed Covid when I maybe should have been blaming a more pervasive virus and one that there is no vaccine for currently.
