But you have to understand that it gets frustrating, right? I'm not saying it's wrong for you to speculate, but think of something you really know about. And then think of a horde of people who know nothing barging into your workplace and saying, "hey, I bet what you do is like THIS, right? Have you tried THIS? Why…

"in the podcast, Besser questions whether the UCB should not have stand
up shows on peak nights—nights where there are shows in which stand ups
can get paid big"

Okay — that's fair enough. You ARE speculating based on ignorance, which is annoying; one of the problems with "comedians" like Metzger publicly airing their dirty laundry is that it leads to fans who think they know what the business must be like. But yeah, that's not your fault. And the best counter to it isn't…

You don't get the whole "it takes time to build an act" thing, though. You get the "comedians regularly write jokes for other comedians" thing, for some reason, even though it hasn't been true since the '50s (with very few exceptions).

You don't work in the comedy business. You are speculating based on ignorance.

Comedy clubs almost invariably pay a flat fee. Some smaller/irregular venues will pay a cut of the door, but that's far more the exception than the rule. The reason being that, if you have to travel to do a weekend of shows, you're going to need to know what you're making up front. Also, the majority of established…

Exactly. People pay to see the headliner. Everyone else on the bill — not so much. (A lot of them, not even the headliner, unless he/she is a big name.) And if you're normally a headliner, and you're doing a short set, that means you're doing new material, and the club expects you to do new material, and you're in no…

It highlights the difference between improv and a specific WING of stand-up comedy. Metzger is one of those Opie and Anthony meatheads — I'm sure that for him, the ability to bully the UCB was a large part of the appeal.

Yeah, but this guy's a troll. An incompetent one, too. So you have to consider that.

Um… most of the young comedians I know have jobs. None of the young comedians I know work as waiters at comedy venues. (I've known a few people who worked as waiters, waitresses, cooks, etc., but they worked at actual places. During the day. How could you do comedy if you worked at a place that was only open at night?…

Actually, I'd say at least 75% of professional stand-up comics are either in New York or LA. You have a few regional headliners who live in medium-sized cities — SF, Boston, Chicago, presumably Atlanta? — and perform at shows around there. But for the most part, comedians are based in New York or LA, and that hasn't…

I'd say 90% of comedy shows in major cities either don't pay performers, or pay them a token amount ($20?) If you want to support yourself doing comedy, get famous enough that people out of town want to see you, and go out of town.

The problem with that is, open mics are shit. Sure, there's occasionally an open mic that's not an absolute soul-sucking nightmare, but for the most part, open mics are shit. You need a whole range of shows between an open mic where any idiot off the street can go up and a show staffed solely by professional comics,…

You… don't know a lot of comedians, do you?

Ah. So in that case, EVERYTHING means fumbling about looking for phrasings, in a tedious spectacle that they presumably could have avoided if they had actually sat down to get the material right beforehand.

As someone who's been doing stand-up for a decade, I've always found the opposite to be true of comedians. A lot of comics will take a small show or an unpaid show as an opportunity to work on new material. And for a lot of THOSE comics, working on new material means fumbling about looking for phrasings, in a tedious…

Yeah, but you could make that argument the other way too, right? Subtract the 70-80 hour weeks, the last-minute changes, some of the behind-the-scenes tension, etc., and you end up with a show running more smoothly, which has its own benefits?

Um, why? With no other evidence, I'd say 50-75%.

If I believed it, I'd say it. If the quality of the show had dipped substantially, odds are I'd stay quiet.

Well, there was that whole thing last year, when they had to rotate 3 shows to fit them into 2 time slots, and of course the fans interpreted it as "oh no Community is cancelled!" Even though they kept making episodes, even though there was no way they even could have filled those time slots with the amount of 30 Rock…