The last five years have been a reckoning for Hollywood. As the industry continues to consolidate into fewer and fewer studios, it’s also placed more undue burden on younger artists, the ones who should be replenishing the ecosystem with new ideas, styles, and sensibilities. What happened to all the movie stars? Why are there no more comedies? Where are the blockbusters? The so-called “democratization of art” of the smartphone and digital media revolutions was supposed to give new voices a chance to compete. But the game has been rigged against the players. Now, in order to stand out, comics have to work the algorithms so that they can stay atop the algorithms—even though the rewards are fleeting and generally unpaid. They think they’re working toward something, but all they’re doing is acting as unpaid interns for Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai. It’s no way to make a life. Chris Gethard should know.
In a new essay in Vulture, Gethard, who went from “boy wonder of the New York improv scene” to “an old DIY uncle to the young artists,” recalls his early days, making a revolutionary public access variety show during what’s been called the second comedy boom. In the late ’00s and 2010s, comedians had several ways to gain exposure and real-world industry experience they could carry forward. Now, the comedians are working the algorithms to stay in front of people who don’t buy tickets to their shows. It’s a closed loop: Feed the algorithm, stay in the algorithm. Gethard sums it up best in the intro to his piece, comparing working the algorithm to a coal mining town, where the “platform” is owned by the company and it only accepts money they create:
“For coal miners about a century ago, the company store was this idea that the entire town is owned by the coal mine: You can come work in the mine, and when you come to this town, you rent your house from the coal mine, you buy your food from a store supplied by the coal mine, and you are paid in what is called scrip, which only has value in the context of the coal mine. I do not want to co-opt the struggles of coal miners, but I think making stuff for the algorithm is the closest thing I’ve seen in entertainment. From the big corporate players to the other options at our disposal, I don’t think that any of them feel like a pathway for an artist in the way that existed 20, ten, or even five years ago.”
The collapse of comedy’s middle class is not so different from what one Jimmy Kimmel Show writer, Jack Allison, warned of in 2018, when the streaming wars ushered in new, innovative ways to keep writers and actors underpaid and overworked. That was nearly a decade ago, and the problems have only gotten worse. Gethard opines that despite having roles and a writing job on some of television’s most beloved shows, he lost his health insurance a year after his son was born and took a day job. In some respects, these are the problems the Hollywood strikes were supposed to fix. Unfortunately, the backlash against the social and labor movements of the last decade has sent many two steps back toward greater consolidation of power and hostility toward the arts. Still, Gethard is hopeful:
I want to see who establishes a new, viable, actually DIY pathway that divests itself completely of the algorithms. Whoever starts thinking, Man, we need to rebuild this, will be the next group of artists that define what the next phase is. […] Please, young artists, find and build the new and more societally healthy infrastructure. And guess what? They’re going to find a way to take that, too. But they’re moving the pieces on the chessboard right now, and I think we, as artists, are chasing the terms they’re dictating to us.
The old DIY uncle is right. Read the essay “Are We Participating in a Thing That Is Not Even Working?” at Vulture.
