Constant Comedy – Back in 1990, I spent a couple weeks that July working as a talent runner for the Just For Laughs festival. In particular, as one of six talent runners for their flagship galas, who were ensconced in the backstage area of the St. Denis Theatre. Our mission was to make sure that during rehearsals and show time, the comedians whom we were assigned to were accommodated to and taken care of. For me, I had the good fortune of having to look after and cater to an impressive line-up of comics, including Tommy Davidson, Martin Mull, Tom Kenny (the voice of Spongebob Squarepants) and the late Bill Hicks.
The job not only meant some good pocket money, but also a number of after show perks, which included going to late night shows and after parties. It was during the latter that I got to witness the cable comedy wars. During that year, a nearly dog-eat-dog struggle broke out to see what two new 24/7 cable comedy channels would prevail and survive for the hearts, minds, laughs and viewership of diehard comedy fans in the U.S. And that battle was waged at the 1990 Just For Laughs festival in a rather indirect, interesting manner: through giveaway promotional t-shirts.
It’s a well-known insider fact that no matter what arts and culture festival you attend as an industry person, a performer, a journalist or festival employee, there is a common denominator between them: they all like free festival or industry-related swag, and lots of it. This was no exception at Just For Laughs 31 years ago. They were trying to vie for our attention through free t-shirts. In one corner was The Comedy Channel, which was owned by HBO and went on the air in 1989; in the other corner was HA! The Comedy Network, owned by MTV and hit the airwaves in the spring of 1990. And right in the middle was Showtime, the U.S. cable network that was broadcasting Just For Laughs’ Saturday night gala live on the network, which at the same time was launching a new feature called “Showtime Jokes”.
I was lucky enough to get shirts from all three of them. I wore them a lot throughout that summer and beyond; however, based on the designs, it was hard to decide which one would win this war. The Comedy Channel shirt sported its large “C” logo on the front; HA! displayed its eye-catching multi-colored logo on the front, which featured a Jaws-typed Great White shark with its jaws wide open and a speech balloon coming out of its mouth that uttered a “HA!” in large black block letters; the Showtime Jokes shirt was my favorite; the front had on the left side a medium-sized illustration of a potato wearing a set of Groucho Marx glasses playing rim shots on a drum, with the logo splayed across the upper back of the shirt.
It wasn’t until a year later when I found out who won the cable comedy/t-shirt wars. During an afternoon lull in the mezzanine of the Delta Hotel (which was Just For Laughs’ official hotel from 1988-2006), as I was taking a break from manning the booth for the soon-to-be-constructed Museum of Humour (where I was working as a researcher), I saw a small pile of t-shirts that were individually wrapped in plastic, and were left outside the door of one of the hotel’s main ballrooms that was used for the festival’s not-to-be-missed after parties. While nobody was watching, I took a sneak peek of what design was on the shirt. It was the name of the victorious comedy channel in nondescript lettering and coloured in bright pink so that it would attract attention. The name that was printed on that shirt? “Comedy Central”.
It’s been 30 years since that revelation came to me thanks to a giveaway t-shirt. Since then, Comedy Central has been the dominant player on cable TV when it came to original comedy programming (like “South Park” and “The Daily Show”) and countless stand-up specials (before Netflix began to nip at their heels in a big way).
Art Bell, the man who put the channel together and was by Comedy Central’s side during its growing pains and early meteoric triumphs, recalls the birth of a major cable TV network in his recently-published memoir Constant Comedy.
During the early 80s, Bell was a mid-level executive at the constantly growing cable channel that was HBO, first as a marketing analyst, and then with a position at its New Business Development department, where he was tasked as part of a team to develop and test launch a new cable TV channel. Raised on comedy since he was in grade school (his favorites included the Marx Brothers, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen and Mad magazine), and practicing his comedy writing chops as a student at the Wharton Business School writing sketches for the annual “Wharton Follies” stage revue, Bell realized HBO’s potential as a purveyor of stand-up comedy (especially with its annual star making Young Comedians Special and the Comic Relief annual fundraising broadcast). With the growing popularity of stand-up comedy and the increasing number of comedy clubs opening up across the U.S. at that time, Bell realized that having HBO create a separate 24-hour comedy channel would be the next logical step. He wanted the new channel’s format to be based on the “That’s Entertainment!” and MTV models, in which a variety of classic movie and TV comedy clips would play on a rotating basis.
However, when he first pitched the idea to HBO’s head of Original Programming, Bridget Potter, she flatly rejected the idea, in which she told him “Arthur, you’re not a programmer. You know nothing about comedy and very little about television…”
But when Bell brought the idea to Michael Fuchs, the chairman of HBO, he warmed up to his idea. Shortly afterwards, he was teamed up with Dick Beahrs, Executive V.P. of Sales for Cinemax; Fran Shea, V.P. of On-Air Promotion for HBO; and Stu Smiley, HBO’s V.P. of Comedy. And that kicked off the dizzying roller coaster ride that would provide the genesis of the Comedy Channel, which would later be renamed Comedy Central.
…And all of this had to be done in six months, in time for its official launch in November of 1989. The first half of the book is pre-occupied with the channel’s difficult birth and its growing pains. Besides the usual clash of egos, there were the battles over copyrights for the use of the clips for rebroadcast, taping promos, getting talent to appear in front of the camera, and hammering out the details and logistics that would result in Comedy Central’s first regular program “Short Attention Span Theatre” (SAST). However, the biggest headache that the Comedy Channel/Comedy Central team had to deal with was the impending debut of a rival 24-hour cable comedy channel that was being developed by MTV; it was to be called HA! The TV Comedy Channel, and it was set to launch on April 1, 1990.
But that’s not all. The book also focuses on the behind-the-scenes look at the development of the concepts and shows that would put Comedy Central on the map during its first five years, such as the live comic commentary of President George H.W. Bush’s State of the Union Address in 1992 (which led to the creation of The Daily Show); Comedy Central’s own “Contract with America” in 1995; Mystery Science Theatre 3000; and Bill Maher’s pre-Real Time politically-oriented talk show “Politically Incorrect”, in which Maher boldly proclaimed when Comedy Central’s then- Head of Programming Mitch Semel asked him where the funny would be in the show: “I’m the funny. But I won’t compete with my guests. I won’t dive in with a joke at every opportunity just to get a laugh. I want the audience to get something out of this other than just me being funny.”
Finally, Bell gives the reader a cold, stark look at how fierce and cut throat the entertainment industry can be within its executive suites and boardrooms, when he was unceremoniously let go from his job in the mid-90s by the channel’s newly-appointed CEO Doug Herzog, who previously worked as an executive at MTV, as a sort-of purge of HBO staffers who were with Comedy Central from the early days. His account contains all the insincerity, cold-heartedness and detachment that goes with the hurt of being let go from any job for the impunity of people who, according to Bell, “perform their work seriously, passionately, and effectively.” It makes for sobering reading.
Constant Comedy is a penetrating look at what it took, especially all that sacrifice and energetic effort, towards creating a cable TV channel from scratch that still creates an impact within the comedy world, from the man who built it from the ground up and took all the slings and arrows that went with it. However, in retrospect, Art Bell had this to say about the mighty comedy channel he fathered:
“Comedy Central created and showcased thousands of hours of innovative television comedy. And most importantly to me, Comedy Central became what I intended: the center of the comedy universe. And that was the idea.”
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