The Importance of Timing in Comedy

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Is comedy becoming just a thing of highlights? And is that in the longer run good for comedy, bad for comedy? Well, it's taking everybody's attention span on everything, right? I've always found it hard to sit through an hour of somebody's comedy unless he was, you know, a classic Richard Pryor thing like that. Louis C.K. and Chappelle and Chris Rock still do take their time with their bits. They spin out long things and they're still on top. If you take a top YouTuber and put that person on stage at a comedy club, how does that person fare? Very badly.

Tyler sat down at Comedy Cellar with owner Noam Dworman to talk about the ever-changing stand-up comedy scene, including the perfect room temperature for stand-up, whether comedy can still shock us, the effect on YouTube and TikTok, the transformation of jokes into bits, the importance of tight seating, why he doesn’t charge higher prices for his shows, the differences between the LA and NYC scenes, whether good looks are an obstacle to success, the oldest comic act he still finds funny, how comedians have changed since he started running the Comedy Cellar in 2003, and what government regulations drive him crazy. They also talk about how 9/11 got Noam into trouble, his early career in music, the most underrated guitarist, why live music is dead in NYC, and what his plans are for expansion.

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Recorded March 15th, 2023.

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