A Rejection Letter

photo credit: Daniel*1977 via photopin cc
photo credit: Daniel*1977 via photopin cc

Every industry has its politics, lingo, red tape, etc. and stand-up comedy is no different. I’m not a fan of that kind of stuff but to some extent I have to “play the game.” So I won’t mention the club’s name, but I received an e-mail the other day from comedy club informing me they weren’t interested in having me perform:

Watched your video – some good stuff; but to be honest, in general, we try to have our openers work as clean as possible to the headliners aren’t coming up to a crowd that’s been ‘vulgared-out’ already.

Now, I won’t beat around the bush on this, I’m pretty new to stand-up. It wouldn’t have bothered me as much if they just thought I needed to work on my material (in fact that would have been helpful), but what the hell is this? They’d rather have wholesome than funny? Maybe they need funnier headliners and then just worry about the opener getting laughs to warm the crowd up.

The irony of the situation is that I’m not a particularly vulgar comic. I don’t use the “n word,” the “c word,”  belittle people for being homosexual, swear an obscene amount (NSFW), or any of the other things that comics do routinely when being vulgar. Sure, my comedy could be considered a little dirty at times but I don’t think it would “vulgar-out” an audience by any means. Eventually I’ll start putting clips on YouTube of my material (the video the club owner is referring to isn’t publicly available) and you can judge for yourselves (or better yet, come to a show). Until then let’s just agree that this club owner should probably re-evaluate how he/she evaluates comedy. I’ve seen some shows by this club before and the bar isn’t set all that high, even for headliners.

By Matt Aromando

Stand-up, improv, and sketch comedian.

1 comment

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *