Getting the Last Laugh
WHEN I RENT a car, I don’t want to have a conversation with the rental car clerk. I just wanna get my keys and go,” said comedian Michael Ian Black on stage at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater in New York City last November. “But I guess the rental car companies believe that customers enjoy it when the clerks engage in conversation. So they keep asking the same annoying question—‘So, what brings you to town today?’” The crowd titters.
“Look, I’m Jewish,” Black says. “As a Jew, when I hear ‘What brings you to town today?’ that sounds suspiciously like [imitating a Nazi voice] ‘May I see your papers?’”
As the audience erupts in laughter, its reaction captured by a couple of the black-clad camera operators, Brian Volk-Weiss is standing backstage, enjoying it all. He’s the co-founder and president of Comedy Dynamics, a company that is perfecting a risky business model within the industry, and along the way helping reshape how comedy specials get created and distributed in the emerging on-demand world. He almost crashed Dynamics before it got off the ground, when he invested nearly $300,000 to produce, and own, a special that, at one point, had no buyers. But tonight, he’s in his element, presiding over his company’s latest production.
Black’s show is being taped for his new, hourlong standup special, Noted Expert, which has already been licensed in an exclusive “first-window” deal to the cable channel Epix. Volk-Weiss is thrilled that so many people are here in attendance. He remembers a time in 2013 when he produced a standup special in Minneapolis for comic Tom Segura and could barely fill the theater. “We had to run around to all the local bars and give away tickets to get people to come in,” says Volk-Weiss, 40, smiling. Tonight, the house is packed and howling. It’s music—and money—to Volk-Weiss’s ears. Comedy Dynamics, based in Burbank, California, is footing the bill for Black’s show, including his fee and the costs of postproduction, editing, and delivery to Epix. When Epix’s license to air the show expires, Volk-Weiss will relicense the
