Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Netflix & the Rise of Comedy Specials

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

Once upon a time, 1-hour comedy specials were a rare bird. Will the big investments Netflix has made in stand-up comedy backfire? Jason Zinoman, comedy critic for The New York Times, weighs in on the business of comedy.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Shannon Maldonado. I'm the founder of Yowie, a gift shop from the lens of artists and handmade objects. I chose Shopify because when I was testing other platforms, it was definitely one of the most user-friendly. It was important to me to think about where we would be in the future. All of the tools for reading your sales, like planning inventory, they're just right there on your dashboard. For anyone starting a small business, the biggest thing I can tell you is it doesn't have to be perfect. Shopify can help you build upon it. Start your free trial on Shopify.com. Chris Hill With The Motley Fool Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill. What have you been binge-watching lately? There's a lot to choose from out there with

so many documentaries, award-winning dramas, and action movie franchises. Then there's stand-up comedy. Netflix in particular has so many stand-up comedy offerings, some have wondered if it will lead to a repeat of the industry imploding like it did in the early 1990s. Jason Zinnemann is the comedy critic for The New York Times. And when we spoke a couple of years ago, he shared why he is not concerned about the business of stand-up comedy. There was a time when getting an HBO special was, you know, the pinnacle. And now, it's the netflix special and you know uh you could criticize netflix by putting out so much you know almost once a week uh and you know comedy central and cso and hbo are still putting

them out that they do seem like less of an event than um than what we had in hbo um where when if you're just getting an hbo just just just the hbo stamp of approval meant something um and which you raises this question that are we in a situation like the first comedy boom in the late 80s, early 90s, where this glut is about to, we're heading towards a comedy bust. There's too much comedy. And I actually don't think so. I think there's differences between these two booms. And the main one is, it's the difference between real estate and the internet. The reason that the first comedy boom bust was that people built you know there was a a a chuckle fort in every town there was all these comedy clubs and every and there weren't enough there wasn't enough good

talent to support all these places um so audiences were seeing a lot of bad comedy um and uh the you know people stopped people sort of tuned out um the the but the pool of people who are willing to go to a comedy club and and have the two drink minimum and see the comedy is a lot smaller than the audience that is gonna watch a streaming stand-up special um you know this like these this dave chappelle special you got got 40 million dollars or whatever for it it's a huge hit um it gets a huge amount of media attention and i can tell from in just covering comedy the appetite for, in a time when the glow of movie stars seemed to be dimming, I would say the glow of stand-up still seemed to be pretty bright.

If you want to read more about the topic of comedy, check out Jason Zinneman's great book about David Letterman, entitled Letterman, The Last Giant of Late Night. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening! We'll see you next time! Thank you.