Monday is Labor Day, so let’s say a word about comedy as labor.
Every working comic is a small business (with no HR department). They are an independent contractor at the club, sometimes an employee in a writers’ room, a sole proprietor at the merch table, an employer in the recording studio, sometimes all in the same week. Most workplace protections attach to employees, which means much of comedy operates outside of those protections.
That isn’t a complaint. It is a job description. It means whatever protections a comic gets are essentially the ones they build for themselves, through contracts (and through reading, understanding, and negotiating those contracts), a confirmation text, their business entity, the insurance they carry, their gig log.
So today I am raising a glass to the road comics driving home from a weekend of shows while the rest of us sleep or grill. The funny business is a business, and the people in it work, hard.