What if a toxic culture of secrecy is intentional?

So far, I’ve been approaching the question of transparency from the perspective that everyone is making a good faith effort. But that’s quite frequently not the case.

In fact, that’s why I’ve been putting this last one off - it’s the one where I stop being idealistic and face the ugly truth.. So take a deep breath and let’s face it together.

Toxic narcissists use a culture of secrecy, informants and retaliation to try and keep you too isolated to even be sure you’re getting taken advantage of and too off balance to do anything about it.

And of course, comedy - like many other arts - is fertile ground for those kinds of people to run amok, unchecked. After all, where else are you going to perform? So everyone just has to suck it up until they (hopefully someday) are able to move on from it. (Of course, the next rung up the ladder may be no more sane or reasonable!) Or do they….

Pay transparency with your peers

It’s perfectly reasonable to ask someone working the same club as you or a gig you are considering doing how much they got paid.

Before we get into the bigger, scarier ways to share important information with your peers, let's talk about unemotional numbers. It’s perfectly reasonable to ask someone working the same club as you or a gig you are considering doing how much they got paid. And you should feel confident in sharing that information with others. They are facts. Observable, objective facts. There's no shades of grey, misinterpretation or “sides” when it comes to how much cold hard cash you get and if you get it on time.

Anyone trying to pressure you to keep it to yourself is doing something shady.

General transparency with your peers

We all know that feeling of sharing a bad experience with a group of people you know and trust only to have a stranger or vague acquaintance walk into the room. Your brain immediately conjures up the worst case scenario of it getting back to the person in question and then somehow blackballing your entire career.

But ask yourself, do you even care if it gets back to them? Do you still want or need to work there after your experience?

And most people don't have the kind of power to influence anything beyond their own tiny sphere, no matter what they try and project. There’s no secret club owner’s book club or group chat, most of them despise each other and it can often raise your profile with one to alienate another. Ah, spite, great way to run a business. And bookers aren’t brunching every week to talk shit about you, either.

Snitches never get stitches

The unfortunate truth is that a lot of behavior that would be diagnosable as narcissistic or psychopathic gets rewarded. We don’t live in a fairy tale where the bad guy loses in the end. So, yes, you do have to be a bit cautious in who you share things with.

But consider expanding your comfort circle just a bit wider in terms of who you are willing to warn away or steer towards certain things.

Empathy and Memory

We’re hardwired to remember bad things more easily than good ones. But I see a lot of great, wonderful men continue to work with terrible scumbags who have caused professional or physical harm to women. If you’re white or straight, it may not strike as deep a chord in your emotional brain to hear about racism or homophobia.

I get it. There’s so many terrible people doing terrible things all the time, it’s hard to keep up! I’ve certainly run into cases where I gave someone a chance and then was reminded of some shit thing they did that I absolutely had already heard about and then just forgot.

It’s not fun to keep an active file in your brain of “Bad People To Not Work With” but it’s probably worth it to keep track of that info somehow.

The Endgame

So ideally, what happens when you share freely is that a club or producer or promoter will lose access to most or all of the comedians at a certain level, that will impact the bottom line and they’ll be forced to up their game.

I think we all know there are too many people who would throw a drunk street team member who has never told a joke on stage just to make sure they could hawk their bottom shelf liquor to gullible tourists. But there are enough people who actually give a shit in this business that this sort of freeze out will give them food for thought.

And I know there’s a thousand reasons we’ll “never be able to form a union” but you can organize small scale protests!

Organize a group of comedians to agree to not submit avails at a certain club all on the same week.
Organize a critical mass of comedians to each send a form letter detailing the complaint and remedy a la those “click here to write your Senator” campaigns
Keep “The Good Ones” in mind for future opportunities - you aren’t just the best resource for your peers to get more work, you’re the best resource for us adjacents too!

I know I’m very guilty of this, but I think we all too often just assume “things are how they are and there’s nothing I can do to change it” but I’ve seen comedians be able to effect change and I’ve been able to, myself, despite heavy headwinds against it.

Random Links

Hoo boy, lotta patriarchal nonsense to unpack, but also just a silly fun fact that at one point in time men were terrified women would stab them with their hatpins!
Man, I can’t stop laughing at the NJ Senator who received gold bars in exchange for spying and as bribes and then googled “How much is one kilo of gold worth”
You may have already seen it on TikTok, but here’s actual science people explaining that aluminum is antiperspirant is perfectly fine! Or at least no worse than the non-aluminum kind.