![]() What happens when those phenomena collide? How does the industry’s more systematic extraction of specwork make sense (or not!) of comedy’s excess? Let’s climb part of the surplus-comedy pyramid to find out-from crowd-work clips on TikTok to an improvised network sitcom to Chris Rock’s most recent Netflix special, Selective Outrage. On the other hand, the comic arts have seemingly always required plenty of surplus and slack to find the funny. On the one hand, the industry has tried to shift as much risk as possible to its workers, even if that results in the vast wastage of specwork. Rather than scale up toward the grander issues that critics such as Lane-McKinley, Lauren Berlant, and Sianne Ngai have highlighted, I want to ask a more local, more mediated question. Yet comedy as a creative endeavor verging on art remains dependent on almost ungovernable moments and utopian glimmers, as Madeline Lane-McKinley has detailed in her recent book Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times (2022). Everyone does it, all the time, and under its aegis everything is, or ideally should be, a pilot that will launch an unstoppable money machine. ![]() Alongside gatekept “craftwork” and IP-strip-mining “brandwork” lies the “vast, micromedia speculation stock market” of specwork. And specwork has become a bulwark of the system, transmuting the work of aspirant creators-particularly on user-generated content (UGC) platforms such as YouTube and TikTok-into the raw materials the industry can extract, process, and profit from. ![]() Work done “on spec” is, by definition, flexible, unsolicited, and unpaid. But somehow, at the largest scale, the ragged business of comedy serves as a cornerstone of contemporary streamed entertainment.Īll this other comedy, from the ancillary to the not-quite-ancillary, forms part of the domain of entertainment industry labor that John Thornton Caldwell calls “specwork.” In his new book Specworld: Folds, Faults, and Fractures in Embedded Creator Industries (2023), Caldwell contends that the formerly limited domain of speculation-of artistic innovation on the one hand and the “spec script” on the other-has nearly swallowed the industry. This way lies the madness of calculations that produce false declarations like “The World Cup causes eleventy billion dollars in lost productivity.” Yet there is a comedy business, and in order to make money in it, aspiring comics have to do so many things that are unpaid or worse: open mics, improv classes, workshopping, beta-testing, rehearsing-in-public, marketing, “guesting,” and a host of other gift-economy rituals. How much monetized comedy is generated in a week? How much more could there be? How much surplus comedy is generated in the process of reaching the current level? How much more would have to be generated to reach a financial maximum? Does surplus comedy only include nonmonetized comedy or does it include all attempts at comedy, even those that fail? Conversely, does monetizable comedy include the unintentionally funny? Does it include the funny aside in a horror movie? Can you securitize dad jokes?
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