I got contacted recently about a performance. A guy calling himself a promoter saw me and wanted to use me for a show. I was pretty excited, but after some back and forth, found out he didn’t want to pay anything for an hour long show. As an entertainer, you have to watch out for titles like “promoter.” I could walk into any club or bar in America and call myself a promoter because I once posted a show link on Facebook. “I’m a marketing specialist. I also made pork and beans, so I’m a chef. I then told my buddy how to beat beat Deathstroke on Batman: Arkham Origins, so I’m basically a crisis negotiator.”
Comics are probably the worst, sadly. I’ve met more people who have claimed to have worked with Sam Kinison than he possibly could have met in two years of doing comedy.
There needs to be a Carfax for the comic industry, but trust me, if you do it long enough, you don’t need one. You just know. When I did a show in Indiana several years ago, a guy told me he used to open for Kinison. Then he pulled out a piece of paper and read several jokes he had printed off a Google search. He didn’t even have the decency to memorize the jokes that I had heard before my tenth birthday.
Of course, real promoters and bookers have been bombarded by these truth ignoring poop smears for decades, so it makes it that much harder to get anyone to believe my credentials, which are rather menial. I’ve featured for John Witherspoon and Jim Breuer, opened for Harlan Williams and Pauly Shore, once headlined a high school reunion in Zanesville, have performed in a senior center, at a 50th anniversary, before a movie at a theater, and multiple bowling alleys. See how fast that petered out? Did I tell you about the time I worked with Sam Kinison?