It's not like he sends someone to walk out on the stage the night of the show to tell the audience who paid and traveled to the venue, "Sorry, Schaub's not here and there's no show so go home." If you're not Chappelle or Burr and you're not a guaranteed sell out at every venue in every market, you book shows and you watch the ticket sales and if the tickets move then you do the show and if they don't you maybe reschedule or you combine dates or worst-case scenario you scrap the show. All of it is done as far out from the actual date as possible. It's by no means uncommon practice specific only to Schaub as further proof that he's the worst person ever.
Knowing more ≠ Caring more. You can go ahead and project that onto me if you want, but I just know what I'm talking about and have decided to come in here and offer some informed opinions for the uninformed haters to chew on.
And to reiterate, I don't think that Schaub's very funny. He's still incredibly green and his special is undoubtedly clunky with tremendous room for improvement. My only issue is with the people who actually go out of their way to say that they've watched all of 75 seconds of Schaub's entire stand-up career
and then try to speak authoritatively on his comedy. If you don't like him and you won't watch him, that's fine. Like you said, your taste is your taste. But you can't watch a minute of a dude on stage and then try to act like you're the expert. You can still hate him and think that he's unfunny, but if you don't think that there's evidence of improvement between his first special and his second special, then you have no clue what you're talking about, or, even more likely, you're just hating with no interest in actually getting a clue.
First, I
asked if it was resentment/envy fueling the hatred, meaning are his haters just mad/jealous. If you personally aren't jealous/envious of him and if you personally don't hate him, fair enough. But clearly he's inspired quite vitriolic hatred from the Internet and your own assessment of the situation seemed to paint a picture of people jealous of his success lashing out because he's more fortunate than they are.
Privilege is - or should be - privilege tout court. But whatever. I won't harp on conceptual specificity. As for the PF Chang's thing, I'm pretty sure that comes from him talking about how someone not in the business hating on him or trying to give him advice to change what he's doing - when what he's doing has been extremely successful and profitable for him - is silly. Like how we make fun of keyboard warriors on here. If a keyboard warrior works at a PF Chang's and is trying to criticize Ngannou, there's a point where you have to draw the line and say, "You work at fucking PF Chang's and Ngannou's the champ." That's not coming from a place of privilege where the "lower class" are spit on as scum. But, again, whatever. The tables will always be tilted against Schaub and no benefits of the doubt will be extended to him. To your last point, your Kardashian comparison is perhaps more apt, although even if you hate Schaub, he was never famous for being famous, he did actually work to achieve things. But at this point, yeah, I guess they're in similar boats, consistently hated by ignorant people who know/care nothing about what they're actually doing with their lives. For the record, I don't care at all about any of the Kardashians, but I'd find Kardashian haters just as sad as Schaub haters. It's being a hater that I find so puzzling.
This is the least charitable interpretation of this possible. See above.
So if it's funny, it's not racist, but if it's not funny, it's racist? If a joke doesn't land, it just means that it isn't funny. It's fine if you don't find that shit funny - although exaggerating if not straight-up inventing shit to tell stories in a comedy set is par for the course, so if there's a difference between Schaub fictionalizing that story about the UFC doctor and Segura fictionalizing his Wu-Tang story, I'll be interested to hear it - but leveling charges of racism should have a much higher threshold.
It's the classic "Necessity is the mother of invention." The subscription streaming model has been
the way you do things in the comedy world for so long, and so it's of course still deeply entrenched in that industry. You still want Netflix, you still want to lesser degrees HBO or Showtime. I'm not saying that comedians have all decided to say no to everything except YouTube. I'm saying that it's no longer Netflix or nothing. Comedians have realized that there are other ways to find success, and so a shit ton of people have started uploading specials to YouTube, initially because it was their only option but increasingly because they're finding it the best option, and "best" meaning the most effective way to get their content to their fans and the most productive way to get their content to potential new fans and increase ticket sales. So from people like Schulz and Gillis to Mark Normand, Joe List, Sam Morrill, Akaash Singh, Yannis Pappas, DC Benny, they've all put shit out on YouTube either by themselves or with All Things Comedy or what have you and it's provided tremendous bumps, and bumps that they're starting to realize are likely bigger than the bumps that they would've gotten even from a Netflix or a Showtime.
Within the last year or so, there's been a groundswell. YouTube isn't just for the losers who can't hack it in the majors. As the subscription streaming model starts to break apart, YouTube is poised to be the next comedy hot spot. That's why Distefano is constantly joking about him FINALLY getting a Netflix special as the company announces that it's starting to die, and it's why he's said he's either going to put most of the clips up on YouTube anyway or just upload an entirely separate special so that he can have one on Netflix and one on YouTube.
Independently producing and distributing your own content on your own platform is becoming the new model.
