Title Stand-up comedy industry
Thesis 1: From an industrial organization point of view, the stand-up comedy market structure in the 1980s can be characterized as an oligopoly
“The structure of a market, thus how a market is functioning, “ is the concept behind the industrial organization theory”. The Industrial Organization (IO) theory is about, how a structure of a market has an influence on the strategy and decision making of a company.” 1 The theory therefore focusses on the market wherein the company operates and links the decisions of the company to the market. In the economic theory of industrial organisation, an industry can be defined according to several different criteria.2 According to Throsby, there are three
…show more content…
In 1975 such a diachronic dialectic was found for the first time in de music industry by Peterson and Berger. They saw an active interaction/connection between small and large firms, which influenced the market. While the large firms were competing with each other, niches opened up and were filled by smaller firms.
But unlike the music industry and the American film industry (Mezias & Mezias, 2000), there is not a diachronic dialectic between small firms and large firms in the stand-up comedy industry.
According to the resource-partitioning theory, a theory conceptualized by Caroll in 1985, this dialectic exists when the big firms are competing with each other. Just a few of these generalists survive and they move forward toward the centre of the market. Because of this movement small pockets of resources open up, where smaller firms can thrive (Vermeulen & Bruggeman, 2000).
However, in the stand-up comedy industry it is difficult to underestimate large and small firms, instead we distinguish comedians and the media they use to reach their audience. Hence it weren’t large firms causing the opening of the niches for smaller firms. Instead it has been the increase of the use of media over the past couple decades that has stimulated the creative industry of stand-up comedy.
The last fifty years booms
Popular culture is the artistic and creative expression in entertainment and style that appeals to society as whole. It includes music, film, sports, painting, sculpture, and even photography. It can be diffused in many ways, but one of the most powerful and effective ways to address society is through film and television. Broadcasting, radio and television are the primary means by which information and entertainment are delivered to the public in virtually every nation around the world, and they have become a crucial instrument of modern social and political organization. Most of today’s television programming genres are derived from earlier media such as stage, cinema and radio. In the area of comedy, sitcoms have proven
In the field of microeconomics, the market structure of an organization determines the performance of the organization within the industry. There are different types of market structures practiced today. Among these market structures include the perfect competition structure (Miller, Vandome, & McBrewster, 2009). In perfect competition structure, the competition happens between numerous small firms against each other. In this practice, there is optimum production by the firms socially at the minimum cost per unit possible. There is no barrier to entry in this structure, hence new companies and organizations can join easily. The
People often think that comedians have a straight forward job: they practically just have to joke about a topic and make people laugh. But not many realize the brutality comedians have to face when they are “forced” to change their acts according to the setting and diverse range of their audience. In the article “That’s Not Funny”, the author Caitlin Flanagan, explains on how comedians face an uphill talk when they perform in colleges and how they have to change their scripts to make sure they don’t offend students on the basis of gender, religion etc. Colleges are paying comedians big money and that’s the main reason comedians still perform even when they can’t express themselves freely through comedy. In this essay, I will explore how Caitlin argues about the unjust conditions interested comedians face who want to perform in college campuses. Caitlin builds the credibility of her work by stating strong and valid points, different types of arguments and rhetoric situations.
-In the 1700’s a new middle class emerged. Mass print became a thing as well. Every day people started to purchase art works to display in their homes. It was a way for them to express their status and national patriotism. The diversity in patrons had a great impact on the arts of the 15th – 18th centuries. With new patrons and the demand for art work, artists were able to capture more than just religious scenes. They were able to create landscapes and everyday life in their work. Artists were commissioned by the new middle class to create art work that they were able to hang in their houses. For instance, artist Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting “A Philosopher Giving a Lecture at the Orrey (1765).”
Oligopolies have been around ever since there is trade. However, it has only recently gained grounds in this age of globalisation. Never before has oligopolistic competition been so fiercely contested across so many industries.
Kevin Hart was born on July 6, 1979 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is known for being a comedian doing stand-up comedy and for being an actor. He was raised by his mother, Nancy, and is the youngest of two boys. His father, Henry Hart, battled with cocaine addiction and was in and out of jail, so he was rarely around during Kevin Hart’s childhood. However, since Kevin’s childhood, his father has cleaned himself up and the two of them have reconnected. Kevin Hart took to comedy as a way to relieve himself from all of his pain that he endured during his childhood. He used humor as a coping mechanism to make everyone laugh about the situations that he has been through. “The jokes,” he has said on his stand-up, “come from a real experience” (biography.com editors). As a kid, he was really into stand-up comedy and comedians. Hart named Chris Tucker and J.B. Smoove as the most influential comedians to him. Soon after he graduated from high school, he had begun to work as a stand-up comedian. He traveled to New York City, Brockton, Massachusetts and Los Angeles. He started off doing stand-up comedy in small clubs with his stage name as ‘Lil’ Kev the Bastard’. He won several amateur stand-up performances, which encouraged him to perform in clubs around the country. ABC gave Hart his own sitcom called The Big House, which was cancelled after only six episodes. Hart did not sit with that loss, instead he rebounded quickly. He starred in various movies such as Soul Plane, The
It is not unseasonable to believe that because stereotypes are appearing so commonly in comedy, they will reinforce those stereotypes rather than help society rid itself from them. Extinguishing stereotypes is impossible. Researchers have determined that the creation of stereotypes is a natural function of the brain (Paul, par. 2). In attempt to make light of a problematic issues, comedians use stereotypes to denounce stereotypes. The first thing that we should understand is that comedy is comedy. This does not mean that it should not be taken seriously as frequently advised. Comedy should be embraced and takes seriously but not in the
The difference between the intended meaning of media texts and what the audience actually perceives can be shockingly different. Producers of media can do everything possible to force audiences to experience their work in the way they want them to, but in the end they still take away many different meanings even within the same audience. Stuart Hall outlines this in his encoding and decoding model. One of the most apparent examples of this is the television show South Park. The television show South Park is a media text with the producers’ preferred meaning of being decoded as joke or as being satire, but many audience members take an oppositional stance of taking it seriously. This is clear from the examples of controversy when South Park aired episodes focused on Scientology, red-headed people, and Islam. Through these examples it is demonstrated that the producers of media have less power compared to the audience in determining the meaning of media.
Jenkins argues that American popular culture will be redefined by the struggles over convergence and media. With the idea of profit in mind,
In our society, there are many forms of mediated texts ranging from newspapers and magazines to films and television shows. Each of these media forms can be seen from different theoretical perspectives and analyzed to understand the different concepts that may influence them. Television shows are one of the most popular media texts with approximately 400 new shows airing each year (Ryan, 2016). However, it is often very unlikely for these television shows to strive as 65% are cancelled after their first season (Ocasio, 2012). This then, brings Marxist scholars into the picture as they are interested in how economic factors affect the production and distribution of media content (Mack & Ott, 2016). The Marxist theoretical perspective allows Marxist scholars to study television shows in order to understand why they were cancelled and how certain roles in the media lead to this.
•Oligopoly: This is an industry with very little firms in the market. If they conspire, they weaken output and raise profits the way a monopoly would and should do. For example the mobile phone industry is an oligopoly what with so many companies for example Apple, LG and Samsung all competing together. Supermarkets are oligopoly’s as they make supernormal profits as well.
In this case some big companies dominate the whole industry and as a result the small companies
“An observation made of oligopolistic business behaviour in which one company, usually the dominant competitor among
Competition: As time goes on firms drop out until no one is producing the product.
According to McConnell and Brue “Economists group industries into four distinct market structures: pure competition, pure monopoly, monopolistic competition, and oligopoly. These four market models differ in several respects: the number of firms in the industry, whether those firms produce a standardized product or try to differentiate their products from those of other firms, and how easy or how difficult it is for firms to enter the industry” (McConnell & Brue, 2005, chap. 21). As part of the MBA/501 course the learning team is tasked with identifying a company for each market structure, and describe the pricing