You do a gig, you get paid, right? Maybe not.

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

Thank goodness I’m going to US next month and doing reputable gigs where you are paid as soon as you’ve finished the final show. That’s the way it always was back in the day, and remained for a long time. Clubs usually paid in cash, but even those that wrote checks rarely wrote bad ones. I say rarely because it certainly did happen, but in all those cases, restitution was made before too much time had elapsed. There was only a handful of times where I had to wait more than a month for my pay.

Flash forward to the 2010’s, much of the first half of which was spent in financial difficulty for both US and UK. The financial crisis affected the comedy world, too. Much has been said in the last couple years about UK’s major comedy club chain Jongleurs, which in a good news/bad news scenario, decided to stop booking me about the same time they encountered a rough patch financially, and held off paying people until some of the veterans went public with their gripes. There are people I’ve talked to who are still owed money from gigs done in 2013. Jongleurs did me a favour, but not one I’m especially grateful for.

What I’ve been dealing with recently is on a considerably lower pay scale than Jongleurs. For starters, it’s now been five weeks and counting for a gig I did in a community theatre, well attended, while my pay wasn’t even triple digits, yet no one from the agency that booked me seems to care enough to even respond to my e-mails and/or texts. This is just the latest of many inexcusable delays I’ve been experiencing in the past year or so. When a “good” month becomes one where you open your other hand to continue counting the gigs, that’s not sufficient reason to, say, buy a house. And when gigs are at that kind of premium, waiting weeks/months for your pay is even more frustrating. I’ve learned the hard way that the current option of bank balance transfer hasn’t really improved human nature. People still pay when they damn well feel like it, and if you protest, they can tell you to fuck off. Or dare you to sue them.

I had a falling out with a booker earlier this year over pay that wasn’t finally paid in until nearly six months after the gigs. Yet this guy decided my attitude sucked, because I got tired of hearing “You’ll get your pay shortly,” which means nothing. As my protests got a bit more vociferous, the response was on the level of, “You want to take this further, give it your best shot, but I’ve got my ass better covered than you ever will!” His wife was an attorney.

This man was a fellow comic who’d always been nice to me and respected what I did. He initially started his own run of gigs because he’d gotten badly screwed over by Jongleurs, and the intent was to book (mostly) fun gigs within an hour of London, pay cash, and essentially be an anti-Jongleurs. Things went swimmingly for a year or so, but he got screwed by a partner (so he said), and had to establish a new bank account, or something like that. His explanations seemed suspect, to say the least, and I was willing to cut him some slack because overall he’d been very supportive. It’s human response though, that when someone owes you money, and continues to do so over a period of several months, you can only be a nice guy for so long. He got his final revenge on me, unceremoniously pulling a gig in July that had been booked three months earlier, without anything resembling an apology. There’s been no communication sense.

The all-time record for me, and maybe for all of the history of stand-up comedy, between gig and actual pay, is a staggering TWO AND A HALF YEARS! I didn’t badger the booker consistently over that time period, but it was more like he called me maybe two years after I’d given up on him. My last words on his voice mail were, “Congratulations, you got a freebie out of me, not that I owed you any favours, but if this is how you run things, you really should get out of the business. Meantime, I’ll make sure to get the word out for everyone to avoid working for you.” This guy was, and still is, based in Northern California, and called me out of the blue at my home in LA to check and see if my address was still the same, so he could post the check for the gig. The gig was in June 1996, and I was paid in December, 1998!!

I must be the most forgiving soul, because I actually did work for this guy once again in 2002, a total crap gig which had no redeeming qualities except that the pay was really good, and it would be in cash. If I’d agree to that, then it’s safe to assume that if the man above contacts me about work, and it guarantees cash, I’m certain I’d say yes. I’m a bit of a wimp that way.

I’m just happy I’ve got my steady quiz master and DJ gigs, working with people who have shown me honour, dignity, and support. And I’m paid cash as soon as I’m done. That’s all we ask, n’est-ce pas?

September 6th, 2015



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