I Hate NYC #27 Comedy Club Barkers

If you want to make it as a stand up comic, NYC is one of the best and only places to do it. 

Unfortunately that means that there’s a lot of bad comedy floating around city and because of this, most people equate watching unknown stand up comics to being worse than a visit to the dentist.

Since ”stand up comedy = bad” has been ingrained into most New Yorkers, comedy clubs send out young comics to the busy streets of the city to “bark” customers in.

Barkers stand in the middle of busy sidewalks offering up “discounted” and “free” tickets to comedy clubs.  Barkers put customers in the seats of shows and in exchange are usually given stage time at the end of a show. 

They usually don’t do this alone and are in pairs, and places that use barkers are usually located near other places that use barkers - meaning that there are overlapping barkers all over the place in Times Square and down in the Village.

Barkers are mindless yapping sidewalk obstacles who don’t care about anyone but themselves and haven’t quite realized that they can save themselves years of frustration trying to make it as a stand up comic by simply hitting themselves in the side of the head with a brick.

When you see a barker out on the street, just ignore them and speed up - they tend to be too self involved, poor and unfed to follow you more than 20 feet.