In 2021 the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign paid Colin Jost $70,000 for an hour of comedy. The comic who went on before him, one-season Saturday Night Live<\/em> cast member Luke Null, received $2,000. Both figures sit in signed paperwork held by a public university. Until this week nobody outside that booking office could check either one, and the opener certainly couldn’t check what the headliner got.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They are now both in the Comedy Fee Tracker, which the American comedy journalist Seth Simons launched through his newsletter Humorism on 28 July. It’s a searchable database of money paid to comedians and their promoters at publicly owned US venues, built out of freedom of information requests. That covers public colleges and universities, plus city, county and state-owned theatres and arenas. Simons’ launch post says it holds 155 records covering 91 comedians. The A.V. Club’s Matt Schimkowitz, writing the same day, called it “a small dataset of 91 comics and 153 fee records”. Either the thing grew mid-week or somebody counted on a Monday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The headline sums are the ones that travel, and Simons opens with Jerry Seinfeld. Two shows at the Indiana University Auditorium in October 2023 earned “a payout of $618,106 for his promoter, JS Touring.” John Mulaney played the University of Rhode Island’s Family Weekend in October 2019 for a fee of $140,000. A few days later he took, in Simons’ words, “a tidy $175,000” for the University of Maryland homecoming show. Kenan Thompson got $42,000 at Truman State University in 2018. Those are fun. Then you scroll to what the openers on those same bills were paid, and the numbers drop to three figures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Simons is upfront that the money isn’t really the point of the exercise. He set out to track how much comedians make, he writes in his launch post<\/a>, but the fees were a means to an end:<\/p>\n\n\n\n What I was really after is how much power they have, who they’re sharing it with, and how they’re using it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The sharing-it-with part is where the Tracker earns its keep. Adam Devine headlined the University of Central Florida’s “Comedy Knight” in 2017 and the university paid him $51,500 for a 60-minute set. His opener, Adam Ray, got $500 for a half-hour set. Same stage, same night, same student activity fee paying for both, and a ratio of 103 to one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the documented evidence in the Comedy Fee Tracker, a television-famous headliner at a US public university takes $42,000 to $175,000 for one show. The opening act on the same bill is documented at between $500 and $5,000. The A.V. Club noted Jost’s openers at Illinois were paid “$5,000 apiece”, a long way from Adam Ray’s $500. Two openers, two campuses, and a tenfold gap for the same job of talking to a room that hasn’t come to see you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mechanics matter as much as the digits. College shows mostly don’t run on box office at all. “Usually, students get free or cheap admission, and comedians are given flat payments (or ‘guarantees’) rather than earning a cut of ticket sales,” Simons writes. Sometimes acts get both: a guarantee plus a percentage above it. For ticketed public venues, a contract for a percent-of-receipts show “will usually state the terms, e.g. ‘85% GBOR,’ or gross box office receipts”, he explains. Anyone who has squinted at a door split on a bar receipt at 11pm will recognise the shape of that. Just three more zeros and a lawyer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Buried in the methodology is the line that made me actually open the database rather than just read about it. “Where possible, I’ve included the artist’s hospitality riders, where they lay out their dressing room and technical requirements for each show,” Simons writes. A searchable public archive of what American headliners demand in their green rooms is an unbelievable gift. Especially for anyone who has spent a night finding out that the promised “full backline” is a Bluetooth speaker and a lamp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Tracker is also honest about its limits, which is more than most databases manage. Settlements record what goes to the promoter, not the comic. After a show, a venue tabulates the expenses deducted from gross ticket sales and lists the payout to the promoter, Simons explains. The records “usually don’t tell us how much the comedian walks away with after that, or after they pay their agents, managers, and the tax man”. Occasionally the paperwork is chattier than intended. He points out that a Theo Von settlement “conveniently spells out his fee as one of the promoter’s expenses”. The A.V. Club’s write-up pulled Von’s night out at $227,000 and put Louis C.K.’s hourly range at “anywhere between $117,000 and $235,000 an hour”. It clocked Chris D’Elia at $130,909 for a 2023 show at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, Oregon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What it can’t tell you: private universities, corporate gigs (which Simons says he understands pay quite well), net earnings over time, or anybody’s net worth. It also reflects one researcher’s obsessions rather than the industry’s shape. Simons says there’s more on Louis C.K., Chris D’Elia and Colin Jost than on Mike Birbiglia or Taylor Tomlinson. Those are the people he’s been chasing paperwork about for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is no equivalent for the UK circuit, and the absence is starting to look conspicuous. British comics spent this spring finding out what their own fees were worth only when they stopped arriving. Equity had to claw back pay for three Leicester comics<\/a>. The fuller picture of unpaid acts still waiting five months on<\/a> only emerged because performers compared notes. A database wouldn’t have got anyone paid faster, though the acts would at least have known the going rate before they signed. Nothing over here obliges anybody to publish a fee sheet, so the closest thing we have to disclosure is one comic telling another in the smoking area what the last headliner got.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The counter-argument from bookers is real and worth stating. A published fee becomes a floor, and floors push mid-size rooms out of the market. The first venues to go are ones like Club Comedy Seattle, which shut this month after no buyer appeared<\/a>. I don’t think that survives contact with the actual numbers here. The room where an opener earns $500 while the headliner earns $51,500 isn’t operating on wafer-thin margins, and at UCF the same student activity fee covered both of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For now the Tracker is free to browse with no sign-in. After a brief launch period, Simons says, you’ll need a free Humorism newsletter subscription to get in. He plans to update it roughly quarterly, and there’s a request form for readers who want a particular comic’s paperwork chased down. That form is the most interesting thing on the site for anyone holding an American college date next spring: the headliner’s guarantee is a public record, and it can be pulled before somebody offers you $500 and a half-hour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
How much do comedians get paid for US college gigs?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The riders are in there, which is the best bit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Nobody has built the British version<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Sources<\/h2>\n\n\n\n