The Gatekeeper Gets the Gate

Not long ago, we linked to an article about Eddie Brill who was the warm-up comedian for David Letterman and also the guy who scouted and recommended the booking of stand-up comedians for Dave's show. Certain things Eddie said about women in that job description angered some and it was announced yesterday that he's been relieved of his scouting/booking duties, though he will apparently still handle warm-ups.

A number of blog postings I've read about this have opined that Eddie should have lost that job because Late Show has had a pretty poor track record of booking good stand-ups. I think that's grossly unfair. As near as I can tell, Brill has been doing that part of his duties quite efficiently. The assignment, after all, is not to book great new stand-ups who'll have everyone talking about how funny they are. It's to find and suggest the kinds of comedians that Dave Letterman wants on his show. Those are not remotely the same thing.

As for his comments about women, I thought they were a bit off-the-mark but only a bit. He's right that there are a lot of female comics who try to act like men. He's wrong to the extent he was suggesting that all or most stand-up ladies are "inauthentic" because they do that. I can think of a lot of successful ones who don't: Rita Rudner, Janeane Garofalo, Kathleen Madigan, Paula Poundstone, Wendy Liebman…I don't think Kathy Griffin or Sarah Silverman fit that description and oddly enough, neither do a lot of openly gay women comics like Ellen Degeneres and Wanda Sykes. You may not think all of those ladies are funny but all of them could easily do five minutes on Letterman's show just as well as any male who's been on there. (Not that some of them would want to…)

Brill's comments really only drew fire because women like that are rarely booked with Dave — though Griffin is on tonight and may even talk about this if they'll let her. In any case, if women comics are being bypassed on the show, it might be because Mr. Brill never recommended many or it might be because Mr. Letterman vetoed those recommendations. It might even be because Dave never said — as Mr. Carson did once when TV Guide pointed out the gender gap in his bookings — "Hey, find me some female stand-ups." That led to Maureen Murphy and Victoria Jackson and a few other bookings and probably got Joan Rivers on The Tonight Show more often.

My suspicion here is that Eddie Brill is to some extent taking the fall for preferences from above. I also suspect that if Dave was upset about that N.Y. Times article it was mainly due to (a) the attention paid to someone who's supposed to maintain a lower profile and (b) the revelation that Brill has a side business charging up-and-coming comics to train them. It's not always an unacceptable conflict-of-interest for folks who are in positions to hire (or to recommend hiring) to accept money from those who seek to be hired…but it can make a lot of people very uncomfortable. If I were running a TV show, I would pay my casting people well but forbid them from doing that kind of thing.