Sebastian Maniscalco Responds to Comedian Controversy

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Featured: Sebastian Maniscalco, Dane Cook, Jeff Dunham, Shane Gillis, Bill Burr, Dave Chappelle, Liz Mealy, Gianmarco Ceresi, George Carlin, Joan Rivers, Bob Hope, Andrew Schultz, Norm Macdonald

What’s in This Episode

• Sebastian Maniscalco responds to Raw Dog comedy channel controversy
• SiriusXM removes Raw Dog channel from Raw Dog 8
• Sebastian Maniscalco Comedy Radio launch and playlist strategy
• Johnny Mac discusses radio programming methodology and A-B-C rotation system
• Controversy over comedians removed from rotation on SiriusXM
• SiriusXM insider response about evolving channel programming

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

Caloroga Shark Media. Sebastian Maniscalco has addressed Raw Dog 8, as I’m calling it. Let’s start with Sebastian, then I have a lot of thoughts and I want to go slowly. Here’s Sebastian Maniscalco. This goes out to all my fellow comedians.

I want to let you know that I heard you. I support you. I love you. I know how hard the grind is. Believe me, I’ve been there.

But I wanted to let you know that I had nothing to do with removing the raw comedy from SiriusXM. That was a SiriusXM decision. But I also want to let you know that I’m going to work with SiriusXM to highlight a variety of different voices in stand-up comedy, from emerging to established to newcomers and everything in between. I just ask that you give me a little time, guys. I just got here, and I needed a little time to build out the channel.

So I just want to let you know that I heard you and just give me some time and be patient. And I think you’ll like the result. God bless everybody. Please give me one second to do some quick housekeeping. I didn’t address this this morning for reasons I’ve said on the podcast.

I was out of pocket yesterday and I teach a class on Thursday morning. It is now 137 in the afternoon and I just had a chance to take in all the latest. As for, let me go up a level. We’re going to go slowly today. My old mentor taught me about, he called it Steinbrenner, and here’s what he meant by this.

Back in the day, George Steinbrenner owned the New York Yankees, and George Steinbrenner would react to things and make trades and give players to the manager that maybe the manager didn’t want. What my old mentor meant by that was, from afar, it’s easy to nitpick a radio station and be like, this station sucks, the boss is stupid, why aren’t they doing X? And what you don’t know sometimes is what information you don’t have. Maybe my old mentor knew that, oh, this talent is better than that talent. I should have that talent on in the afternoon.

He knows this. You guys are on message boards saying, oh, the radio station sucks. Why are they so stupid? But what you don’t know is that Steinbrenner gave somebody a three year million dollar contract. And if somebody has a three year million dollar contract, they’re going to play in the outfield or they’re going to host afternoon drive.

So as we pick this apart here, there may be information we don’t have. There might not be, but there may be just information we don’t have. Let’s start with Sebastian’s, is it an apology statement? It’s not an apology. It’s a statement.

He needs some time. Sebastian, I don’t think so. The channel was announced in April. Today is October 8th. What time do you need?

For newer listeners discovering this podcast through this topic, I programmed the Raw Dog channel from 2004 to 2014. I did the logs. Maybe not every day, but I’m pretty confident I did more than 90% of the logs day to day for most of that time until I got promoted to VP, then somebody else on my staff did it. But I’m very familiar with how Raw Dog was programmed 2004 to 2014 because I was in charge of the rotations. Let me walk you through very quickly..

At a top level, how I teach it to college students. And I did this briefly the other day, but I want to go longer here. Okay. We’re going to have a bucket of comedians. We can play any comedian in the world.

What we’re going to do is we’re going to make three buckets. We’ll call the buckets A, B, and C. The letters don’t mean anything. It can be X, Y, Z, red, white, blue, whatever you want, but let’s call it A, B, C. In bucket A, I’m going to have a smaller bucket of comedians and In my case, when I would program, that would be the hits.

So in 2008, maybe the hits were Dane Cook and Jeff Dunham. If I were programming a channel today using an ABC rotation, maybe Shane Gillis, Bill Burr, Dave Chappelle would be in the A’s. The B bucket is a bigger bucket. In that bucket, I personally would have people like Liz Mealy, Gianmarco Cerezi, whoever you think today’s comedians are that aren’t household names but are awesome comedians. They would go in the B category.

And there would be more B’s than A’s because as people circle in and out of getting into their car or listening to stuff, I would want them to hear the hits. I want them to tune into my station and be like, oh, they play Dave Chappelle. They play Shane Gillis. I know those guys. But along the way, once you’ve bought in, the next clip comes on and you go, oh, who’s this funny woman?

I don’t know who that is.

And then you learn that you like a Liz Mealy.

You learn that you like a Gianmarco Ceresi or whoever you like these days. Then you could have a C category with older stuff. And that’s where I might put George Carlin or Joan Rivers or even a Bob Hope. And honestly, I saw a playlist the other day. They had two cuts from each other, Andrew Schultz and Bob Hope.

I’m not sure Bob Hope belongs on this station at all. And I love Bob Hope. I talked about that already. OK, so Sebastian says he needs time. Unless someone deleted the clips from the system, and they may have, and this is where I say Steinbrenner, I don’t know.

I also don’t know what they’re using to schedule records or sound recordings is the term. I don’t know what they’re using these days. I haven’t asked anybody. I haven’t listened to Raw Dog since I was asked to no longer program Raw Dog. Someone else has done it.

Sure, they’ve done a good job. Not here to bash on them. Unless someone deleted the clips, and I can’t think of a reason why you would delete the clips, I.. You can just schedule them as inactive. So back to ABC, let’s have a category called Rest for R.

If you don’t want to play all these comedians that aren’t currently being played, you could just move them to R and let them sit there and never schedule an R record. Maybe they were all deleted. If they were deleted, then you’re going to have to put back in the metadata and it’s going to take a minute. If they haven’t been deleted, if they’re still in the system.. If Sebastian Maniscalco called me up and said, hey, as of tomorrow, can you add a new category?

We’ll call it Z. And can you put all these working class comedians, as we’re calling them, can you put them back on the clock and add a couple Zs every hour? Three, four Zs, eight Zs, whatever amount of Zs Sebastian wants. I could easily do that in 2013 with the technology I had in 2013. Again, to be fair to the Steinbrenners, I don’t know what they have or don’t.

Just telling you in 2013, if Sebastian called me and said, I want this fixed tomorrow, I I could fix it tomorrow. The more I think about this, I suspect there was a meeting and it went something like this. Hey, Sebastian, what comedians do you like? You know, I like all the greats. I like Carlin and Joan Rivers and, you know, more contemporary guys like Norm Macdonald was great.

And, you know, maybe he mentioned some comedians he was into. And I think just looking at this from afar. Someone took that as gospel and made that the playlist. That’s just a guess from a guy in a basement recording a podcast. An insider at SiriusXM tells Entertainment Weekly that programming on all channels is ever-evolving, and Maniscalco’s is no different.

Comics at all levels are consistently being added, and those who may have found themselves out of rotation on Sebastian Maniscalco Comedy Radio can likely be heard on other SiriusXM comedy channels. I haven’t listened to SiriusXM. I have no idea what’s on the other comedy channels. Specific to comedians consistently being added and deleted? Absolutely.

I did that all the time. Maybe once a week-ish when new stuff came in, we added it. As stuff got tired, if a new hot comedian came along, we would move them to A. Things would move from the A category to the B category. You would rest things, rotate things in and out to keep the station fresh.

That’s totally normal. A spokesperson tells Deadline in an exclusive statement, quote, Sirius XM has proudly supported the comedy community, and we’ve been listening to comedians speak out this week. Our decision to end raw comedy was due to the channel’s underperformance and came prior to Sebastian joining the Sirius XM lineup. While the challenges facing working comedians are bigger than any one person or decision, we remain committed, as we have for more than two decades, to making Sirius XM and Sebastian Maniscalco’s comedy radio a place where comedians at every stage of their careers can be heard. At some point, somebody, whether it’s Sebastian or a programmer or was me, someone is deciding, hey, I want to play this comedian or I don’t want to play this comedian.

And if you choose not to play the comedian, that comedian doesn’t get royalties. I’m not sure that is Sebastian’s problem. I hear you and I understand why it was important, but I’m not sure that was really his problem. Let’s take a break there and I’ll come back. There’s an essay in the LA Times.

Let me just do some quick housekeeping. As I mentioned, I had a very busy Wednesday, which is why I didn’t discuss this this morning and didn’t discuss it until now. I also don’t think I’ll talk about it on the Friday podcast. I still haven’t put that together. Maybe I’ll find a couple of new stories.

I don’t know. And I also kind of want to get off this topic because I’m torn here because I’m close to it because I kind of know how it works. I’m not looking to get in a whistling match with Sebastian or whoever’s programming the channel now. I actually don’t know who programs the channel now. Again, you’re asking me to comment on my ex-girlfriend and My ex-girlfriend is out there somewhere being happy, and I’m happy in my life, and I don’t think about her, and it’s all good.

That’s why I don’t want to really dive in on this. But when every major comedian is putting out a video and I host a podcast called Daily Comedy News, I kind of have to talk about it. So that’s where I am with this, and I’ve just had a very busy week, but I do want to just address that Sebastian addressed it, which is why today’s bonus episode. Okay, from the LA Times, an essay from Christina Catherine Martinez. She writes..

Setting aside any appeal about the lives of working comics, squeezing out the middle class of any industry is its death knell. The consolidation of voices at the top kettles the audience into a dead end of diminishing options until we’re all paying $ 500 to hear a Gen Xer with the complexion of a vintage handbag stomp around in an arena, spouting the vaguest outline of a worldview, and we will be fooled into believing that’s the best or worst thing comedy has to offer. Without getting into the nuance of her opinion there, I think spiritually, we are aligned. I.. Don’t know why you wouldn’t want to play the comedians that I’ve named, checked, and the working class comedians.

I think that’s the interesting part. I host on the Live One app a weekly program called The Weekly Comedy Thing, and every week I play, I go out of my way to do a segment of, here are some comedians you might not know. And as I’ve hosted that show for over a decade, at one point, one of the comedians you didn’t know was a guy named Sebastian Maniscalco. One of the comedians you didn’t know is a guy named Nate Bergetzi. And so on and so on.

I go in, I see what is in the new release bin, as I call it, and I try and play people like that. I think that’s the interesting part. It’s very easy to go, here’s Chris Rock. Sure. And Chris Rock is great.

But to me, the interesting part are the working class comedians. That LA Times also quotes a post from Nick Vetterod, who wrote, Sebastian’s so busy, I’d be surprised if he even knew he has an XM channel. I wouldn’t go that far. But I bet he was quite surprised to find out that he was dragged into this because I can’t believe Sebastian woke up and said, yeah, I don’t want to play those working class comedians anymore. Get them off my channel.

Again, I think he just said, yeah, you know, I like Carlin and the greats. And somebody took that as gospel would be my guess. Back to my Steinbrenner point. I don’t know. That same piece in the L.A.

Times quotes comedian Jasmine Ellis, who said the beauty of the Raw channel is that it was kind of this catch all for people who didn’t fit neatly into the other categories. Raw was a channel dedicated to people who were focused on the art form of stand-up without restrictions. When I programmed the channel, it was called Raw Dog Comedy Uncensored. It’s all right there for you. That’s all you need to know.

Cracked wondered, what will the Sebastian Maniscalco drama mean for Marcelo Hernandez? I’m not going to get into my opinions on Marcelo Hernandez being funny or not. Look, this is too small for Saturday Night Live to deal with. They’re not going to deal with it. SNL doesn’t need to get involved in this controversy.

So if there was any chance of Sebastian hosting SNL in the relatively near future, that ain’t going to happen yet. But again, Shane Gillis is hosting this week. Give anything time. Cracked wrote that the ongoing controversy is pretty inside baseball for a show that caters to an audience of roughly 8 million viewers per episode. This did hit my wife’s radar.

Now, my wife is married to me, so maybe she paid more attention to it than if I were a dentist. I don’t know. But my wife was aware of this. So this is somewhat out there, but I do think it’s too small for SNL. Cracked also said the Maniscalco sketches from last season hit so hard because Maniscalco is completely irrelevant to the premise.

Then there’s the issue of SNL’s legendary fence-sitting. Speaking out against one of the most powerful broadcasting corporations and an internationally beloved comic over a business decision doesn’t really seem like a Lorne Michaels move. I think Cracked has nailed that there. And that is your bonus episode for Thursday. We’ll be back in the morning again.

If you’re just discovering this podcast through this, welcome. I put out an episode seven days a week. I hope you will continue to listen. And as this story develops, I will address it as needed. See you in the morning.

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