Celebrity comedian Sebastian Maniscalco responded to this week’s outcry in the comedy community over his buyout of a SiriusXM channel that for years supported up-and-coming stand-ups while providing them with a minor royalty control lifeline. He joins the broadcaster in assuring those who are up in arms about the station’s demise that the company axed it long before the superstar took over.
In April, Maniscalco’s Comedy Radio replaced SiriusXM’s Channel 99, which had long been home to the Raw Comedy/Raw Dog channel, a little corner of the satellite radio giant where up-and-coming comedians could not only launch their careers, but also make a few bucks doing it. SiriusXM replaced the “jukebox channel”, which ran comic book sets and had no host, with a channel now “curated and headlined by Maniscalco” which primarily features mainstream and well-known talent. The outcry came this week when advocacy group Stand Up for Standup and high-profile comedians like Patton Oswalt, Margaret Cho and Michelle Wolf took to social media to ask Maniscalco to bring Raw Comedy back to the platform. On Thursday, the comic superstar responded.
“This goes out to all my fellow comedians,” Maniscalco said via Instagram Stories. “I want you to know that I heard you, I support you, I love you. I know how hard it is; believe me, I’ve been there. I had nothing to do with Raw Comedy being removed from SiriusXM. It was SiriusXM’s decision.
“But I also want to let you know that I’m going to be working with SiriusXM to highlight a variety of different voices in stand-up, from emerging to established to up-and-comers and everything in between,” he added.
Stand Up for Stand Up said on its website that the comics earn $15 in royalties per “shoot” of their set on the Raw Comedy channel, money that the group says “helps support their comedy careers in the form of passive royalty income.” The group said the channel no longer relies on a broader pool of more than 800 comedians and instead airs a smaller slate of comics each month, with more than 75 percent of shows going to top 50 performers and larger celebrities.
On Thursday, the network added to Maniscalco’s response in a statement to The Hollywood Reporterconfirming the timeline and claiming that Raw Comedy was scrapped due to low ratings.
“We listened to comedians speak this week and want to clarify that our decision to end Raw Comedy was due to the channel’s underperformance and came before Sebastian joined the SiriusXM lineup,” SiriusXM said in the statement. “While the challenges facing working comedians are greater than any one person or decision, we remain committed, as we have for more than two decades, to making SiriusXM a place where comedians at every stage of their careers can be heard.”
A person close to the situation at SiriusXM said some of the comics heard on Raw Comedy/Raw Dog will still be heard on the broadcaster’s many other comedy channel offerings.
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