Professional Comedian Salary

Video Transcript

"How much money does a Comedian earn? Well it's a pretty wide scale because there are some Comics who might make ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars a year and there are Comedians who make two, three, four, ten million dollars a year. It's a very large scale, and really it's up to you how much you're going to earn, how hungry you are, how much drive you have, how much you want to work, how much you want to travel. Some Comics don't like traveling, so their income stays down, they like it that way. But the, in the early years, my first jobs paid me fifty dollars a night, and in a matter of a couple years I went to earning sometimes a thousand dollars for one show, sometimes two thousand dollars for one show. But it's never the same, every show is different, every, every gig I would do is different. Sometimes you work in a club and you'll make fifteen hundred for the whole week. So you have to know that, you have to know how to budget your money because you never really know from week to week, from month to month what kind of gigs you're going to be offered. So, know about money, know how to handle your money, know how to budget your money, and you're going to be ahead of the game. You're going to be a lot, in a lot better place mentally to deal with this business.How much do beginning Comics make? Once they've established an Act, and they have a good fifteen minutes, they become an opening Act in clubs around the country. OPening Acts usually make anywhere from three, four, five hundred dollars a week and then the club will put them up in a hotel. Some clubs will give you a traveling allowance, some won't, depends, there's A clubs, there are B clubs, and there are C clubs, which are the different levels, the better down to the worst. As you move up the ladder, the better you get the more your income increases to where you become a middle Act. You may make anywhere from six, seven hundred dollars a week to a thousand, eleven hundred, twelve hundred dollars a week, and then eventually you graduate to Headliner status and it's depending on your credits. Depending on how good you are, you can make anywhere from fifteen hundred to twenty thousand dollars in a week. There's no, there's really no imitations except what you place on yourself."