How much is laughter worth? If you’re the supposedly canceled comedian Louis CK, and it’s the year 2025, anywhere between $117,000 and $235,000 an hour. Thanks to the Comedy Fee Tracker, a new project from comedy journalist and critic Seth Simons, the wallets of some of comedy’s biggest names have never been easier to open. Using public information obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the Comedy Fee Tracker is a searchable database of talent contracts and payment records from publicly funded venues, such as public colleges and universities, and city, county, and state-owned theaters and arenas.
Simons tells The A.V. Club by email the project began with an investigation into Saturday Night Live‘s return to live audiences during COVID. Five years later, he’s amassed a nice “little library” of information by requesting receipts from public venues. He launched the Tracker earlier today, cataloguing the money paid to comedians with a small dataset of 91 comics and 153 fee records. The information doesn’t simply reveal what everyone already knows (Jerry Seinfeld and Dave Chappelle make lots of money) but also the pay disparity between headliners and openers. In one instance, Adam DeVine made $51,500 for an hour of comedy at the University of Florida, while his opener, Adam Rey, pulled in $500 for a half hour. “Maybe this is naive,” Simons writes, “but it shocked me to see that Colin Jost was getting paid $70,000 to do an hour of standup at the University of Illinois—and that his openers were getting $5,000 apiece.”
To be clear, Simons doesn’t mean to suggest that it’s “bad that comedians are making a lot of money—perhaps I balk at some of the university fees—but I think the numbers help us understand that many of these people are more than just entertainers.” As Simons has been arguing for years now, comedians have grown way beyond the brick wall. With comedians making so much money and serving as a microphone for the United States government, the least we can have is a little transparency into how much Chris D’Elia is still making ($130,909 for a 2023 show at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, Oregon).
“They are effectively multimillionaire CEOs who run little mini economies,” Simons continues. “They employ people and often run their own businesses. Their work creates jobs everywhere they go, and they share their ticket revenue with powerful tour promoters (Live Nation, Outback Presents, etc) that in many cases seem to have monopolistic levels of control over arts institutions. I think it’s important to see comedians through this lens, especially the ones that have become very loud voices in our cultural/political discourse. Theo Von’s everyman persona looks a little different when you know he makes $227,000 in a single night.”
Snoop around the Comedy Fee Tracker and Simons’ full post behind the project, how he built it, and what’s next over at his newsletter, Humorism.
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