College Comedians: How to Find and Book a Comedian for Your Next Campus Event
Planning, organizing, and executing campus events is tough. When you’re trying to balance school, campus organizations, work, and a personal life, the thought of coordinating all of the different moving parts of a big campus event can be more than a little overwhelming.
Before you even get that far, though -- before you start thinking about things like promotion, attendance, costs, budget, logistics, and everything else that comes along with an event or activity -- you have to actually book the entertainment itself. As challenging as it can be to actually follow through with an event and make it a huge success, finding good entertainment in the first place can be just as hard (if not even harder).
Fortunately, it’s totally possible to find great college entertainment with minimal effort on your part, so long as you know how to go about it. The approach you take will be a little different depending on the type of entertainer you’re looking for. For example, you’ll take a slightly different approach when finding a college magician as opposed to trying to book a solid college guest speaker. In today’s blog post, though, we’re going to focus on how to find one type of entertainer in particular: a hilarious college comedian.
There’s no question about it: we’ve all seen bad comedy, right? You don’t want to book someone for a student activities event who couldn’t get a single laugh at the local open mic night. But, of course, comedy is subjective. So, it’s important to get a real sense of what someone’s standup act is like before you sign a contract with them. Here, we’ll look at three different ways to find and book a college comedian: via Google searches, a talent agency, and an online platform.
photo courtesy of Samuel J. Comroe – Fresh Variety
Finding Comedians Individually
If you’re not pressed for time as a campus activities board member, you could start by running searches for college comedians and scoping out individual entertainers. Many comedians have fairly elaborate websites with plenty of video. Going this route will give you the opportunity to browse through a ton of different comedians, all of whom will be at different stages in their career.
Once you’ve checked out a comedian’s act on their website, you’ll want to take a look at their social media presence, too. How popular are they? Do they have a ton of followers? Do people retweet their Twitter posts? What’s their demographic? Do college age students seem to like them, or do they appeal more to an older crowd?
There are a couple of significant disadvantages to trying to find a comedian this way. For one thing, you won’t have any idea what their pricing structure is like from their website. In other words, you’ll need to reach out to each potential comedian individually to check on both their availability as well as their fee. That creates a lot of extra legwork on your end.
On top of this, you’ll be completely on your own when it comes to signing a contract with whichever college comedian you choose. If you don’t have much experience with entertainment contracts, the process can be more than a little intimidating (not to mention time consuming).
Working With a Talent Agency
Rather than going it alone and attempting to navigate the wild west that is Google search on your own, you could opt to go through a college talent agency to find a college comedian. When working with an agency, you’ll be able to browse through a selection of all of the entertainers they have available. If you end up establishing a good relationship with an agency, it could make your life easier in the future, as you’ll have access to other types of entertainers as well.
On the one hand, working with an agency can be significantly easier than attempting to connect with an individual college comedian. The agency will handle the contract paperwork for you, for one thing. In addition, you don’t have to worry about reaching out to individual comedians about their availability. Instead, you just let the agency know what date you need filled, and they take care of the rest.
One of the major downsides to working with an agency is the sheer cost involved. Most agency talent is pretty expensive. For one thing, you’re primarily dealing with high end talent, which carries with it a higher price tag. Plus, agencies charge sizable fees for their services, which means you’ll be paying for the work they’re doing on top of the fee paid out to the college comedian themselves.
Choose an Online Platform like ArtistHub
If you’re looking for the cost savings and flexibility of dealing with an entertainer one-on-one alongside the ease of working with an agency, ArtistHub is the perfect solution. With ArtistHub, finding the perfect college comedian is simply a matter of browsing our online roster of entertainment. Just like a talent agency, we help connect artists with individual universities and student activities boards around the country. Unlike a talent agency, though, we don’t charge huge fees or get in the way of the direct relationship between your and the entertainer. Click here to sign up for a free ArtistHub account and browse our selection of entertainers today!
