Sebastian Maniscalco Gary Gershoff/WireImage Celebrity comedian Sebastian Maniscalco has responded to this week’s uproar in the comedy community over his takeover of a SiriusXM channel that for years supported up-and-coming stand-ups while providing them a minor lifeline in royalty checks. He joins the broadcaster in assuring those up in arms over the station’s disappearance that the company axed it well before the superstar took over.
In April, Maniscalco’s Comedy Radio replaced SiriusXM’s Channel 99, the longtime home of the Raw Comedy/Raw Dog channel, a small corner of the satellite radio giant where up-and-coming comedians could not only launch their careers but make a few bucks doing it. SiriusXM replaced the “jukebox channel,” which rotated sets from comics and had no host, with one now “curated and headlined by Maniscalco” that features mostly mainstream and well-known talent. The uproar came this week when the advocacy group Stand Up for Standup and big-name 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 superstar comic replied.
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“This goes out to all my fellow comedians,” Maniscalco said via Instagram Stories. “I want to let you know I heard you, I support you, I love you. I know how hard the grind is; believe me, I’ve been there. I had nothing to do with removing the Raw Comedy from SiriusXM. That was a SiriusXM decision.
“But I also wanna 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,” he added.
Stand Up for Stand Up said on its website that comics earned $15 in royalties per “spin” of their set on the Raw Comedy channel, money the group says “aids in supporting their comedy career in the form of passive royalty earnings.” The group said the channel no longer draws from the wider pool of 800-plus comedians and instead rotates a narrower roster of comics each month, with more than 75 percent of plays going to the top 50 artists and bigger celebrity acts.
On Thursday, the broadcaster added to Maniscalco’s response in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, confirming the timeline and saying Raw Comedy was put out to pasture because of low ratings.
“We have been listening to comedians speak out this week and want to clarify that our decision to end Raw Comedy was due to the channel’s underperformance and came prior to Sebastian joining the SiriusXM lineup,” SiriusXM said in the statement. “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 SiriusXM a place where comedians at every stage of their careers can be heard.”
A person familiar with the situation at SiriusXM said that 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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