How To Make The ECNY Awards: Part 1 - A Brief History of the ECNY Awards
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about transparency, and how keeping your agenda secret - no matter how big, little, important or not - always, in some way, leads to hurt feelings, and exclamations of, “If you had just told me in the first place…” So to that end, I thought I’ve give a little insider look into one of the productions I’m involved in, The ECNY Awards.
For three years, the ECNY Awards existed as a little bit of an embarrassing joke in the comedy world. I don’t mean this as a slam on any of the people involved, who were awesome, and worked hard. The heart was there: take a population that doesn’t get a lot of recognition, the struggling comic, and give them one night where they would be celebrated. But there were certain elements that, in my opinion, were lacking. The awards were too narrowly focused (they were originally called the Emerging Comics of New York Awards, which drew scorn from the community). They were too insular. And making a joke out of the proceedings ended up making them into a joke.
Two years after the “last” awards, Alex Goldberg, from the sketch comedy group Fearsome, said, “Hey, you know? That was a good idea. Let’s try that again.*” So he asked a couple of people to join in, specifically Drink at Work’s Carol Hartsell, The Apiary’s Nate Sloan, The Rejection Show’s Jon Friedman, and myself on drums.
I’d chalk that 2nd year up to the recession. The world was on the brink of financial collapse, no one had jobs or knew where their next paycheck was coming from, and $15 (or was it $20?) was too much for a ticket. The show was actually the same week the stock market hit a 10-year low.
(Source: alexzalben)
Comments
Here you can embed a comment system of your choice, such as Disqus or Haloscan. By default, comments will only be enabled on posts tagged enablecomments. More information here.