Videos of stand-up comedy...can I subscribe to something?

September 28, 2007 5:53 AM

Is there somewhere I can download (for later viewing) videos of popular stand-up comedians? Legally?

I travel frequently and I'm bored with watching movies and listening to music. Occasionally I'll rip audio with StreamRipper32 from one of the Shoutcast comedy streams, but it's hit and miss and pretty low quality. YouTube is hit and miss as well.

Yes, I know I can get all the Comedy Central reruns I want from BitTorrent but I'm hoping for some kind of dedicated pay service with 20/30/60-minute specials from people I've heard of. Or failing that, people who are funny and don't have the same tired-ass old recycled American jokes about their single lives ("so I'm dating this guy...") and black-folk-versus-white-folk (done to death).

Has anyone set something like this up? Have they digitized Comedy On the Road and Evening At the Improv from my misspent youth and are they serving it up for $9.95 a month over teh internets? (Huge bonus points for a service that features Australian comics, who seem for some reason to be funnier to me than English and American comics. Maybe it's that charming accent?)

Thanks in advance!

posted by ostranenie to media & arts (7 comments total)

What about the Amazon MP3 download service?
posted by acro at 5:56 AM on September 28, 2007

Sorry, I read 'legal' and forgot you said 'video' ;)
posted by acro at 6:03 AM on September 28, 2007

Well...I have Yahoo! Music for legal audio, and it's pretty good. I download the licenses and listen to the files on the plane (or wherever). But I like to see the expressions, the audience shots, etc., so that's why I'm after video.
posted by ostranenie at 6:16 AM on September 28, 2007

If you go to comedian's respective youtube or myspace pages, they often put up nice quality videos of sets that arent' on the TV specials. Notably, these clips often include uncensored or racy material that would get cut from a special. They are legal because (a) the comedian taped themselves in the first place, so the video is theirs, not some networks' and (b) it's on their own webpage, so presumably they would be okay with you watching it.

To download them, just get a firefox extension like video downloader.
posted by Pastabagel at 7:20 AM on September 28, 2007

iTunes has "Best of Comedy Central Stand-Up," $1.99 for each 20 minute episode. There are 80 episodes up right now.
posted by cosmic osmo at 2:06 PM on September 28, 2007

If you're willing to pay, you may be better off getting a netflix account (or zip.ca or whatever is available in your area) and going through their stand up dvds.

Or, if you're willing to settle for audio, emusic has a good selection of comedy CDs available.
posted by Gary at 2:12 PM on September 28, 2007

Marc Maron's got a bunch of video up.
posted by acro at 9:12 AM on September 29, 2007