Comedy Central and Edinburgh Fringe Have Made “Comedy Central at The Comedy Store”, a Series of Specials w/Virtual Audience
(via THR)
Since The Edinburgh Fringe, the massive annual performing arts festival that takes over all of Edinburgh is cancelled for this year, the festival could not just stay dormant until next year or whenever they could have thousands upon thousands of shows take over the city for all of August.
So, they’ve partnered with Comedy Central to produce a collection of stand-up comedy specials from favorite performers that they would have presumably been a big hit at the Edinburgh Fringe this year were there no pandemic to deal with. It will be called Comedy Central at The Comedy Store (unrelated to The Comedy Store in LA) and feature host Jamali Maddix and the likes of “up-and-coming” talents Joanne McNally, Thanyia Moore, Leo Reich, Helen Bauer, Travis Jay, Fatiha El-Ghorri, Christopher Bliss, Wayne Mazadza, Jamie D’Souza and Kuan-Wen.
The “episodes” are seven minutes and feature a virtual audience, which might make for a new precedent in making stand-up comedy for TV while the COVID-19 health crisis still exists. Previous to this announcement, the shortest specials produced at a network level were Netflix’s 15 minute specials in the still horribly titled The Comedy Line-Up. Virtual audiences are seemingly going to have figure into any sort of live comedy productions as well and we’re curious to see if they were able to dress it up in anyway like Super Secret Comedy has done with their wall of Zoom audience members.
Comedy Central at the Comedy Store will stream during the week on Comedy Central International’s social media starting Aug. 17th.