Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn

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Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn was a talk show on Comedy Central created by Colin Quinn. The idea of the show was to have roundtable discussions he had with other comedians at the Olive Tree Cafe, the restaurant connected with the Comedy Cellar in New York City. It aired weeknights at 11:30 PM ET, immediately following The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It debuted in 2003, and was put on an "indefinite hiatus" in October 2004, with what was presumably its final episode airing on November 4th of that year.

The show featured Colin Quinn and four other comedian guests discussing current events and issues. the emphasis was on the comedy and the debates were never settled. The show opened with a monologue by Quinn; after the opening credits, the debates happened throughout most of the show. Near the end there was usually a sketch of some sort, followed by each of the four guests doing a brief monologue on a particular topic that was discussed earlier in the episode which. The comedians usually prepared these monologues ahead of time.

1 Guests
2 Show Format
3 The End of the Show
4 Epilogue
5 External links

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Guests

Regular guests were Patrice Oneal, Nick DiPaolo, Jim Norton, Keith Robinson, Rich Vos, and Greg Giraldo. Other frequent guests included Marc Maron, Judy Gold, Robert Kelly, Dave Attell, Jim David, Laurie Kilmartin, Dom Irrera, Kevin Hart, and Sherrod Small. Many famous comedians made appearances as well, including George Carlin, Chris Rock, and Jerry Seinfeld. The guests on the final show were Oneal, DiPaolo, Norton, Giraldo, and Keith Robinson.

Frequent guest Stephen Colbert's satirical political show The Colbert Report would eventually take the 11:30 time slot once occupied by Tough Crowd.

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Show Format

There were times when the comics would begin shouting at each other at the expense of being funny, but the panelists over time learned to avoid this for the most part. The show was beloved by fans of comedy for granting much-needed exposure to some of the best New York-based comedians. Tough Crowd also featured a trait rarely displayed on television: brutal honesty. Quinn made it a point not to edit out jokes that bombed, because it was honest. As Jim Norton said, "Comedy is not always a smooth gem that is perfectly timed and it certainly doesn’t always illicit the hoped for response. Sometimes comedy is sloppy and poorly delivered... (Quinn) refused to be some polished, blazer wearing jerkoff of a host and crucified any one of us when we tried to lapse into that smooth, disingenuous nonsense. You saw us as we really are on Tough Crowd; sometimes very funny, other times embarrassingly unfunny, sometimes hypocritically self-righteous and preachy and other times just plain mean. But we were never afraid to show our flaws."

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The End of the Show

Jim Norton discussed the ending of the show on his blog, where he said that Comedy Central would send down notes to the show to stop being political or racial, because they already had shows that dealt with those topics, referring to the The Daily Show and Chappelle's Show, or that the show did not fit with Comedy Central's image it wanted to have. Due to Quinn and many of his selected guests and friends (notably Jim Norton and Nick DiPaolo), the show was seen by some as much more abrasively conservative than Comedy Central fans were allegedly used to. Critics noted that while it was easy for gruff comedians like DiPaolo to express their views, more moderate or liberal comedians tended to have to rely on sarcasm and farce to get their point across to fellow panelists and the crowd. Due to the show airing while America was still reacting to and coping with the terror attacks of September 11, crowds were likely more receptive to the kind of humor that Quinn was using on the show.

After the decision was announced to end Tough Crowd, a website was started to attempt to save Tough Crowd.[1] This website was started by the fans who run CringeHumor.net, a website dedicated to many of the top New York comedians.

The last show contained emotional monologues by Quinn, who attacked his detractors (such as the New York Times) as being hypocritical and elitist for their negative reviews. He also attempted to define "comedic integrity" as the ability to critique the hypocrisy of society, but to be real enough to admit that you are as guilty of it as anyone else. The implication was that many political comedians spend all their time criticizing society and others, but rarely themselves.

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Epilogue

Comedy Central has tried using several shows to replace the timeslot left vacant after the cancellation of Tough Crowd. Too Late with Adam Carolla, The Graham Norton Effect, Wanda Does It, and repeats of The Daily Show and Chappelle's Show were all used as attempted replacements for Tough Crowd. All of these replacements have failed, before Comedy Central finally found success with The Colbert Report, a show which shares The Daily Show's liberal leanings.

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