Bert Kreischer says he started a comedians union

Bert Kreischer says he is starting a comedians union, and that it has already been taken off his hands. He laid it out with Tom Segura on 2 Bears, 1 Cave, in an episode titled The Sebastian Maniscalco SiriusXM Drama, after SiriusXM moved from Raw Dog Radio to a Sebastian Maniscalco channel. Kreischer says the switch terminated the income of about 500 comics, and that nearly all of them seem to live in New York, which he found odd.

The plan started as a post. Kreischer says he got online and announced himself as a stand-up comedian with a message to all comedians that they were going to start a union. Then his phone blew up. He says Matthew Broussard hit him up wanting in, and Greg Fitzsimmons hit him up too. The next day Leanne called him and, in his telling, said she guessed she was starting a union.

Segura blames the comics

Segura is not on board with pointing at Maniscalco. His position is that comics walked away from radio on their own, chased podcasts, and then acted shocked when the platform went away.

That is the part the two of them actually argue about. The anger of the past week has been aimed at the guy whose name is on the new channel, which we covered earlier, and Segura keeps dragging it back to what comics did to the format first.

The numbers under the fight

From there they get into club money, which is where the union talk stops being a bit. Kreischer says feature rates sit at $700, or $100 a show, and have not changed in 35 years. Hosts get $50. Travel buyouts, he says, have been the same for more than 20 years.

Segura counters with his own math. He says his first headliner offer was $1,500 for a weekend in 2006 or 2007, and the next offer, in 2008 after the crash, was $1,300. He also argues clubs have to be allowed to make money, because a club that only breaks even is a club that stops existing for comics to work at.

Kreischer says he was told not to post the video. He posted anyway, because he woke up thinking he could fix it.