Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn

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Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn
Genre	Comedy/Talk show
Running time	Approximately 21 minutes
Creator(s)	Colin Quinn
Executive producer(s)	Colin Quinn Liz Stanton Ken Ober
Starring	Colin Quinn Nick DiPaolo Greg Giraldo Jim Norton Patrice Oneal Keith Robinson Rich Vos
Country of origin	USA
Original channel	Comedy Central
Original run	(Test) 2002-12-09–2002-12-19 (Regular) 2003-03-10–2004-11-04
No. of episodes	Approximately 92
IMDb profile

Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn was a comedic talk show on Comedy Central which borrowed heavily in premise and format from a previous Comedy Central production, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Like Politically Incorrect, the idea of the show was to have roundtable discussions, except instead of inviting various guests of many views, mixing entertainers expressing themselves with experts and political figures, Quinn's guests consisted mainly of comedians from the Olive Tree Cafe, the restaurant connected with the Comedy Cellar in New York City. It aired weeknights at 11:30 p.m. ET, immediately following The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

In 2002, Tough Crowd debuted on Comedy Central with an eight-episode test series which ran Mondays through Thursdays from December 9 to December 19. The show was picked up in January 2003, and the regular series began its 21-week run on 2003-03-10. The show was placed on an "indefinite hiatus" in October 2004, with what was presumably its final episode airing on 2004-11-04.^[1]

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. The comedians usually prepared these monologues ahead of time.

1 Show format
2 Guests
3 Series finale and epilogue
4 References
5 External links

[edit] 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. 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 elicit 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."

[edit] Guests

[edit] Regular guests

These comedians were regularly rotated into the show's panels and were often paired together:

[edit] Frequent guests

These comedians made numerous appearances, with some serving as informal regulars:

[edit] Famous guests

These well-known comedians made only one or few appearances:

[edit] Series finale and epilogue

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.

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.

After placing Tough Crowd on hiatus, Comedy Central attempted to fill the vacant timeslot with various programs, including Too Late with Adam Carolla, The Graham Norton Effect, Wanda Does It, and repeats of The Daily Show and Chappelle's Show – all of which were met with limited success. Currently, the slot is occupied by Stephen Colbert's series, The Colbert Report.