Brody Stevens was brilliant as a TV show warm-up comedian

Vulture

“Brody turned audience warm-up into an art form,” says comic Steve Agee of the beloved comic, who died last Friday at age 48. As John Roy explains, Stevens honed his "skills in the grueling crucible of audience warm-up. A dirty secret of the television industry is that the live audience of your favorite programs are not all fans of the show. Large portions consist of people who were promised 20 bucks to sit in a room for three hours and plan to do it again at a different show tomorrow. They don’t care one bit about what they are watching, and on shows like @midnight, Chelsea Lately, and The Jeselnik Offensive, Stevens’s job was to make them. He attacked this problem with everything he had...He would start outside, before the audience was even in the room, walking up and down the line, telling jokes as they filed in the building. He would ask audience members where they went to high school and then rattle off facts only someone who went there could know: their area code, their mascot, the Del Taco across the street. They would light up. If this warm-up guy put in that level of effort, the least they could do was laugh."