Scene Report: Who's on Substack?

We talked to Reid Pope and the writers behind "Low Lift Ask" to hear more about longform written comedy on this very platform...

This is SCENE REPORT: conversations between Zach Schiffman and other comedians about the trends we all notice in the comedy scene but no one on the outside is privy to.

In my last Scene Report, we discussed podcasting as an alternative to standup and sketch for comedic content. As the social media landscape increasingly fractures, I am still interested in looking at the other places where comedians can showcase themselves online. I realized the very place you are reading this newsletter is a good place to start! Despite the current comedy scene being a wonderful and robust community of people, few are regularly writing on this platform. Plenty of friends in the scene have started Substacks that they use with little to no regularity (including myself, as you will see someone point out shortly.)

For this scene report, I talked with standup Reid Pope about their personal newsletter, and Ritam Mehta and Nabeel Chollampat of Low Lift Ask about using Substack as a comedic outlet and how it has influenced their other work. More than anything, I highly recommend you subscribe to them both.

When did you start on Substack?

Reid Pope: I launched my Substack on October 4th, 2020. I was stuck in my apartment, missing stand-up, and couldn't get myself to work on longer-form plays or scripts. One evening, I was like, okay, I’m just going to sit down for 45 minutes, bang out whatever pops into my head, and then press send. Fast-forward 229 weeks, and here we are. Haven’t missed one!!!

Ritam Mehta: We started almost 5 years ago now–April 2020. It was a time when everyone was starting a Substack (Zach Schiffman included) but only a few people kept publishing regularly through the New Substack boom (Zach Schiffman excluded).

Describe your newsletter.

Reid: Short, Medium, and Long dispatches from my week to help you get through yours. Subscribe for stories about pigs with buttholes for eyes, getting punched in the face by a man in rainbow pants, teenage Junior-Olympic springboard diving, and tweeting something so nuts that the FBI decided to make a house call.

Ritam: Impossible.

Nabeel Chollampat: How much time you got? ​​​😂😂😂😂 #NawImJusPlayin I think our newsletter is, like almost every other Substack, about whatever dumb shit either of us thought about that week, or whatever was in our camera roll, just run through the filter of “How can we make this as stupid as possible?”