The hidden tastemakers: Comedy scouts as cultural brokers at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Abstract

Responsible for selecting which new artists are brought to the public attention, talent scouts carry considerable influence in framing performing arts fields. Yet their practices are hidden from public view and how and why they select fledgling producers remains unexplored in cultural sociology. This article aims to demystify the work of such gatekeepers by examining temporary comedy scouts operating at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The Fringe is the world's biggest arts festival and a central tradefair for the British comedy field. Drawing on ethnographic observation and interviews with nine comedy scouts, I examine the positions they occupy in the comedy field and, in turn, how this positioning affects which comedians they propel. I then interrogate the brokerage enacted by scouts. Centrally I argue that while some broker between artists and management, all scouts are implicated in mediating between artists and audiences. In particular, they act to intensify comedy taste boundaries, making judgments based on assumptions about imagined audiences and directing more legitimate comedians to privileged audiences and vice versa. In this way, scouts act as hidden tastemakers, intensifying the scarcity of certain tastes, and strengthening the ability of privileged audiences to use comedy in the claiming of cultural distinction.

Making Evaluative Judgements and Sometimes Making Money: Independent Publishing in the 21st Century

“…Their high levels of cultural capital mirrored those of cultural intermediaries documented in other research (e.g. on comedy scouts (Friedman, 2014) and television buyers (Kuipers, 2012)). Just as Giselinde Kuipers' (2012, p. 587) television buyers had in common high levels of cosmopolitan capital, with 'similar speech styles: similar informal, loose, pleasant yet business-like manners -even similar hairdos and clothing styles', the literary publishers in my study had high levels of academic capital and most were educated to postgraduate level.…”

Career gatekeeping in cultural fields

“…In this regard, the role of the JFL Festival in the North American field of stand-up comedy is comparable to the Fringe Festival in the field of British comedy (studied byFriedman, 2014), as well as to similar fieldcoordinating events in other cultural fields, such as the fashion week in Paris (studied by Godart andMears, 2009). These are proofs of the final publication available at Springer via American Journal of Cultural Sociology: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00078-7…”

“…For example, social networks influence the search and selection strategies used by booking agents for night clubs, academic peers involved in appointment procedures, and producers of fashion shows (Corra and Willer, 2002;Foster et al, 2011;Godart and Mears, 2009;van den Brink and Benschop, 2014). In addition, career gatekeepers' positions in a field influence their decisions, as researchers have demonstrated for agencies in the film industry and comedy scouts at art festivals (Bielby and Bielby, 1999;Friedman, 2014).…”

“…For example, studies have highlighted the effect of these decisions on tastes in the respective fields. Comedy scouts intensify taste boundaries when they select comedians for gigs, and jazz teachers reify the artistic rules of the field of jazz music (Friedman, 2014;Nylander, 2014). In addition, a few studies on career gatekeeping have concentrated on the effects of gatekeeping decisions on employment chances; this work includes analyses of employment throughout the project-based careers of writers and actors in the film and television industry (Bielby and Bielby, 1999;Zuckerman et al, 2003).…”

Producing and Consuming Inequality: A Cultural Sociology of the Cultural Industries

“…The work of Bourdieu (1984;1993), for example, also addressed this area of cultural work, albeit conceptualizing such boundary-spanners less as brokers and more as 'cultural intermediaries'. Work in this tradition tends to stress that intermediaries are key ''tastemakers'' (Mears, 2011;Friedman, 2014) that play a pivotal role in ''framing'' fields of cultural consumption by shaping what forms of culture are available to certain audiences (Maguire and Matthews, 2012). An important aspect of their job, to paraphrase Entwistle (2006), is to 'matchmake' artists with the tastes of appropriate audiences.…”