To Carly Hoogendyk, the manager from Omnipop Talent Group West, Hollywood today has come to embody a kind of “no new friends” mentality — and oftentimes, it takes non-traditional efforts to break into traditional spaces.
In an era of contraction — marked by the dwindling of TV roles, late-night viewership, and talent incubation, at the institutional level — many of the old pathways up through the business for emerging stand-ups have narrowed or disappeared entirely. At the same time, social platforms are as noisy and packed with creators as they’ve ever been, making it harder than ever for a newer comedian to cut through.
For Hoogendyk, meeting the challenges of today’s comedy marketplace starts with recognizing, in the words of Mark Duplass, that “the cavalry is not coming.” But she also cautions against taking the “no new friends” idea too literally. There are, in fact, new friends to be made. But it’s all on the artist to build whatever friendships are important to them, from the level of the individual fan on up, in what is hopefully a carefully considered, long-road approach to their careers.
Business Casual‘s trajectory embodies this philosophy. Consisting of Jeremy Elder, Corey Peter Lane, and Hunter Saling — a trio whose work gravitates between sketch, improv and clowning — Business Casual are a group associated with the viral comedy collective Stamptown who met as freshmen at UCLA and have since built momentum through performances at comedy festivals worldwide. Their professional relationship with Hoogendyk, Lane says, has been “punctuated” by escape room outings and escalatingly impactful appearances at Austin’s Moontower Comedy Festival.
After first connecting with the group on the ground at Moontower, Hoogendyk reached out to say she’d be in L.A. soon and ask whether they had any shows coming up. “The answer was no,” Lane recalls. “So I told her yes.” Hoogendyk signed the trio off of a last-minute show thrown together for Netflix Is a Joke Fest, and in the years since, their partnership has centered on stacking small, intentional wins. After securing them reps for work in commercials, film and television, and pushing them to self-tape regularly, Hoogendyk has worked with Business Casual to get a bunch of burners on the stove, including their “masthead show” Cowboys, a project originating as a pandemic-era digital sketch, which they fleshed out for performances at festivals across the country, as well as a six-week Off-Broadway run.
In film and television, the group is now developing multiple projects, including Battlebots, a Dodgeball-esque sports comedy centered on the world of robot combat, as well as All Star Gas, a half-hour comedy pilot on which they’re collaborating with comedian Chris Gethard. Then, there’s The Business Casual Show, a podcast they set up earlier this year with Bill Burr’s All Things Comedy that’s helping them to further expand their online audience. To Hoogendyk, this was a big “missing piece” that would get them on a more regular cadence of publishing digital content — helping, hopefully, to take their careers to the next level.
Business Casual joined Hoogendyk to chart the long, unglamorous path of building a comedy career in a recent sitdown at All Things Comedy’s podcast studio for Comedy Means Business. Across the conversation, they talk about learning to embrace the “sh*t factor” — the freedom that comes from working with what you have, rather than waiting for perfect conditions — and inspiration taken from Stella, the comedy troupe consisting of Michael Showalter, Michael Ian Black, and David Wain. The group also touches on how they view today’s sketch landscape, as well as their artistic endgame, both as a group and as solo performers.
Meanwhile, Hoogendyk dishes on the “young person’s game” of talent discovery and how writing the State of Comedy digest on Substack and curating the Newcomers Showcase at the New York Comedy Festival has factored into this process for her. Check out the full podcast above.
