The Daily Show's Resident Deranged Millionaire John Hodgman slid into his Daily Show rolly chair to frustrate Jon Stewart and to lecture the audience about the horrible mistake they made by voting to re-elect Barack Obama earlier this month. As with most people crying over Romney's loss, Hodgman does it by wiping his tears and blowing his nose on a $100 bill. Is there any other way?
We reported earlier this week that Lena Dunham is shopping around a new advice book (tentatively titled Not That Kind of Girl) and that the starting bid for the book rights was $1 million, but in the days that've followed, the bidding has gotten a heck of a lot higher. Deadline tells us that, with the deal still not final, bidding is currently at $3.6 million. Stay tuned to see which side of NASA's annual budget Lena Dunham's paycheck lands on.
Jason Zinoman and Megan Angelo over at The New York Times have a great piece today detailing how much money several different types of comedians make. They talked to a road comic, a UCB solo performer, a podcaster, a Comedy Cellar regular, a cruise ship comic, and Eugene Mirman. Bad news: Everyone except TV star Eugene Mirman makes less money than the cruise ship comic.
According to a great piece on Louis C.K. in The Los Angeles Review of Books, the FX Network offered C.K. a bigger budget and a 9pm primetime slot prior to this latest season of Louie but he refused, fearing that more pressure from advertisers would be a threat to his creative control of the show. Wow, Louis C.K. sure is crazy about this whole “having integrity” thing.
Stand-up and cancer survivor Tig Notaro's recording of her acclaimed, heartbreaking Largo performance, which was released two weeks ago via Louis C.K.'s website, turned out to be a whopping success. The A.V. Club reports that the album has sold about 75,000 copies so far, which would put it at #3 on the Billboard charts if releases on C.K.'s website were set up to register on Billboard. Some estimate that the recording, which was sold for just $5 a pop, has made somewhere in the $250,000 range for Notaro so far. That's a lot of well-deserved money for Tig Notaro and cancer research.
After a surprisingly contentious negotiation, Modern Family's six adult leads have agreed to a deal. They're rumored to be making somewhere around $170,000-180,000 an episode next season, with a raise every following year and a back-end cut. This is up from $65,000 an episode but slightly less than the $200,000 they originally wanted. With the pay bump, they also agreed to extend their contracts from seven to eight seasons. So all is good with the Pritchett family? Not so fast. Now the Modern Family kids are asking for more money. It's amazing what children pick up from their parents. Though this negotiation is not likely to [...]
