Courtesy of Just For Laughs
Audio By Carbonatix
With four tickets sold, a non-refundable plane ticket to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and a Plan B that consisted of a drink at the Katy Trail Ice House with friendly strangers, Alistair Ogden made an urgent and desperate plea to the city of Dallas: Please buy tickets to his Thursday night stand-up show at the Dallas Comedy Club before it was canceled.
Just days ago, the Canadian comedian received a humbling text from his manager: the show had sold only four of the required 20 minimum tickets for the curtain to rise. So he turned to desperate measures in the form of a modern confession booth: TikTok. Worst-case scenario, a friendly-enough stranger invited him to the Katy Trail Ice House, so he’d at least experience the real Dallas, full of golden retrievers and finance bros. As fate and algorithms would have it, by Monday, after the internet vulnerability, his headlining gig had sold 33 tickets. The show must go on. Rain check on the Ice House.
If he looks oddly familiar, that’s because he is. The comedian, rising in the era of short-form comedy show clips, has gone viral more than once. With close to 100,000 followers across several platforms, the comedian is tasked with turning fickle social media metrics into real revenue.
“I went through a roller coaster of emotions,” he tells the Observer. “At first, you get that text, and you start to spiral and think ‘How can I make a career out of this?’… I try to look at it positively. It’s a very silly job I’m doing anyway. It’s really not that serious. No one’s lives are at stake. Nothing really bad is going to happen. You just lose some money, and that’s what it is.”
Ogden, who will play a show in Washington, D.C. before heading to the West Coast, has no choice but to fly to Dallas, show or not. His connecting flight is at the nation’s top airport for novice half-marathon speed-walk training and baggage theft.
“Now that the show is happening, it feels even better,” he says. “When you’re about to lose something, you enjoy it even more.”
Ogden has been working as a comedian in Canada for a decade and has a loyal following, but breaking into the U.S. market is his next step. To do that, he needs an O-1B visa, specifically designed for entertainers. The application requires a myriad of evidence of “extraordinary ability,” including proof of headlining gigs, which is how he landed in Dallas. The U.S. Department of State also accepts published press materials in newspapers and magazines as visa qualifications, and, for that, we say “you’re welcome.”
“In Canada, it’s very hard to build a big audience without first going to the States,” he says. “You have to tell the [Department of State], ‘I’ve done all the things I can do in Canada, please take a chance on me.’ Then you pay a whole bunch of money, and then they let you in to do shows for little audiences, and you try to build up the momentum.”
Ogden isn’t the only performer impacted by low ticket sales; he’s just one of the few who’s honest about it. A surging trend called “blue dot fever,” named for the blue dots signaling unsold seats on Ticketmaster, has led to many show cancellations, particularly in smaller markets. As more artists skip Dallas entirely on their tours, it’s a good reminder that if you want your favorite entertainers to come to your city, you have to buy tickets to big, small, new, strange, bad and undiscovered acts, too.
With a lot on the line and a miniature existential crisis in retrospect, the comedian is grateful to bring his act to a small but steadily growing Dallas audience, hoping to make just a few people laugh.
“I often think the world’s on fire, and I should go do something more practical,” he says. “But I think that’s what it means to be human, to create and to talk about the things that people are creating, to be really excited about all the silly stuff. When a society is healthy, hopefully we’re all doing that all the time.”
Alistair Ogden will play the Dallas Comedy Club (3036 Elm St.) on Thursday, May 21, at 7 p.m. Tickets are $25.
