The business of comedy: Alan Kohler talks to Marty and Michael

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Hi, I'm Patricia Carvelis, the host of Politics Now. And sometimes it can be hard to cut through all the noise from the Canberra bubble. But on the Politics Now podcast, bursting it wide open is our core business.
I'm joined by the brightest minds at the ABC to break down polyspeak and have a chat about what's actually going on behind the scenes. It's called Politics Now and you can find it on ABC Listen.

**Alan Kohler** (0:42)
Well, something different for this week's That's Business. Marty and Michael, the guys who do comedy stunts on social media and often hurt themselves so that for them, medical bills are a cost of doing business. But yes, this is a business, quite a serious one in fact. They wouldn't tell me their revenue, but it's definitely more than a million dollars with nine employees. They've got 13 million followers across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, but 60% of their revenue comes from subscriptions these days so that they can have more control of it instead of handing control to social media. But this is a story about 21st century media and how it works and how social media algorithms have changed everything.
So here's Marty and Michael. Well, guys, this is a business podcast to the ABC called That's Business. So I want to talk to you about the business of Marty and Michael.
You up for that?

**Marty** (1:40)
A bit of a change of speed for us. We're having a nice civil conversation without anything exploding or hitting us, so it's nice.

**Alan Kohler** (1:48)
Yeah, good. I reckon that although it looks like you're just a couple of crazy guys having fun and hurting each other, I actually think you're probably working hard to create and sustain a business. Am I right?

**Marty** (2:02)
Yeah. Well, when we started out, we just wanted to make funny videos. But as we grew, we were forced to look into the business side of things, and it's just kept growing and growing. It's something that we've really enjoyed, the business side of things now.

**Alan Kohler** (2:21)
For some of the people my age who haven't caught your act, can you explain what you do?

**Marty** (2:27)
Michael.

**Michael** (2:30)
So Marty and Michael basically have built a career on playing silly buggers with each other. We've done a range of different content styles from pranks to slapstick humor, heavily influenced by Jackass growing up. So we've sort of made a living through hitting each other with different objects and turning it into science and seeing how the body reacts to different pains and objects getting hit by it.

**Marty** (2:59)
Yeah, so essentially we're content creators who just do physical comedy as our main source of content.

**Alan Kohler** (3:09)
And can we go back to the start? I mean, were you friends as teenagers? And how did you start this?

**Marty** (3:16)
Yeah, so we met in high school. We went to a school called, a high school called Kelvin Grove here, which has a tennis excellence program. So we actually met, so we weren't even in the same year, but we just met through the tennis excellence program. And then just remained friends and kind of were bonded by our very extreme sense of humor. And that just kind of carried us through. Then we started work, we worked together as tennis coaches after school, and then we traveled with our friends all over the world. And then sort of in our 20s, we were kind of given a little opportunity with some of our friends who started a production company, and they needed some content to produce. So Michael called me up and said, hey, let's go out in public and kind of do what we used to do in high school, except film it.
And yeah, it kind of started from there.

**Alan Kohler** (4:10)
Were you making money in those early days? Was it tough?

**Marty** (4:12)
No. Yeah, God, no. We were quite the opposite. We were very broke. And from that first opportunity, we actually ended up in quite a lot of debt.
And yeah, we kind of, it just came, everything came together sort of in our late 20s. We were filming for, I think, four years.

**Michael** (4:34)
Four or five years, yeah, and getting nowhere.

**Marty** (4:36)
Yeah. So it was a lot of nothing and a lot of concerned parents and friends thinking, what are you guys doing? Because it's hard to get a normal job.

**Alan Kohler** (4:46)
So why did you keep going at that point? I mean, four or five years, you must have, you must have felt like giving up. Yeah.