On a chilly Monday night in November, Will Noonan is strolling the swanky basement stage at Capo in South Boston. He has hosted a Wednesday night stand-up show here for six years, but tonight is different. There is no green room full of comics waiting for their spot on a showcase. Tonight is all about Noonan — five cameras capturing his 45-minute set from every angle.
Noonan is shooting his own stand-up comedy special. He’s been planning it for more than a year, and hopes it lands at a big streaming service like Netflix or Amazon. That would be a nice payday and career-changing exposure, but Noonan knows his most likely destination is YouTube, an option that might have seemed amateurish four or five years ago but is becoming an increasingly legitimate choice for indie stand-ups.
“I want to see it old-school style,” says Noonan, speaking in a back room at Capo after a second taping. “Forty-five minutes, forty minutes, an hour on a YouTube special or Netflix special. But I think it’ll probably be a mix of a lot of things.”
The mix Noonan is referring to is the release of the special, and then rolling out clips from it on social media. A short clip of the right routine can go viral on TikTok or Instagram and give a comedian a burst of new followers. Noonan says his management wants to see that. “They can cut this up, and I can go 10 months on the . . . clips [on] high-quality film,” he says.
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Instead of waiting for their Netflix moment, Boston comics are creating their own specials