Careering Through Comedy: Liminal boundaries in freelance creative work

Comedians are well known for pushing the boundaries of taste, decency and social mores in their acts, often to hilarious effect. But professional comedians must also navigate a range of visible and invisible boundaries as their careers unfold. One of the pivotal shifts occurs with the transition from the live circuit to television. While these two domains are often seen as closely connected, live work and TV work are in fact characterized by very different rules of entry and progression. Drawing on 82 interviews with comedians and other industry players, this paper explores the risks and rewards involved in making the transition from one institutional context to another. In particular, we develop the concept of ‘liminal career boundary’ to explain how and why boundaries emerge in fluid, informal organizational contexts such as freelance creative work. This concept extends our understanding of organizational liminality as a state of disorientating in-betweenness, one that is partly objective (insofar as it is determined by key industry gatekeepers) and partly subjective (insofar as it is perceived by professionals who are attempting to cross a career boundary).