Louis CK bypasses the ticket brokers, who probably aren’t laughing

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KCRW stocked up on ice cream – four kinds – for a visit of one of the funniest guys on television. And he left without even a scoop.

Elvis Mitchell and Louis CK. Photo by Bil Zelman (The original image is no longer available, please contact KCRW if you need access to the original image.)

But Louis CK did take time this week to sit down with The Treatment’s Elvis Mitchell to talk about his remarkable career and his recently hatched plan to skip the brokers and sell tickets to his comedy shows directly to the public. This meant no service charges or sales tax. The result:

Here’s a portion of the interview with Elvis (a longer version will air on The Treatment in the coming weeks):

Here’s a little background on Louis’ ticket-broker sidestep from his own website:

This year, I’m trying something new, building on the fun, success and fan-benifit of selling my content online.  We are selling tickets to this tour exclusively here on louisck.com.  I only wanted to do this if there was a way, like with LIVE AT THE BEACON, that  it could bring the price of tickets down and make them easier and less complicated to buy.  We figured out a way.

Making my shows affordable has always been my goal but two things have always worked against that.  High ticket charges and ticket re-sellers marking up the prices.  Some ticketing services charge more than 40% over the  ticket price and, ironically, the lower I’ve made my ticket prices, the more scalpers have bought them up, so the more fans have paid for a lot of my tickets.

Indeed, this isn’t the first time Louis has bypassed middlemen to offer content directly to his fans. In December, he sold downloads of his “Live at the Beacon” comedy show for $5 on his website. He pulled in more than $1 million in two weeks.