Stephanie Courtney, Flo in the ubiquitous Progressive Insurance ads, says she's OK "as long as I get to do my improv shows."
Stand-up comedian Pete Holmes had an audience of more than 100 million people last month. As the snarky voice of the stock-trading baby in commercials for the online trading site E*Trade, Mr. Holmes and his two recent Super Bowl spots were part of the most-watched TV event in U.S. history.
Normally, when Mr. Holmes performs, it's for audiences of hundreds—gigs at New York comedy clubs, colleges or the occasional taping of a Comedy Central special. He doesn't do finance.
"I know about as much about investing and banking as an actual baby," he says.
Across the country in West Hollywood, seven members of the Groundlings improv troupe dash onto a bare, tiny stage, and Stephanie Courtney announces to the 90 or so people in the audience: "Welcome, everybody! It's Wednesday! That means it's time for the Crazy Uncle Joe Show!"
Ms. Courtney looks vaguely familiar, but only vaguely. Without the maraschino red lipstick, bumped-up hair, head-band and clinic-white apron, she doesn't bear an especially close resemblance to "Flo," the insanely perky hostess she plays in ads for Progressive Insurance.
Mr. Holmes and Ms. Courtney live a double life in show business. The pop-culture icons they portray are known to more people than many movie stars. But in their chosen fields, as actors or stand-up comics, they are still struggling for recognition, roles, and a living wage.
The commercials are steady work and steady money—six-figure money, in fact. Mr. Holmes says the year before he booked the E*Trade gig, he went on the road to do 60 colleges over five months, "sleeping in different hotels in Iowa, driving through the snow" of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. That whole tour, he says, "paid roughly one third of what I've made from E*Trade in a year."
But these performers also face the danger that their corporate celebrity will overshadow the work they care about, or even detract from it. A 2007 obituary for Canadian actor Dick Wilson, who played Mr. Whipple in hundreds of Charmin commercials, said he was making $300,000 a year, working just 12 days. But as he rose to become the third best-known American (in one poll) behind Richard Nixon and Billy Graham, the once-prolific actor essentially stopped winning roles. "I've done 38 pictures and nobody remembers any of them. But they all remember me selling toilet paper," he said.
There was a time when a comedian's route to the top was well marked: Work the club scene, strive for years to get on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson, then hope you kill—and your life changes. Steve Martin broke on Carson, then "Saturday Night Live," put out a platinum-selling comedy LP, and for a time was packing large arenas.
Now, cable and the Web have fractured the comedy scene into a million funny pieces. Not all are profitable. Many aspiring comedians produce Web videos at their own expense, hoping it leads to something that pays. Doing ads can pay the freight along the way.
"The industry's almost backwards in a way. There's no defined path anymore," says Matt McCarthy, a 31-year-old, burly, red-bearded New York comedian who portrayed a constantly outdone cable installer in commercials for Verizon FiOS TV service.
At the Groundlings show, Ms. Courtney is wearing a black v-neck Journey T-shirt over snug jeans. Her hair is completely normal—flat and wavy with a glint of red. Over 90 minutes she'll pretend to be an elderly British lady building with an erector set, a cross-dressing Army commander and an unconscious 1980s prom date who awakens singing the Thomas Dolby song "She Blinded Me With Science." During one improv, a phone jingles in the audience, and without breaking character she tilts her head and says to her stage partner, "Does your neighbor play the xylophone?"
Ms. Courtney had been auditioning in Los Angeles for years, after leaving stand-up comedy in New York. She became a main-company member at Groundlings and has won bit parts in TV shows such as "Men of a Certain Age" and movies including "The Heartbreak Kid."
"I always thought I would have supporting parts, then get bigger supporting parts, and get a character actor's career going," she says. She was auditioning for commercials to pay the bills and having little luck, booking "under one a year," she recalls. But she nailed the Progressive audition ("They were like, 'Can you be a little more quirky?' and I was, 'Oh sure'"). Since 2007 she's taped 53 spots as Flo. A Facebook fan page for Flo has 2.4 million "likes."
These days, the comics doing ads insist they don't feel it's demeaning. "There's no difference between commercial and sketch as long as it's funny," says Mr. Holmes.
Not long ago, movie stars such as Brad Pitt and Mel Gibson felt the need to sneak away to Japan to earn a few extra bucks making commercials. Ellen Page went from an Oscar nomination for her hipster "Juno" star turn to ads for Cisco Systems the year after the Academy Award show. Old-timers may gag—would Lenny Bruce plug a mutual fund?—but the wall between art and commerce appears to have collapsed.
The road to permissibility is paved with irony. Some of the hippest comedies on TV, including "30 Rock" and "The Colbert Report," have turned product plugs into winking inside-jokes. During his fake 2008 presidential campaign, Mr. Colbert admitted it was "tawdry" and "cheapened the process" when his coverage of the race was called "The Hail to the Cheese Stephen Colbert Nacho Cheese Doritos 2008 Presidential Campaign." But the "product integration" was real. "30 Rock" plugged Verizon Wireless as Tina Fey said, "Can we have our money now?"
Last June, Will Arnett and Jason Bateman, stars of cult-fave sitcom "Arrested Development," launched DumbDumb, a serious business venture described as a "sponsor-driven comedy studio" whose mission is to "produce and star in branded…programming for all platforms that match not only a brand's personality and marketing objectives but Arnett and Bateman's well-known comedic tone." Bud Light made fun of product placements in a Super Bowl commercial this year with moviemakers festooning a swashbuckling scene with beer logos so they could "get tons of free stuff."
"The idea of 'selling out' doesn't really mean the same thing anymore," says Wilson Standish, a trend analyst at the Intelligence Group, a firm owned by Hollywood talent agency Creative Artists Agency that supplies research to Comedy Central. "The Y generation understands that you need financial backing to pursue your dreams, and as long as you're not compromising your artistic integrity, it's OK."
Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal
Mr. Holmes ad-libbed the line "It's haunting" to describe a fellow infant's dance moves in one commercial.
Make no mistake: Stand-up comics, pound-for-pound, remain more judgmental than mothers-in-law—it's their job. But the judgment these days isn't over whether you've done a commercial—it's whether it's funny. Says Andrew Donnelly, an L.A. stand-up who voices an animatronic turtle in ads for Comcast high-speed Internet service: "Your commercial might be on between 'The Office' and '30 Rock.' You better be funny,"
Mr. Holmes's words for the E*Trade baby essentially are unscripted. He'll riff on a provided theme in a studio, then watch footage of the kid in the onesie to add flourishes. Preparing one spot—with the baby teasing an infant buddy on a red-eye flight from a Vegas bachelor party—Mr. Holmes saw his baby waving his arms around and ad-libbed, "He dances like this." Then the baby blinked and looked into the camera, and Mr. Holmes added: "It's haunting."
Flo's ad-libbed quips (like "…or a big, tricked-out name tag!") are the product of Ms. Courtney's years working on comic timing. From day one, she says, the director of the commercials encouraged her to improvise.
"When I saw the first commercial, I thought, this is sort of showing my wackier side more than some of the stuff I've booked that's, like, comedy," she says.
Most performers in commercials don't make life-changing money. They often work for scale, a minimum negotiated by the Screen Actors Guild: $592.20 per day of work, plus a declining fraction in residuals as the commercial airs, down to $51.65 per showing. There are separate rate schedules for network, local and cable TV, and it can add up to a healthy middle-class lifestyle. But celebrities—and performers in long-term campaigns like Ms. Courtney and Mr. Holmes—may graduate to more lucrative deals, says Doug Ely, a commercial agent at AKA Talent.
"I'm sure Stephanie has a multiyear contract," Mr. Ely says. "Let's say she gets $100,000 per year, though I'm sure she gets substantially more than that at this point. They'd contract for x amount of work that includes commercials, print ads, radio, personal appearances."
Ms. Courtney declined to talk about her deal, but concedes, "It's definitely changed from where I was. But where I was, was a one-room studio, really hand-to-mouthing it. Now, to not freak out if you have to go to the dentist or something, it's made life a little easier."
Mr. Holmes also didn't want to be specific, but added: "When it's all said and done—many recording sessions, many rewrites, rerecords, and after they've all aired for a year— you're looking at about the starting salary of an ophthalmologist."
Ms. Courtney feels she can dodge both the stigma of doing commercials and the straitjacket of being pigeonholed for playing one character so well.
"There's no 'it's her!' factor" when she performs, says Groundlings colleague Roy Jenkins. He says sometimes when celebrities perform at Groundlings, the audience laughs at everything because they're famous. "She doesn't get that," he says.
Mr. Holmes never mentions his gig as the baby when he performs because, he claims, he doesn't have material about it.
"They've never really given me a talking-to about what I can and can't discuss on stage," he says. "But for me it's good business to not be, 'Hey, I'm the E*Trade baby! Imagine if the baby was doin' this…' and humping the air, or whatever."
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