Robert Rose wrote in response to this posting here…
Referring to the question someone asked you about stand-up comics, one that came to me was: Was there ever someone you saw for whom the reverse was true — you saw them do five minutes on a talk show and thought they were great, but then saw them live for forty minutes and realized that five minutes was about all they had? Possibly not, since they probably wouldn't have been booked on TV in the first place without at least one full set they could do in clubs — though of course you might have been seeing them try out a new routine that flopped. Of course, even if you have examples, I would completely understand that you might not want to name names.
(Also slightly curious if you like Jim Gaffigan, whose work I enjoy — don't recall you ever mentioning him one way or the other. One kind of nice thing about him is that his material is pretty family-friendly and non-political. Not that I don't love some guys who are more raunchy and/or topical — though I have to admit I've been kind of avoiding Lewis Black in the Trump era; as angry as Trump makes me, I think I'd be worried Black was going to spontaneously combust — but I can occasionally do with a break…)
Taking the second part first, I like what I've seen of Jim Gaffigan, which has not been enough to become a big fan of his. I just looked up his touring schedule on his website and I don't see him coming anywhere near Los Angeles for a while. He occasionally plays Las Vegas where I occasionally go…but comics of his stature only play that town on weekends and I'm not as fond of Vegas on weekends. I took Amber there on a weekend a year or so ago to see Jim Jefferies and he was fine but everything else cost too much and/or was too crowded.
I'd like to see Mr. Gaffigan but right now, he's too big to do a full show at the Comedy Store here in town or the Comedy & Magic Club in nearby Hermosa Beach…and not big enough to play the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood or Vegas on a school night. I may just have to wait until his career goes way up or way down.
You answered your first question yourself. No one gets on The Tonight Show or any program like that to do five minutes unless they could come back the next week with another five-minute set and the week after with yet another. When I was a more regular presence at the Comedy Store and the Improv, I did see a number of comics break in new material that flopped. I once saw Bill Maher do something up on stage that flopped and after five minutes of insufficient laughter, he told the audience to go screw and walked off.
I saw Richard Pryor and, at the other end of the Comedy Food Chain, I saw Roseanne Barr do that too. I also saw Andy Kaufman flop spectacularly once with a bit I doubt he ever did again. To Mr. Kaufman's credit, he stuck it out to the end though he clearly thought it was all the fault of the audience refusing to play along with with a not-very-clever routine.
I also saw a lot of bombing by comedians I never heard of again. I won't name them because I can't remember any of their names.
By the way: In my list of great stand-up performances I've seen, I should have mentioned Chris Rock and David Brenner. Brenner struck me as a lightweight when I saw him do five minutes with Carson…and maybe he was in those days. But a few years before he passed away, I saw him get up on a stage and breeze through 75 minutes of solid, brilliant comedy material to non-stop laughter. Like Kinison and a few others, you'd never have known how good he was just from seeing him on some TV talk show.