(Disclaimer stand up comedy was always popular since the 50's and 60's I'm not going to get into that because I want to focus on the comedy boom of the 80's. This is focusing on those times) The comedy boom of the 80's was because of comedians finding an audience with Television. Already legendary comedians had made stand-up very popular, Eddie Murphy, Carlin, Pryor, and too many to count had already turned the art of stand-up from the schticky bits of vaudeville to social commentary. The audience was already primed for the new "stand-up that was created in the 70's. Shows like Evening at the Improv, MTV Half hour comedy hour, Friday Night Funnies, even The laugh factory had a show. Making a TV show out of 30 minuets of stand up was a quick inexpensive way to put a show on the air, the more shows, the more success they had. Think of it, kind of like how wrestling got popular and all of a sudden there were 3 or 4 different organizations. Well with the creation of so many opportunities cam an influx of hacky comedians. Soon anybody and everybody was wearing a cheap suit and telling the same vanilla garbage. "___________ is like this, but __________ is like this (cue the canned laughter. Eventually the public grew weary with this and all the TV shows slowly got cancelled. With the cancelations went the "Gold Rush" of opportunities. Almost all the now famous comedians felt this in the 90's. They had to weather almost a decade of relative obscurity compared to the 80's. What happened next was the comedians went back to the night clubs where most of the TV hacks couldn't keep up and the fat was cut off leaving and a new better culture for the comedians to hone their craft. By the early 2000's we had the rise of the comedy scene we now have today. I would write more but I got to go RIP Dennis Wolfberg