HOME VIDEO : Comedy Tapes Look Like Contenders

When the home-video boom started about five years ago, the comedy tape business was a joke. Video retailers were concentrating on renting movies and had no time for comedy.

Compared to the multibillions earned from movie rentals, the revenues from comedy tapes are still laughably small. But the comedy home-video market took a big jump a few years ago and is still on the upswing.

Comedy tapes, incidentally, aren’t movie comedies but non-theatrical programs, mostly of comics in concert. Some are compilations of skits, usually from TV.

According to industry analyst Betsy Niesyn of the trade journal Home Video Publisher, comedy tapes did $50 million worth of business--sales and rentals--in 1987. Last year, the figure leaped to $130 million.

How about this year?

“It may go up to $140 million,” she predicted. “Look for it to keep growing, but not by huge amounts. It’s a small market but it’s very healthy.”

One reason for the increase in comedy tape sales is the drop in price. Most comedy tapes now cost $19.95, down from $30-$40 three to four years ago.

That price reduction was possible because of a change in the marketplace. Like every non-theatrical genre, comedy benefited from the influx of the mass merchants--discount chains like Target and K mart--who now market low-priced tapes.

Jim Jimirro, president/CEO of J2 Communications, cited another new outlet: “Comedy sells in music outlets, like Tower, Wherehouse and Music Plus.”

As long as business was limited to retailers and rentals, comedy was doomed to a small share of the market, but as other sales outlets opened, comedy blossomed.

“Now it’s mostly a sales market, with companies geared to doing volume business, putting out as much product as the market will bear,” said Bill Perrault, marketing director of Vestron, which has released tapes by such comedians as Steve Martin, Robin Williams and Richard Pryor, and has an Andrew Dice Clay program on its fall schedule.

According to J2’s Jimirro, most comedy tapes are former cable-TV specials--mainly from HBO and Showtime. One reason original programs don’t dominate the comedy market is that they’re just too expensive to make. Acquiring the home-video rights to a cable comedy special is considerably cheaper.

“Making an original program costs about three times what it costs to buy the rights of a cable show,” said Jimirro. “An original program costs more and it’s a greater risk.”

Still, J2 has had great success with original programming. The three tapes in its Dorf series, starring Tim Conway--”Dorf on Golf,” “Dorf and the First Games of Mount Olympus” and “Dorf’s Golf Bible”--have cumulatively sold 360,000 units. All were originally priced at $29.95.

But J2’s next release is a former Showtime special, an 80-minute Louie Anderson show due out Oct. 12 at $39.95. Jimirro said the price is higher because, initially, J2 will sell it to retailers for the rental market. After some months, the company will lower the price, probably to $19.95, for the sales market.

The biggest stars in the market are Eddie Murphy and Bill Cosby. Murphy, whose tapes are released by Paramount, has a new one, “The Best of Eddie Murphy: Saturday Night Live” ($24.95), that should be the major new comedy title in the fall market and should wind up in the Top 10 of home-video comedy.

Here’s the most recent list of best-selling comedy tapes, compiled last year by Niesyn of Home Video Publisher. She cautioned that while each title has sold more units since then, the relative positions probably haven’t changed:

1--”Bill Cosby: Forty-Nine” (Kodak, $19.99). 350,000 units.

2--”Eddie Murphy Delirious” (Paramount, $19.95). 230,000 units.

3--”The Best of John Belushi” (Warner, $19.98). 220,000 units.

4--”Eddie Murphy Raw” (Paramount, $89.95) 200,000 units.

5--”Dorf on Golf” (J2, $19.95) 190,000.

6--”Bill Cosby Himself” (CBS-Fox, $19.98). 150,000 units.

7--”The Best of Dan Aykroyd” (Warner, $19.98). 140,000 units.

8--”Elephant Parts” (Pacific Arts, $39.95) 125,000 units.