So, a venue that I have been working with is now transitioning to doing standup comedy.
Perspective from the masses, is a sound engineer necessary for a standup comic event? The owner seems to think not, but I believe that he is just trying to cut costs anywhere he can. I've got 15 min to "soundcheck" the talent and then it's off to bartending for me. I've done live comedy events before, and working on cruise ships we always had an engineer for comedy. What are your thoughts on this? How do I convince the owner that he needs to have a live engineer in order to get a proper high class event out of this? The room that we are in is very reverberant, I spent about 6 hours tuning the mains when he installed the system. We have basically 0 room treatment and the bar seats 500.

(let me know if I can give you more information)

You'll probably make more $ in tips by tending bar IMO.

Some comedians use music/effects in their show, depending on the depth of talent. It has been my experience that most local acts don't need special production other than a mic.

My view: If the installed system is "vanilla" aka: not too complicated to operate, the manager can just fire it up and go, most times...but what happens if something goes wrong..?

In most cases a powered box mixer with two or four 10/1 (or 12/1) cabs will cover a stand-up show in a club.

I've been to one comedy show. It was a simple production.

Yea I do think it is important to have someone to setup the P.A sound.
But at the same time I can see that once thats all squared away and the act gets going, its pretty much set and forget slap a compressor/limiter on there and it should take care of itself.

At the same time what might be interesting is to find comedians and "produce" their acts. Lights, Sound FX, background music, that kind of stuff. So that way, you are the one bringing in talent and putting on the show.

6 hours tuning the mains? Do tell me about that.

It was pretty fun - Just spent a lot of time fiddling around with the best placement. We are currently using a Behringer xr18 (terrible little mixer imo), running through a DBX Driverack Venu360 that the venue is borrowing from me. The LR mains are QSC K12.2 with 2 Harbinger 18' Subs. Got the placement and coverage where we wanted it then played a lot of music back through the system while tweaking eq and delay; set the subs up with a cardioid pattern. Ran a line for a patio speaker that time aligns with the mains.

you may want to align the system differently for spoken word - 15min soundcheck seems reasonable and i don't think a tech is necessary after that, unless someone needs to fire a bunch of jingles? but in that case, comedy artists better have someone with them who knows the cues...

Why would the system be aligned differently?

assuming your system not only sounds nice but measures flat, coverage is excellent and reflections are minimal (the latter i doubt), alignment might be ok - but to get the best intelligibility, i prefer (to design, to set up and) to align systems differently for speech than for music.

High pass the vox at 100hz-125hz
Set it and forget it
Go bartend and enjoy

That sounds about right. Thanks!