Wealth & Money Quote by Denis Norden

A neat little piece of showbiz arithmetic is doing the heavy lifting here: laughter is the product, but the money comes from the song. Denis Norden, a writer who knew the British variety circuit from the inside, is pointing to a system where comedy material was treated as disposable fuel, while music publishing provided the reliable revenue stream. The “song” isn’t an artistic flourish; it’s the monetizable loophole.

The intent is almost breezily forensic. Norden isn’t raging about exploitation, but he is exposing a hierarchy of value that performers and promoters rarely admit out loud. Songs had clear ownership, repeatable licensing, and a paper trail. Jokes were murkier: harder to police, easier to “borrow,” and culturally coded as cheap because they vanished the moment they landed. So comics ended with a tune not because the audience demanded it, but because the industry’s incentives did.

The subtext lands in that dry final clause: “but it all added up.” It’s both an accountant’s shrug and a quiet indictment. Underpayment becomes tolerable when distributed across many small transactions, and a writer’s livelihood depends on being nickel-and-dimed by a whole ecosystem of acts. Norden is sketching a pre-streaming precursor to today’s creator economy: the front-of-house talent captures the spotlight, while the people supplying the words survive on volume, workaround revenue, and institutional habits that normalize paying “not very much.”