Louis C.K. has cracked the code on selling his comedy to his audience with as little mess as possible, and shows no sign of slowing down. He announced Monday that his next tour, running October through February, will cost $45 per seat -- yes, that's every single seat, regardless of the venue or type of seat -- and will be free of service charges or other additional fees.
The comedian is selling tickets for his 39-date tour exclusively through his website, allowing customers to avoid Ticketmaster, Brown Paper Tickets and other third-party avenues that tend to jack up the price up to 40% over the actual price of the ticket.
How he pulled it off, we have no idea (and he may want to tell Eddie Vedder his secret), but it likely is due to the fact that C.K. plays mostly theaters that would allow him to independently sell tickets more easily with little overhead.
Another, albeit riskier way that C.K. plans on making this work is by doing everything within his power to stop people from scalping the tickets, the practice of buying a ticket with the intention of selling it privately for more than its original price after the show is sold out.
C.K. explains on his site:
...[Y]ou'll see that if you try to sell the ticket anywhere for anything above the original price, we have the right to cancel your ticket (and refund your money). this is something I intend to enforce. There are some other rules you may find annoying but they are meant to prevent someone who has no intention of seeing the show from buying the ticket and just flipping it for twice the price from a thousand miles away.
C.K. admits that he is likely to make far less on this tour than previous ones with this trade-off. He even indicated that he is personally paying the sales tax for each ticket. But he sold his last special, "Live at the Beacon Theatre," through the same independent means, and while he said he expected to get paid far less than he would have if he had done it through HBO or Comedy Central, he made enough to donate a large part of the proceeds to charity and bonuses for his staff.
So why he is he doing this? It's hard to gauge the success of this type of strategy, but the fact that top-tier comedians Aziz Ansari and Jim Gaffigan have sold their specials in much of the same way may be evidence of the fact that C.K. is rapidly changing the way comedians release their product.
Plus, he says that "The benifit for me is that I won't get angry emails from anyone who paid a ton of money to see me due to circumstances out of my control. That makes me VERY happy."
Unless you live in New York City, you can probably grab tickets to his show. And knowing the way C.K. works, it will be an entire new hour of material you've never seen before. Click here to grab a $45 ticket to see Louis C.K. while you still can.
And while you have Louie on your mind, be sure to watch Thursday's season three premiere of "Louie," which HuffPost's TV critic Maureen Ryan raved about.