Alf LaMont and the art of getting people to pass it on

In 2009, Alf LaMont managed to overlook Slash. He was at the Viper Room during the Sunset Strip Music Festival, talking comedy with George Lopez. The guitarist tried to join the conversation. LaMont, by his own cheerful account, had enjoyed enough drinks to miss the significance of the person beside him. For someone whose work involved getting people noticed, it was an unusually elaborate way to take the evening off.

The episode makes a useful entrance to a career spent around performers without always being the performer. LaMont handled marketing and development at the Comedy Store, then digital content and social media at agencies, before becoming co-founder and CEO of LaMont Digital. The work connects entertainment, art, politics and public-interest communications. His recurring concern is what happens after somebody sees a message. Will they do anything with it? Will they tell somebody else?

Long before that question became an agency brief, he was helping neighboring venues on the Sunset Strip find one another online. Their customers already moved between clubs. The businesses began moving between one another’s conversations, too. Twitter offered a meeting place; eventually, the meeting acquired a walking route. The Tweet Crawl was a fairly literal answer to a digital question: what if the followers actually came out?

A childhood argument, awaiting a search engine

LaMont’s affection for the internet also has a less commercial history. In a 2012 essay, he recalled moving from Mexico to the United States as a child and discovering that his television memories did not travel as easily as he did. His references included Skippy: The Bush Kangaroo, Rocket Robin Hood and Odisea Burbujas. Other children did not recognize them. Years later, online searches helped him recover the programs he remembered.

He paired that memory with a family dispute over a game of Scattergories. His answer involving the Ashanti language was rejected; the household encyclopedia failed to settle the argument in his favor. His father supplied a pun, and the pun enjoyed the sort of long domestic career available only to jokes nobody asked to hear again. The internet, in LaMont’s telling, brought the possibility of vindication.

These are comic recollections, written with an adult’s enjoyment of an old grievance. They also explain something about the appeal of a searchable, connected world. A childhood reference could find its missing context. A question could escape the boundaries of the bookshelf. LaMont’s later professional writing is frequently impatient with the internet, but the impatience comes from someone who expects it to be useful.

The job description arrived after the job

His arrival at the Comedy Store was similarly untidy. He had been working as a talent manager when a friend told him Pauly Shore wanted a producing partner and help with development. There followed roughly a dozen meetings and a description of duties broad enough to accommodate several careers. Only after starting did LaMont recognize marketing and development as the center of the job.

The actual work was concrete. He updated websites, looked after social accounts for the Sunset Strip and La Jolla clubs, answered inquiries from organizations wanting to use the rooms, and helped book the Main Room. He made artwork, edited online video and handled publicity. Tweets sat beside comedian biographies and press materials in the same crowded stream of responsibilities. This was communications with a room to fill at the end of it.

A May 2009 blog introduction supplied the editorial proposition. Much of the club’s comedy happened away from the stage, he wrote, and the internet could let people into that wider world. The material included backstage encounters, club personalities and the accumulated stories of performers. A venue could publish more than a schedule. It could offer readers a reason to feel familiar with the place before they walked through its door.

LaMont shifted attention away from MySpace and established a presence across Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr and Tumblr. The list now reads like a drawer full of old charging cables. At the time, each service offered somewhere to put a different piece of the club: a photograph, a coupon, a clip, an observation. He was assembling an online version of a place with considerable character already inside it.

A neighborhood learns to retweet

The Comedy Store was part of a larger experiment. At the Roxy, Nic Adler and Annie DeSanctis were developing their own online community. People at the Viper Room were doing the same. LaMont encountered these neighboring operators through Twitter, along with Charlie Amter, then working at the Andaz. They began helping one another online, and the collaboration became a physical event.

LaMont coordinated the Tweet Crawl’s participating venues and the materials they needed, while describing decisions as collective. That detail matters. The attraction depended on several establishments agreeing to make the surrounding neighborhood more interesting together. Each business had a front door of its own; the event gave customers an excuse to try more than one.

He connected that cooperation to economic pressure and the tools newly available to respond to it. Businesses had reasons to seek company. Twitter made finding willing collaborators easier. There is no need to dress the arrangement in technological grandeur: nearby people recognized a shared problem, exchanged messages and organized an evening. The novelty lay partly in how publicly they could invite everyone else along.

In 2010, his writing took aim at another use of the same tools: automatically following everyone who followed a brand. He acknowledged that refusing could cost followers. He still disliked the transaction. A Comedy Store account did not need to pretend it cared about every stranger’s dinner. It needed worthwhile material and a willingness to respond when people actually wanted a conversation.

A bigger conversation than the follower count

“Your content should be reason enough for your numbers,” he wrote. The sentence is brisk enough to survive the platform on which the argument began. His proposed reading list for the club’s account extended beyond comics to scientists, museums, writers, politicians and local businesses. What a brand chose to follow and share helped explain its interests. An audience could encounter a sensibility rather than a repeated request to buy a ticket.

The question reached a different room at SXSW Interactive in 2011. LaMont joined a panel moderated by Sean L. McCarthy with Marc Maron, Michael Ian Black, Kambri Crews and Comedy Central’s Jordy Fox Ellner. The discussion covered the internet’s effect on comedy, including Twitter and MySpace. McCarthy and LaMont had conceived the panel together. The person managing a club’s accounts was helping frame a conversation with performers and other people changing how comedy traveled.

That year also brought a public-radio collaboration at the Comedy Store. A recorded Off-Ramp show featured Ian Edwards, Sarah Tiana, Michael Kosta, Fahim Anwar and Freddy Lockhart, with Brandon Christy hosting. LaMont received a special thanks. The arrangement put the club in front of listeners beyond the room, using a different medium and its own conventions. The internet was one route out of the building; it was never the only one.

“Your content should be reason enough for your numbers.”Alf LaMont · December 2010

From a comedy room to a winter briefing

LaMont’s subsequent roles included heading digital content at Adler Integrated and directing social media at TaskForce PR. His project history includes Truth To Power, Manifest: Justice and #Watts50, extending the work into art, politics and social justice. At LaMont Digital, he and co-founder Tonya LaMont brought their experience into an agency whose services include strategy, multilingual content, social media management, art commissions and event coverage.

A December 2023 winter-preparedness briefing shows how far the subject matter had traveled. Alongside speakers discussing weather, emergency services and insurance, LaMont addressed the distribution of information. The question was how to make useful material available for people and organizations to share as California faced the winter season. He described a social media information kit, with material available in multiple languages.

“The goal is to encourage the community to be the messengers themselves,” he said. That is an ambition with practical consequences for the work. A community organization needs something it can use. A person sharing a warning needs language their neighbors understand. A video and a graphic offer different ways into the same subject. Preparing those materials gives the next messenger less work to do.

The distance from a club promotion to a storm briefing is considerable, particularly in what is at stake. Yet one working question carries across: how does the message get beyond the account that first published it? On the Strip, neighboring venues and their customers helped circulate an invitation. In preparedness communications, community networks can carry information onward. LaMont’s role has moved with the setting, while his interest in that onward movement remains recognizable.

History, horror and a microphone of his own

He has also made room for interests that resist being reduced to a client list. The History Happy Hour, credited to LaMont, ran in 2020 and 2021. Its episodes ranged through historical subjects and popular culture, including discussions of HBO’s Rome and a horror-film series called Deep Cuts. Contributors included Mike Black, Amanda Brass and Daniel Dingmann. The episode descriptions were openly playful about both the discussions and the editing.

That mix of curiosity and comedy appears elsewhere in his writing. In 2013, he recalled asking Wes Craven about levity after a Cinefamily screening of The People Under the Stairs. The interest fits the podcast’s later wandering between history and horror: he wants to know how the machinery of a story works, while still enjoying the story. A frightening film can accommodate a laugh. A history conversation can accommodate friends with opinions.

The off-duty details are pleasingly specific. His karaoke choice is Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline. He likes science, has a corgi named Watson and admits to playing the trombone poorly. His agency biography places him in Sacramento and gives his wife the superior intellect. Even the small print has comic timing.

It would be easy to finish with a number: followers acquired, views accumulated, a tally large enough to look conclusive. LaMont’s own early argument points toward another ending. Give people something worth their attention. Respond when they engage. Help them carry it further. It is work that requires someone to notice who else is in the room. On most evenings, presumably, even the guitarist.