donderdag 20 oktober 2011

Do entertainers earn too much money?

This week’s writing task charged me with the instruction: you should spend about 40 minutes on this task. Write about the following topic:  Some people feel that entertainers (e.g. film stars, pop musicians or sports stars) are paid too much money. Do you agree or disagree?

My brains did overtime thinking about this writing task. First of all, since when exactly are sports stars entertaining people? I find nothing entertaining about sports, let alone soccer. The only thing that might be a little entertaining, are the comments after a disappointing match, and one of the soccer players says something like: ‘If you look at the chances we had then we didn’t have a lot of chances and although we had a lot of ball possession, that didn’t result in any more chances’ or ‘Yeah and then you were in the lead with 2-0 and then you  gave away that lead and then suddenly you have  2-2 on the scoreboard’.  Note that those soccer players always use the word ‘you’, but really, I didn’t do anything. But this is not entertaining, it’s embarrassing.  

This writing task at least brought me the insight of a paradox. The people I find entertaining, do not earn enough money. High quality stand-up comedians, like  Caroline Borgers,  Katinka Polderman and Kees Torn can hardly gather a good month salary with their ingenious songs and jokes. Circus artists have a hard time to get their pockets filled. Stage actors are usually poor people feeling the pinch, peddling with tickets for weeks and finally playing for three rows. But those people are entertainers.

So maybe we should drop the noun ‘entertainers’. Then the task will be about: Do I think that film stars, pop musician or sports stars are paid too much money? And what an indiscriminating question is that! A lot of pop musicians have side jobs like judging local talent scouts these days to feed their children, because all their songs are illegally distributed.  If we do not see a movie star for a long time, that is probably because he or she was in several b movies that were never shown on television, let alone in the movie theatres. And sports stars only earn a lot of money when they actually win a big tournament. All other days of the year they do tv commercials and wear ugly sponsor T-shirts to pay the mortgage.

So what is the question then? Do I think Wesley Sneijders earns too much money? Or Madonna? Or Oprah Winfrey? Look, I couldn’t care less. Those few have conquered the world, they influence people’s lives in a good way. So they are entitled to an amount of money in proportion to their impact. The more people know you, the more money you can ask for. That’s is the benefit of impact. The more impact you have, the more priceless you become. People who say that they are paid too much, will never have more impact than getting their son to do his homework. Which is a good thing, mind you, but if George Clooney said ‘Do your homework’ it might send hundreds of thousands sons all over the world behind their books. And that is why he should be paid a lot.

That leaves me with the question why bankers earn so much money. They are not famous, the only impact they have on people’s lives is that they make them feel robbed. And their level of entertainment is extremely low.

Geen opmerkingen:

Een reactie posten