That's performing, not marketing.

The analogy would be if whatever company releases a product that people see out in the wild and it's so good at what it does that they want more of it based on word of mouth.

Performing is just showing up at comedy shows and doing your bit. That alone would not have made him successful.

He aggressively promoted and marketed himself!

Biggest example: Going on Letterman and other corporate talk shows / interviews (he went on Letterman 12 times to promote himself, not making much money, purely for driving awareness - classic pr marketing technique that he used repeatedly)

He also went far beyond live acts when he started monetizing his recorded acts that were playing/distributing through corporate partners. Those recordings and specials were heavily marketed and he benefited from it because it created scale.