Remember the summer of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic prompted a temporary shutdown of live comedy (along with public life) across much of America and the world, leading at least one comedy club owner to proclaim prematurely that “NYC is dead forever”?
Well, a lot can happen in four years.
Here we are in March 2024.
The Creek and The Cave, which was a hub and incubator of raw comedy voices in Long Island City for a decade and a half, closed in 2020, and owner Rebecca Trent relocated herself, the club and walls of photographic memories to Austin, Texas, where she’s fostering an entirely new and different generation of comedians. The former Creek in LIC is now a boxing gym.
Carolines on Broadway closed at the end of 2022, after 40 years in business and the last 30 at the north end of Times Square. While Caroline Hirsch and company continue to put on the annnual New York Comedy Festival each November, Hirsch’s titular club has been turned into a ping-pong place.
Over the course of the pandemic, we have mourned the deaths of the original owners of the Improvisation (Budd Friedman, and his ex-wife, Silver), Catch A Rising Star (Rick Newman), and Comic Strip Live (Richie Tienken), as well as Al Martin, who opened New York Comedy Club in 1988 and later ran The Broadway Comedy Club and Greenwich Village Comedy Club.
The oldest of the old-school comedy clubs, Dangerfield’s in Midtown East, shuttered in March 2020 with the venue put back on the rental market. Chario, the longtime waiter, died that April at age 84. But the venue got reclaimed last year with a complete renovation, reopening on New Year’s Eve as Rodney’s.
The Upright Citizens Brigade closed up shop in NYC in March 2020. A new UCB-NY has begun teaching improvisers and sketch comedians and forming teams, but the new venue on East 14th Street has yet to open, as pictured when I walked by last week. As for the former longtime home of the UCB? That’s gone and buried, demolished along with the Gristedes supermarket and Midtown Tennis Club that sat above the basement theater, all to make way for more luxury condos no aspiring comedians could ever afford.
The last comedy tenant in that basement, Asylum NYC (an offshoot of Boston’s Improv Asylum), stopped putting on shows there in December 2022, and only just now finally reopened the doors at the East 24th Street spot vacated by The PIT in 2020. The PIT has kept hold of its original loft space on West 29th Street, and the Magnet Theater a block west of them have stayed in business, too.
Across the East River in Williamsburg/Bushwick, the cool kids of comedy have collected at the Brooklyn Comedy Collective (which has partnered with Chicago’s old iO), while Chicago’s fabled Second City just established their first-ever Brooklyn beachhead, poaching Asylum’s artistic director while Asylum NYC waited and waited to reopen.
But wait! There’s more!
Stand Up NY is now in Times Square?!? That’s right. I walked by Bond 45 last week and saw none other than Dani Zoldan sitting behind the podium outside the side entrance. Zoldan had bought the Upper West Side club in 2008 (it was a co-owner, James Altucher, who proclaimed NYC dead entirely in 2020), and as the Instagrams show, they lured George Wallace to their grand opening shows last weekend. They’re hosting stand-up shows down below the main restaurant on Thursdays-Saturdays but finally have access to a restaurant so that’s something. As for their UWS spot that Jerry Seinfeld mockingly zinged “could use a little sprucing up” when he wrote an op-ed in the NYT countering Altucher’s column? Would you believe that’s going to be a THIRD New York Comedy Club location on the island? NYCC applied for a liquor license in February on the 236 W 78th St. location where Stand Up NY is/was, and that would join NYCC’s original spot on East 24th Street and First Avenue, as well as the East Village spot that used to be Eastville (Eastville long since moved to Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill) and a new outpost they just opened up in Stamford, Conn.
Meanwhile, the Comedy Cellar keeps chugging along, expanding to four different rooms, three of them a block away from the original haunt below the Olive Tree Cafe; The Stand‘s location just east of Union Square fills two rooms in the winter and adds outdoor shows out front in the summer; and there’s not enough room to remind you of Gotham Comedy Club, West Side Comedy Club, and every other club and juke joint across the city’s boroughs that’s pumping out live comedy in 2024.
Which reminds me, there’s plenty of movement happening across the country, too. Here are just two of many movers and shakers that caught my eye recently.
Helium plans to add another club to its arsenal in Atlanta.
And I’m waiting to find out what the Laugh Factory plans to do in Las Vegas when the Tropicana closes for demolition at the end of this month. That’s the planned site for a new baseball stadium (to lure the A’s from Oakland), and while a new hotel will go up, too, that’s not for a few years. So where will the Laugh Factory go? They’ve been in Vegas since 2012.
Seen And Heard
What have I seen that’s worth sharing with you fine people?
Forgive the blurry snapshot on my part, as I hurried to capture even a brief moment of Cole Escola in all of their glory at the curtain call as Mary Todd Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!” What a ridiculously funny satire of the final days of the Lincoln Administration at the end of the Civil War. I’m grateful I could check out a preview. Not surprised at all that even Lincoln director Steven Spielberg and his Mary Todd, actress Sally Field, stopped by at another show to pay their respects. It’s such a hot ticket, that even if you cannot manage to snag tickets yourself through the extended closing of May 5, I’d bet you’ll have another chance down the road as this show should get another run in a larger venue soon enough.
I have to admit I didn’t know what to expect when Alyssa Limperis and Shannon Odell brought “Wake Up Long Island” to The Bell House. Actually, I must admit I thought it’d be more of an actual talk show in the vein of “Ronna and Beverly,” so what a surprise to find out it’s a full-fledged theatrical production about a cable access talk show, complete with a full cast of colorful characters behind the scenes played by the likes of Max Knoblauch and Nick Naney! Turns out I saw it in its most unusual form, though, as Limperis explained to me afterward that they hadn’t ever performed their play AFTER hosting a traditional stand-up showcase in their Long Island characters. But they made it work!
Lebanese comedian Nataly Aukar has been selling out gigs across Europe this past winter, and will headline her own night at The Elysian at the upcoming Netflix Is A Joke: The Fest in LA this May. But apparently her monthly shows at Union Hall have only recently become one of the hottest tickets in Park Slope?! She’s clearly enjoying her newfound level of popularity.
Watching her develop an hour that incorporates the ongoing tragedies across Israel and Palestine, and how it impacts Aukar and her family in Lebanon, all while she’s hitting 30 and trying to find her own perspective and place in the world as a whole as well as within the comedy world, while also trying to figure out if she’s ready to settle down with her German boyfriend or just break up with him already — it’s clear Aukar has tapped into the zeitgeist, and it’ll be exciting to see where she goes from here.
Jungle Cat is a relatively new Thursday night showcase hosted by Abby Govindan and Mohanad Elshieky. Govindan came to NYC from Houston, riding a wave of social media fame; Elshieky, born in Libya, also has had brushes with going viral, later moving to the city via Portland (Oregon). Together (with producers Arish Jamil and Lilly Sparks) they’ve developed a quick and fervent following even while moving around different Chinatown spots, before finally landing atop the roof of 50 Bowery in The Crown. They’ve had some hot lineups already (for that rooftop debut, they featured Josh Gondelman, Sam Clark, Hanan Issa, Ismael Loutfi, Ahamed Weinberg, and SNL’s Andrew Dismukes). Tonight promises the always-tantalizing prospect of a “Secret Headliner”!
If you remember the popular monthly show Gravid Water that used to sell out regularly at the old UCB, then the concept of “And Scene” will look mighty familiar. And that’s on purpose, says producer, host, booker, and actress Mick Szal, who loved Gravid Water and missed its absence in the city’s cultural diet so much that she started up her own version of the concept, which pairs actors and improvisers for two-hander 10-minute scenes. Szal picks scenes from actual plays and productions, the actors memorize and prepare their lines and roles, while the improvisers have no idea what scene they’re in or who they’re supposed to be portraying. The clashing styles usually produce delightful results.
Monday’s show featured pairings of Maggie Carr and Brian Morabito; Sophie Carmen-Jones and Brian Stack; Michelle Federer and Tami Sagher; Michael Cyril Creighton and Connor Ratliff; and Colby Minifie snd Alex Dickson (pictured).
The next And Scene happens April 15 at Caveat in the Lower East Side, but even if you cannot make it in person, there’s also a livestreaming ticketing option.
And scene, indeed!
Last Week On Late-Night TV
Katherine Blanford performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, joking about “port-a-potty racing” at the Kentucky Derby, living with her boyfriend and bachelorette parties.
OK, that’s all I’ve got time for in this dispatch. Is there something else I need to know, something I need to see or hear, or something I should share with everyone next time? Please let me know in the comments or drop me a line via email or DM. If you’d like to know what’s what, please sign up here and subscribe to the newsletter to get future dispatches sent straight to your email inbox!
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