May We Look Back and Laugh: New York City Comedy Clubs Return After Over a Year of Closure
March 12, 2021
Jessica Clayton pulls a freshly sanitized microphone from a stand on the back patio of Now & Then, a bar on Brooklyn’s graffiti-covered Meserole Street. The comedy show’s host had just cleaned the mic with a Lysol wipe as he introduced Clayton. The gesture was at once considerate and distracting. It had been hard to hear her name under the amplified swish of the cloth.
“Let’s get right to it. I want a boyfriend,” says Clayton. The crowd of 35 socially distanced guests starts chuckling. “Why do people laugh at that?! What’s wrong?!” She flips her strawberry blonde hair over her shoulder, smiling at guests bundled in winter coats and angling toward the space’s scattered heat lamps. That opening almost always gets a laugh. She knows people aren’t expecting her to dive right in, but Clayton likes to skip the small talk and “it’s so good to be here” many stand-ups do to ease into a set. She thinks the audience can smell through it.
It’s mid-November and around 40 degrees, but it feels colder encased by the patio’s cement walls. Now & Then is tucked between large brick warehouses converted into coffee roasters and record stores. This makes its patio more of an inlaid concrete yard, unseen from the street and accessible only by a steep metal staircase off of the back door. A weatherproof white tent hangs about ten feet overhead. It covers a little over half of the space. Clayton thinks this is one of the better outdoor venues she’s been to: the tent traps a bit of the space heaters’ warmth and the guests’ laughter, like the walls and ceiling of a regular comedy club would. Every so often someone pulls down their mask to sip a beer and set it back on a folding table in front of them.
“But it’s difficult because all my friends are feminists,” Clayton continues. “They’re all like ‘F*ck white men!’ and I’m like ‘I’M TRYING!’” A deep chortle erupts from a nearby guest and some eyes water—whether from laughter or the cold is unclear.
This is likely Clayton’s 50th outdoor show of the pandemic. She lost count somewhere in October between performances with Stand Up NY in Central Park and the dozens of comedian-led productions in courtyards and bars across the city. She does remember her first show was in August, though. It was on the roof of The Tiny Cupboard, a Brooklyn event venue so close to the Chauncey Street subway platform that the J train is considered the club’s greatest heckler.
“I grew up poor,” says Clayton, leading into her next joke about Hamburger Helper. People laugh, responsive to her family stuff, so she tells another about having to share a bed with two sisters growing up in Columbia, Maryland. She’s one of six children. “And no one wants to babysit when you have six kids!” The small crowd at Now & Then chuckles, understanding the set up. “Sketchiest babysitter my parents ever left us with? Big Ears Eric.” Clayton holds a second. “His name was ‘Big Ears,’ we added the ‘Eric.’” A scattered laugh. That’s fine, that’s not the real joke. It’s just an extra bit she’s worked in over three years of stand-up. Clayton explains that Big Ears Eric did drugs and therefore could never stand still. “You know how in the beginning of a video game, when you go to pick your character? This dude stood there like this.” Watching Clayton pretend to shift restlessly, leaning too far back, chin tucked into her neck, the audience roars with laughter.
The thing about stand-up comedy is that the same jokes might work in one place, with one audience, and not with another. This babysitter bit is why Clayton decided that she wouldn’t do Zoom shows early in the pandemic. Trying to act out the gesture for her virtual audience—awkwardly swaying from the waist-up level of her computer camera—didn’t work at all. Between the viewers’ confusion and the audio lag time, Clayton couldn’t tell if she should keep holding for laughter or if laughter was not going to come. She stopped doing Zoom appearances after that. They just didn’t feel like stand-up to her.
Clayton gets a hand signal from the show’s host at Now & Then. State guidelines have placed a 10 p.m. curfew on bars and restaurants throughout the city, so the producers have been extra insistent on keeping to time. Clayton nods to the host. She connects her set for the crowd using a technique called a Harold, which she learned in improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade years ago. In improv, the technique helps to connect scenes. Tonight, Clayton uses it to tie up her Big Ears Eric story with a reference back to an earlier joke about promise rings. She clips the mic back into its stand. People are still laughing as she rejoins the picnic table full of comics sitting just outside the tent.
Clayton stays to watch the rest of the night’s comedians, many of whom are her friends after performing together the past four months. She has a feeling this will be one of her last shows of 2020. The weather is getting worse by the day and coronavirus cases are on the rise again. At 10 p.m. the show producers end the night by telling guests and comedians they will be on hiatus after next week. They aren’t sure for how long. As comedians and comedy-goers shuffle onto Meserole Street, Clayton calls an Uber home. It’s only a 20 minute walk to her apartment, but it’s cold outside.
“New York City Is Dead Forever”: The City’s Stand-Up Scene by 2020
“There's certain things you want to do in certain cities,” says Emilio Savone, co-owner of New York Comedy Club. “If you're in New Orleans, you see live jazz. In New York, one of those things is to see live stand-up.”
New York has been the center of stand-up since the 1920s. According to comedy historians, the comedic style began at the Palace Theater on Broadway. It was there that headlining vaudeville comedian Frank Fay pioneered an early form of stand-up, calling himself the “nut monologist” and doing away with the many props comedians used at the time. “Let me put it this way,” says comedian and comedy historian Wayne Federman, “people have loved a person on stage, making them laugh, by themselves, since before there was the term stand up comedy.” Although Fay is credited as the founder of stand-up, his anti-Semitic attitude made him unpopular with his contemporaries. “Fay’s friends could be counted on the missing arm of a one-armed man,” Milton Berle, a rival comedian once said. Vaudeville made way for moving pictures during the 1930s, and many of the genre’s comedians moved from New York’s showhouses to nearby Rockefeller Center. There they hosted radio broadcasts and, later, television shows, and by the 1950s a comedy pipeline had taken root in the city. Visitors and locals alike could watch comedians perform on supper club and nightclub stages across New York, each comic hoping to be discovered for television programs like Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater, filmed nearby. Writer Kliph Nesterhoff tells vividly of this period in his definitive history of stand-up, The Comedians. He calls the 1950s the “great change” because comedians started writing their own jokes in the hopes of getting these jobs. Before, Nesterhoff writes, “comedy was always about some elusive guy… ‘A fella was walking down the street when…’ In the mid-1950s no longer was it ‘a fella’ walking down the street. For the first time comedians told the audience: ‘I was walking down the street.’”
It wasn’t until the 1960s that New York City’s first dedicated comedy venues were founded: Pips in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn and The Improv in Hell’s Kitchen. Both locations were early stages for comedians like George Carlin and Rodney Dangerfield. Dangerfield went on to open his own club on 1st Avenue in 1969. By the early 1970s, late night shows, based in New York and California, made stand-up comedy mainstream. The Tonight Show introduced New York City comedians like Freddie Prinze to a national audience, and Saturday Night Live’s success gave rise to lucrative HBO and Showtime specials. By the 1980s the country was in a full-fledged “comedy boom” according to Wayne Federman. During this period, numerous comedy clubs were founded in New York City including The Comedy Cellar in 1982, Caroline’s in 1983, Stand Up NY in 1986, and New York Comedy Club in 1989. New York Times reporter Stephen Holden wrote of the boom in 1987, letting the numbers tell the story. “The number of comedy clubs around the country grew by 200 percent” between 1981 and 1983, he writes, and by October 1987 stand-up had “seen some 260 full-time clubs spring up in over 100 cities and 34 states... If one adds to that total all the bars, clubs and restaurants that feature standup humor one or two nights a week, the count rises to 500.”
The 1990s saw the end of the comedy boom and the rise of alternative comedy. Comedians like Janeane Garofalo and Marc Maron began performing in bookstores, coffee shops and basement bars to escape the tourists at the many “drink-minimum” clubs with high ticket prices and expectations for their performances. Writer Neil Strauss welcomed the new era in his own New York Times story, critiquing the 1980’s boom. “It was nearly impossible to channel surf without running into at least one average-looking man in an open-collar shirt talking about his mother-in-law, masturbation or Roman Catholicism,” wrote Strauss in 1996. “Stand-up comedy has had a bad reputation ever since.” On the decline, venues found themselves closed or under new ownership over the next two decades.
In 2008, Dani Zoldan and his friend Gabe Walden bought Stand Up NY from a Sinatra performer and television producer named Cary Hoffman. The pair had frequented the venue a decade before as teenagers, and Zoldan says that back then the place had “100 pieces of gum under the tables” and “your feet would stick to the ground from beer spilled years ago.” It was a dive that reminded him of the interior of a soiled navy ship. “Everything was gray. The walls were painted gray. The floors were black and gray. The showroom carpet was dark gray,” he says. But Zoldan and Walden knew the club had hosted stars like Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, and Lewis Black. They hoped its history, a few renovations, and red wallpaper would bring it back to life under their management.
Meanwhile, Emilio Savone’s promotion company was in charge of selling tickets for The Comic Strip Live on the Upper East Side, opened in 1975 and where Eddie Murphy found fame in the 1980s. The club was doing well with the help of the promotion team, and Savone and his business partner Scott Lindner asked for a bigger role. The club owners passed. Savone and Lindner then took their services over to Al Martin, owner of the Broadway Comedy Club near Times Square. Martin had recently opened another venue in Greenwich Village, and, according to Savone, really needed help getting the New York Comedy Club—his third location down on 24th Street—back into working order. Savone and Lindner became de facto operations managers of New York Comedy Club in 2012, and Savone says that within a year the club’s reputation improved dramatically. When Martin said he was considering selling in 2013, Savone claims he and Lindner asked him immediately, “Well, what would you sell it for?” The club owner smiles recalling the exchange. “He threw out a number. And we said, ‘Okay, we'll take it.’”
Since the deal went through in 2014, the New York Comedy Club has expanded to a second location in New York City and hosts regular shows in Atlantic City, Philadelphia, and Connecticut as well. Collectively, says Savone, the club was putting on over 50 shows a week in early 2020. They were even considering a third New York location when the shutdown order happened in March. “There was a lot of growth, a lot of momentum,” says Savone, but the pandemic, he continues, “was like throwing a rod in our tire spokes.”
Comedy clubs were closed by executive order on March 16, 2020. At the time, there were only five reported deaths from COVID-19 in the entire state, but city and state officials were proceeding with caution. Many club owners moved their shows to Zoom or streaming services, but some clubs and improv theaters would close completely by late fall, including Upright Citizens Brigade—where Jessica Clayton had trained—The Creek and The Cave, and Dangerfield’s, which had been running for over 50 years.
In August, Stand Up NY became embroiled in an online argument about the soul of New York City. In a now infamous LinkedIn article, James Altucher, the third co-owner of the club, argued that the city was “dead forever.” His reasons included people moving out, businesses closing, and a general lament over the lost subculture of comedy clubs. He mentions that Stand Up NY had tried to do an outdoor show in May that was shut down by the police, although by now the club was regularly putting on shows in Central Park. In the article, Altucher explained his continued concern. “We have no idea when we will open. Nobody has any idea. And the longer we close, the less chance we will ever reopen profitably,” he wrote. The LinkedIn post gathered over 1,600 comments. It was so widely discussed that the New York Times published a response by Jerry Seinfeld.
Seinfeld called Altucher a “putz.”
Another owner, Dani Zoldan, responded to the back and forth in the New York Post: “I think if we weren’t doing the park shows, and actually doing our part to help the city, I think the article would’ve been a disaster for the club and I would’ve been more upset at James for writing it.” Stand Up NY doubled its social media following and spent late summer and fall expanding their outdoor show concept from Sheep Meadow in Central Park to Battery Park, Cedar Hill, Prospect Park and McCarren Park. They had even begun doing outdoor shows in Los Angeles. Along the way, Zoldan had started getting more vocal about what he viewed as arbitrary closure restrictions placed on comedy clubs. In June, the club hosted an invite-only show for the city’s comedians and placed a sign outside which read “ILLEGAL COMEDY” with an arrow toward the club’s door.
Spurred by Stand Up NY’s success in the city’s parks, New York Comedy Club began their own outdoor show program. Co-owner Emilio Savone partnered with rooftop event venues and penthouse spaces. Savone had been waiting to reopen as part of the state’s phased reopening plan. “The whole thing was we're gonna be open July 20, right?” he says. But Phase Four came and went while new language about ticketed performances appeared on the New York State Liquor Authority’s website. The SLA had updated their COVID guidelines to prohibit “exotic dancing, comedy shows, karaoke etc... regardless of phase.” In effect, comedy club owners now stood to lose their liquor licenses if they tried to host shows in their spaces.
Before organizing the rooftop performances, Savone had otherwise been renting out his club for production crews to film comedy specials, working on a podcast network, and producing shows and festivals outside of New York. By November, when Jessica Clayton was performing in one of her final outdoor sets of 2020, Savone said something had to give. “The current business model is just not sustainable,” he said. He had negotiated rent down on his empty locations, but he knew that he couldn’t expect a reduced rate in perpetuity. Savone estimated that between his two New York locations, the club had lost roughly $700,000 since the March closure. “I mean, at some point, you’ve got to decide: are we going to keep our venues? Are landlords really going to stay that patient?”
Heading into winter, Savone had already been part of two organized actions to get comedy clubs reopened indoors. The first, on September 22, 2020, was organized by a group of clubs calling themselves the New York Comedy Club Coalition. It included The Comedy Cellar, QED Astoria, and Gotham Comedy Club among others. The coalition held a press rally outside of Savone’s East Village location. The owner of cQED Astoria, Kambri Crews, presented the coalition's five page proposal on how clubs could reopen alongside the bars, restaurants, bowling alleys being allowed to do so at 25% capacity the following week. State Senator Michael Gianaris attended and offered his support.
Savone says the coalition never heard back.
By October, the New York Comedy Club had joined a lawsuit against Governor Cuomo alongside the Broadway Comedy Club and six small theaters. The lawsuit argued that the extended pandemic closure measures “interfere with plaintiffs’ deeply-rooted liberty and property rights, including the right to work, right to contract, and right to engage in commerce.” That lawsuit is ongoing, and clubs were forced to remain closed for winter.
A New York City Comedian’s Take on the Pandemic
Most of Jessica Clayton’s comedy comes from her experience growing up in a complex lower-middle-class family. As she discusses in most sets, she is one of six children in a blended family, “yours, mine, and ours!” she quips, though not unaffectionately. Her parents both dropped out of high school, and by the time they were 20 and 22, respectively, Clayton’s mom and dad had three kids together. The pair never married.
Clayton’s dad went on to get his G.E.D. and has worked in a series of blue collar jobs. She recalls him being a truck driver and doing something for a refrigeration company. He was also in the Navy for a time. Clayton stayed with her mother in Baltimore until she and her twin sister started second grade and their mother left. “It’s fine, I have a joke about it,” Clayton says. “I mean, it’s not fine, but it’s fine. It’s a great joke.” By then, Clayton’s dad had married her stepmom who had two children from a prior relationship and then a third with Clayton’s dad. So when the comedian and her two immediate siblings moved in, the Clayton household was brought to six total children and a gentle state of constant chaos. “Growing up it was a lot of hand-me-downs, my parents working all the time, crazya*s babysitters because nobody wants to babysit six kids,” she says. Big Ears Eric was a real guy.
Throughout the pandemic, many comedians began incorporating COVID-19 jokes about moving home or being stuck in the apartment with their partner. Clayton kept to telling jokes about growing up poor and her family. It’s not that she doesn’t find topical humor funny, she just knows that kind of joke doesn’t work for her. “Some comics will see what other comics do—and it works for that comic—and then they'll try and do that thing,” she explains. “It's like, No, no, no, no! That comic is being themself! That's why it works. It is about being yourself.” Clayton says that can be “scary and hard” for many comedians because it requires figuring yourself out in front of an audience. That’s why Clayton performs what she knows, what she’d already learned in front of the most judgemental audience out there: high schoolers. After her first winter break in her Maryland high school, Clayton returned to find many of her new classmates sporting Coach bags and new Polo shirts from the holiday. “And I’m like, ‘I'm sharing this cell phone with my two sisters,’” Clayton laughs recounting her recognition of class differences.
While she credits her family’s modest finances with providing a wealth of stand up material, Clayton also says those finances are likely why she didn’t receive an outpouring of support when she decided to pursue a comedy career. Being the first in her family to go to college, her parents had their own dreams for her. Clayton acts out her parents’ statements after her graduation. “She’s gonna make money! She’s gonna be a lawyer! She’s gonna be a doctor!” So when she told them she was moving to New York City to be a stand-up comedian instead, Clayton says, “They were like, ‘Are you f*cking kidding me?’”
When Clayton got to New York in 2016, she was just two years out of college and had a little background in improv from Unified Scene Theater in Washington, DC. She had been working at a commercial real estate firm in Silver Spring, Maryland, but knew that if she wanted to pursue comedy she had to get to New York. “It’s where you go to get good at comedy,” she says, as if there is no other argument to be made. She moved to the city with $2,000 in savings. “I got here and I was like: Oh! This is expensive. I was broke within two months.”
Clayton enrolled in more improv classes at the now-shuttered Upright Citizens Brigade. At the time, the improv theater was on the decline, but it was still known as a hub for comedic talent and alumni included Kate McKinnon, Donald Glover, Aziz Ansari, and many more. “I was taking UCB classes, but I knew I wanted to try stand-up,” she says. “I was so afraid, but I just couldn't stop thinking about it.”
Clayton made performing stand-up her New Year’s resolution for 2017 and did her first open mic shortly thereafter. She says a lot of comedians have stories about doing one or two sets and then not doing stand-up again for five years, but that wasn’t the case for her. “I was like, yep, this is what I want to do. I hit the ground running.” According to Clayton, she has been running ever since, building up her material, practicing, and working on those all-important industry relationships that get you stage time and referrals.
Then came the pandemic, and every club in New York City was closed. Clayton kept her day job as an admin for a tech start up until July, the month of New York’s highest unemployment rate throughout the pandemic. She filed for unemployment benefits and began asking around about these strange comedy shows popping up in parks around the city.
“I honestly had some of the most fun doing stand-up this summer,” Clayton says, even when the turnout varied widely. “Some shows would have like, a hundred people, and then some you’d show up to and be like, ‘Okay, well there’s two people and I’m not sure if this man is just passed out.’” Clayton performed in shows until November, when many smaller outdoor productions, like the one at Now & Then, stopped for the winter.
Since then, Clayton has been writing a television pilot, which is both exciting and new for the comedian. “It feels like I'm working different muscles in my brain,” she says. She also started working a bit for one of her friends. He’s a comedian who also does advertising. He hired Clayton to write roast jokes about brands and products for companies looking to laugh at themselves. She sighs trying to describe the set up with a given company. “I am like, ‘Okay. You better still pay me after I say these things. Because you are NOT gonna like it.’” By February Clayton was starting to look forward to the return of outdoor shows. Still Zoom averse, she said she was beginning to practice her material on her roommate, holding a pen as her microphone. Clayton said knew that some of the city’s clubs had sued to reopen, but as far as she knew there had been no resolution
New York Comedy Clubs From November 2020 to Now
Throughout winter, the New York Comedy Club continued to host heated rooftop shows and work on programming in other states, like Connecticut, where comedy and live performance was getting support from local officials. “They were so excited that we were doing what we were doing that they did everything to work with us,” says club co-owner Emilio Savone. He had spent early fall running a new comedy festival, featuring comedians like John Mulaney, Hasan Minhaj, and Pete Davidson, in Fairfield, Connecticut. Seeing that success, he says he and co-owner Scott Lindner decided to put more energy toward their other venues in Atlantic City and Philadelphia, too. By February, Savone was proud of their efforts, but said they were still struggling in New York. “It's disappointing that it's taken this much to just even indicate the disparity and how things are being treated,” Savone said at the time. He had just learned his October lawsuit was assigned a hearing date: March 15, 2021, almost a year to the day after New York clubs had been ordered to close.
Another club owner had taken a different approach at first. In December, Dani Zoldan of Stand Up NY started producing comedy shows in the last car of the 1 train. He figured it was the best way to continue to offer in-person shows without breaking city and state regulations. “There are no capacity restrictions on train cars,” he says. But train cars are also public. Most Saturday nights during these shows, an unsuspecting local will walk onto the car and enjoy a few jokes before hopping off at their stop. The February 13th performance saw something new happen. “All of a sudden we hear ‘Hi, my name is Michael. Can you spare $1?’” A homeless man worked his way through the audience asking for change while a comedian, with a mic and speaker, delivered his punchlines. “It’s very New York,” Zoldan says.
Zoldan also spent the winter growing more vocal in interviews and on social media regarding the continuing closure of comedy clubs.
Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the launch of NY PopsUp on February 8th. The program was described as a state-level arts and culture initiative and a way to “revitalize New York audiences and bring the struggling live entertainment sector roaring back to life.” Zoldan said it felt like a “slap in the face” in an interview for Pix 11, the next day. The state’s announcement said the plan included turning “New York's existing landscapes, including iconic transit stations, parks, subway platforms” into stages, something Zoldan had been doing for months. Two weeks later, on February 22, 2021 the administration also announced that theaters would be allowed to reopen at reduced capacity. By that date, museums, casinos, billiards clubs, and now theaters had either reopened or been given a timeline for reopening. Stand Up NY posted an article announcing theater news to their Instagram. The caption read, “At this point it seems like Cuomo is just f*cking with us.”
Zoldan hired lawyer James Mermigis to file another lawsuit against Governor Cuomo on March 2nd. The suit argues that the state’s shut down order violates the equal protection afforded Stand Up NY under 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. A day later, on Wednesday, March 3rd, Cuomo’s office announced that “events, arts, and entertainment venues” would be allowed to open at 33 percent capacity on April 2nd. Both Zoldan and Savone are glad to reopen, but each expressed skeptism about the governor’s motives for the decision, each mentioning that Cuomo is now involved in a sexual harassment scandal.
The clarity of an opening date has brought renewed optimism for Savone, though he confirmed in an email that he and the other plaintiffs in the October lawsuit will not be dropping their case. “We want to be ensured that we will be treated like the restaurants and other businesses moving forward. Not continue to be left as the last to get any kind of guidance,” he wrote. Zoldan is also not dropping his lawsuit and says that he’s busy booking new shows while winding down the winter’s train series. Stand Up NY restarted park performances on March 11th and an indoor show on April 15th is already sold out. Both club owners say they plan to continue producing outdoor shows even after they resume indoor programming next month.
What’s Next for New York City’s Comedians
On a black bench in McCarren Park, Jessica Clayton sips an iced Americano. It’s early March and unseasonably warm, almost 63 degrees by noon. She wishes she’d brought along Archie, the two month old puppy she started fostering last week. “He was just out of the bath, though,” Clayton explains as a pack of three bulldogs waddle over. The comedian leans forward to pet them. “Uh oh, don’t get ‘em started,” their owner says, but he smiles and stops for each of his dogs to receive a few scratches. Clayton turns back to the conversation as the group continues down the sidewalk.
“I plan to write character descriptions based on everyone in it, and then go from there,” she says. Clayton has been writing all winter and has more of a collection of stories instead of the television pilot she’d originally planned. “Because you know, I think the best comedic writing comes from characters and not necessarily from plot.”
Clayton says she’s been thinking a lot about her stand-up comedy, too, since learning of the reopening date for New York City’s clubs. She says she’s back to using her pen as a mic, practicing old sets for her roommate. “She can probably do my show by now,” Clayton laughs.
Reflecting on her last year—losing a day job, performing in park shows, realizing a passion for writing—Clayton says she does “hope it pays off.” Though she remains unsure if her outdoor appearances in 2020 will translate to more club gigs this April, the pandemic made her realize such gigs aren’t the point for her. “Here's my thing,” she says, holding her hands together in emphasis. “I'll get on any stage. Whether it's a club or a park. I will do all of it. You know? It only helps to be able to work in those different dynamics.” She says her development as a comedian and writer will stick with her even if the bookers at Zoldan’s and Savone’s clubs don’t. But she does hope they will, too. “Once everything opens again, maybe by autumn when people are like, ‘Who should we put in the show?’ I know my name is gonna be in that register. I think I proved myself.”