Comedy shows in Tacoma this week: 13 new dates since Oct 16, with Damon Wayans and Moshe Kasher, 2 rooms with dates in the next two weeks, tickets from $25.96.
Comedy shows in Spokane this week: 17 new dates since Oct 15, 1 room with dates in the next two weeks.
Comedy clubs in Fort Wayne this week: 1 new date since Oct 14, 1 room with dates in the next two weeks.
Comedy clubs in Philadelphia this week: 13 new dates since Oct 13, with Maz Jobrani, 4 rooms with dates in the next two weeks.
Stand-up comedy in Toronto this week: 10 new dates since Oct 12, with Dave Chappelle, 5 rooms with dates in the next two weeks, tickets from CA$9.99, 2 free.
Comedy clubs in New York this week: 21 new dates since Oct 11, with Aziz Ansari and Chris Redd, 7 rooms with dates in the next two weeks, tickets from $9.
Comedy clubs in Minneapolis this week: 3 new dates since Oct 10, with Tim Harmston, 4 rooms with dates in the next two weeks, tickets from $10.
Comedy clubs in Galway this week: 3 new dates since Oct 9, with Emma Doran and Terry Alderton, 15 rooms with dates in the next two weeks.
Comedy shows in Chandler this week: 9 new dates since Oct 8, 2 rooms with dates in the next two weeks.
Comedy clubs in Indianapolis this week: 4 new dates since Oct 7, 3 rooms with dates in the next two weeks.
Comedy shows in Raleigh this week: 1 new date since Oct 6, 2 rooms with dates in the next two weeks.
Comedy clubs in Portland this week: 5 new dates since Oct 5, with Christopher Titus and Emma Willmann, 6 rooms with dates in the next two weeks.
Comedy clubs in Hamburg this week: 3 new dates since Oct 4, 2 rooms with dates in the next two weeks, tickets from €20.
Comedy clubs in Fort Collins this week: 3 new dates since Oct 3, 1 room with dates in the next two weeks.
Comedy shows in Kansas City this week: 11 new dates since Oct 2, 2 rooms with dates in the next two weeks.
Stand-up comedy in Madrid this week: 10 new dates since Oct 1, 2 rooms with dates in the next two weeks, tickets from €12.
Comedy clubs in Barcelona this week: 19 new dates since Sep 30, 5 rooms with dates in the next two weeks, tickets from €3, 14 free.
Comedy clubs in Berlin this week: 262 shows on sale, 13 rooms with dates in the next two weeks, tickets from €3, 8 free.
77 new dates went up in Brussels between Sep 28 and Oct 5, 2026.
51 new dates went up in Bristol between Sep 27 and Oct 4, 2026.
154 new dates went up in Brighton between Sep 26 and Oct 3, 2026.
3 new dates went up in Bloomington between Sep 25 and Oct 2, 2026.
16 new dates went up in Birmingham between Sep 24 and Oct 1, 2026.
15 new dates went up in Appleton between Sep 23 and Sep 30, 2026.
14 new dates went up in Alpharetta between Sep 22 and Sep 29, 2026.
1 new recurring show and 39 new dates went up in Paris between Sep 21 and Sep 28, 2026.
9 new dates went up in Amsterdam between Sep 20 and Sep 27, 2026.
295 new dates went up in Edinburgh between Sep 19 and Sep 26, 2026.
173 new dates went up in London between Sep 18 and Sep 25, 2026.
28 new dates went up in Washington between Sep 17 and Sep 24, 2026.
5 new dates went up in Tulsa between Sep 16 and Sep 23, 2026.
19 new dates went up in Tacoma between Sep 15 and Sep 22, 2026.
19 new dates went up in Spokane between Sep 14 and Sep 21, 2026.
9 new dates went up in Salt Lake City between Sep 13 and Sep 20, 2026.
27 new dates went up in Philadelphia between Sep 12 and Sep 19, 2026.
10 new dates went up in Oklahoma City between Sep 11 and Sep 18, 2026.
2 new dates went up in Ogden between Sep 10 and Sep 17, 2026.
32 new dates went up in New York between Sep 9 and Sep 16, 2026.
31 new dates went up in Naples between Sep 8 and Sep 15, 2026.
4 new dates went up in Louisville between Sep 7 and Sep 14, 2026.
4 new venues went up in Lille between Sep 6 and Sep 13, 2026.
9 new venues went up in Brussels between Sep 5 and Sep 12, 2026.
8 new dates went up in Amsterdam between Sep 4 and Sep 11, 2026.
34 new dates went up in New York between Sep 2 and Sep 9, 2026.
7 new dates went up in Minneapolis between Sep 1 and Sep 8, 2026.
Vaudeville is usually said to have been killed by talking pictures and radio. The financial record of its most important theatre says something narrower and more useful to anyone running a comedy room: it was killed by…
Almost every stand-up room on earth runs on a format nobody designed. A small dark space, a brick-ish back wall, a microphone, a two-item minimum, and a running order of five to eight acts doing short sets for a…
The founding document of British alternative comedy is a holiday anecdote. Peter Rosengard, a Hammersmith-born insurance salesman, was in Los Angeles with his wife in 1978, had a free evening, and asked the hotel…
5 new dates went up in Cologne between Aug 31 and Sep 7, 2026.
Every sketch show before 1969 ran on the same engine. Set up a premise, escalate it, land a punchline, cut. The punchline was not a stylistic preference; it was the technical device that told the editor where the sketch…
If you want to understand how a comedy scene actually reproduces itself, do not look at the big rooms. Look for the small one everybody has to pass through.
Comedy history is usually organised by venue. There is a better organising unit, and it is the circuit — the set of rooms an act can actually get booked into. Circuits decide who has a career. And for roughly three…
8 new dates went up in Amsterdam between Aug 30 and Sep 6, 2026.
The standard story about a television comedy showcase is that it discovers talent. That is almost never what happens. The talent is already working, in rooms, in front of paying audiences, for years. What television…
Improv is usually told as one story with a Chicago address. It is two stories. The second one starts in Devon, runs through the Royal Court, and ends in Calgary — and its founding method was pure negation.
A comedy festival looks like a consumer event. Tickets, venues, a programme, a public. For the largest of them, that is the surface. Underneath, the product being sold is access to buyers — and no festival has ever made…
39 new dates went up in New York between Aug 29 and Sep 5, 2026.
Live comedy is a service business. You sell a seat, the seat is consumed, and tomorrow you sell it again. Every structural change in the industry since 1960 has come from someone finding a way to sell the same…
The training system behind modern English-language comedy did not come out of a theatre. It came out of Depression-era social work, and it was aimed at children.
The English-speaking comedy world tells its origin stories through club owners: Friedman, Shore, Rosengard. Paris tells a different one. The room that shaped modern French comedy was not opened by a promoter. It was…
5 new dates went up in Minneapolis between Aug 28 and Sep 4, 2026.
1 new date went up in Indianapolis between Aug 27 and Sep 3, 2026.
1 new date went up in Galway between Aug 26 and Sep 2, 2026.
3 new dates went up in Fort Wayne between Aug 25 and Sep 1, 2026.
1 new date went up in Cologne between Aug 24 and Aug 31, 2026.
4 new dates went up in Chandler between Aug 23 and Aug 30, 2026.
1 new date went up in Burlington between Aug 23 and Aug 30, 2026.
10 new dates went up in Appleton between Aug 22 and Aug 29, 2026.
27 new dates went up in Alpharetta between Aug 21 and Aug 28, 2026.
7 new dates went up in Amsterdam between Aug 20 and Aug 27, 2026.
7 new dates went up in Washington between Aug 19 and Aug 26, 2026.
5 new dates went up in Tulsa between Aug 18 and Aug 25, 2026.
1 new date went up in Tempe between Aug 17 and Aug 24, 2026.
66 new dates went up in Tacoma between Aug 16 and Aug 23, 2026.
11 new dates went up in Spokane between Aug 15 and Aug 22, 2026.
1 new venue and 9 new dates went up in Salt Lake City between Aug 14 and Aug 21, 2026.
16 new dates went up in Raleigh between Aug 13 and Aug 20, 2026.
Most comedy specials are built out of a comedian's observations about the world. *Live on the Sunset Strip* is built out of one specific night the comedian nearly died, told from the inside, for laughs, fourteen months…
No comedian has ever been hired for their first paid set. Every one of them first stood in a line, signed a clipboard, and waited for a name that wasn't theirs yet to mean anything. That format — sign up, wait your…
On October 4, 1961, a comedian named Lenny Bruce was arrested onstage at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco for saying the word "cocksucker" and, in the same set, cracking that "to is a preposition, come is a verb." A…
8 new dates went up in Portland between Aug 12 and Aug 19, 2026.
Peter Buckley Hill invented the pass-the-bucket model for the Edinburgh Fringe in 1996: no cover charge, donations only. Eight years later, Alex Petty and Kevin McCarron used the same idea to launch their own free shows…
The world's largest arts festival was not planned. It was a gatecrash that nobody ever managed to throw out.
Most comedy scenes get built by clubs, agents, or television commissioners chasing an audience. Cambridge Footlights got built by university students with no commercial stake in comedy at all — and it has fed British…
1 new venue went up in Phoenix between Aug 11 and Aug 18, 2026.
6 newly listed dates went up in Philadelphia between Aug 11 and Aug 18, 2026.
The most consequential comedy club in America was founded as a rehearsal room for one man's own act. The Comedy Store's house history dates the opening to April 7, 1972, on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, and…
The comedy business has never again built anything like it: a dense cluster of paying rooms, close enough together to drive between, that hired comics by the season and put them in front of audiences who had not bought…
Doing the Edinburgh Fringe as an unknown act has traditionally meant paying to lose money: hire a room, split the box office, and hope strangers wander in before the run ends. In 1996, Peter Buckley Hill's fix was blunt…
5 newly listed dates went up in Oklahoma City between Aug 10 and Aug 17, 2026.
36 newly listed dates went up in New York between Aug 10 and Aug 17, 2026.
9 newly listed dates went up in Naples between Aug 10 and Aug 17, 2026.
3 new venues and 1 newly listed date went up in Minneapolis between Aug 10 and Aug 17, 2026.
2 newly listed dates went up in Louisville between Aug 10 and Aug 17, 2026.
3 newly listed dates went up in Kansas City between Aug 9 and Aug 16, 2026.
8 new recurring shows and 18 newly listed dates went up in Indianapolis between Aug 8 and Aug 15, 2026.
2 new recurring shows went up in Helsinki between Aug 7 and Aug 14, 2026.
The earliest known citation of "stand-up comedian" in print isn't from Los Angeles or New York. It's a British newspaper column, from 1917 — three decades before the American trade-press usage everyone assumes started…
Walk into almost any comedy club and a wall of exposed brick is doing the work behind the mic stand — on flyers, on Netflix specials, on backdrops that have never seen an actual brick in the building. But the club most…
1 new recurring show went up in Hamburg between Aug 6 and Aug 13, 2026.
Order at least two drinks or don't sit down — that's the rule at nearly every comedy club, and the folk explanation is that management wants a loose, laughing room. It's not that: the two-drink minimum is a rent payment…
8 new recurring shows went up in Galway between Aug 3 and Aug 10, 2026.
51 new recurring shows and 1 newly listed date went up in Fort Wayne between Aug 2 and Aug 9, 2026.
4 newly listed dates went up in Fort Collins between Aug 1 and Aug 8, 2026.
7 newly listed dates went up in Cologne between Jul 31 and Aug 7, 2026.
3 newly listed dates went up in Chandler between Jul 30 and Aug 6, 2026.
3 newly listed dates went up in Bloomington between Jul 29 and Aug 5, 2026.
1 new venue and 46 newly listed dates went up in Bloomington between Jul 28 and Aug 4, 2026.
1 new venue and 46 newly listed dates went up in Bloomington between Jul 27 and Aug 3, 2026.
1 new venue and 114 newly listed dates went up in Appleton between Jul 26 and Aug 2, 2026.
1 new venue and 7 newly listed dates went up in Alpharetta between Jul 25 and Aug 1, 2026.
1 new venue and 6 newly listed dates went up in Paris between Jul 24 and Jul 31, 2026.
6 newly listed dates went up in Berlin between Jul 23 and Jul 30, 2026.
3 newly listed dates went up in Amsterdam between Jul 22 and Jul 29, 2026.
2 newly listed dates went up in Madrid between Jul 21 and Jul 28, 2026.
2 newly listed dates went up in Barcelona between Jul 20 and Jul 27, 2026.
259 newly listed dates went up in Barcelona between Jul 19 and Jul 26, 2026.
45 new recurring shows and 354 newly listed dates went up in London between Jul 18 and Jul 25, 2026.
576 new recurring shows and 69 newly listed dates went up in Edinburgh between Jul 18 and Jul 25, 2026.
The Laughing Horse Free Festival happens in the back rooms of pubs that were pouring pints before the Fringe existed. The Wee Room and Maggie's Front Room at The Three Sisters. The Nineties room at The City Cafe. The…
Most English-language comedy in Paris runs one night a week and calls itself a scene. La Pomme d'Eve, 1 Rue des Boulangers, runs three — two production companies, one small room in the 5th, most weeks of the month.