Comedy shows in Los Angeles, California.

Mentioned in our stories

• The Room That Invented the Comedy Club Was Not Built for ComedyThe Improv opened in 1963 as a fifty-seat after-hours coffee house for Broadway singers. It took a year to book its first comedian and most of a decade to become a comedy club at all — and every club since has copied the accident.
• Two Clubs, One Cable Slot, and a Decade of Stand-Up CareersDef Comedy Jam ran on HBO from 1992 to 1997 and was built from two existing rooms — one in Harlem, one in Los Angeles. It is the clearest case in comedy of television not discovering a scene but distributing one.
• Richard Pryor's Live on the Sunset Strip: Turning Trauma Into the Confessional Comedy SpecialFourteen months after nearly killing himself freebasing cocaine, Richard Pryor put the whole incident on stage as a stand-up bit — and made personal catastrophe, rather than observation, the material a comedy special could be built on.