Comedy clubs & live comedy shows in New York.

Mentioned in our stories

• Vaudeville Did Not Die of Radio. It Died of Five Shows a Day.The most prestigious variety stage in America played its last week of straight vaudeville in July 1932 — after trying to save itself by doubling the number of performances and cutting the ticket price.
• 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.
• The Circuit That Named Itself After the Borscht BeltMoms Mabley became the first woman to play the Apollo in April 1939 and spent decades as the biggest star of a national circuit that paid her badly — a circuit whose name was a deliberate, bitter joke about the Catskills.
• 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.
• Open Mic Night: How a Folk-Club Invention Became Stand-Up's Farm SystemThe open stage started as a way for coffeehouses to fill a slow night with amateur singers. Comedy clubs borrowed the format wholesale — and it became the only reliable way a beginner gets in front of a room.
• Lenny Bruce's Obscenity Trials: The Case That Decided What Comedians Are Allowed to SayA comic who kept getting arrested mid-set in the early 1960s ended up defining, by trial and error, how far American stand-up could go — and paid for the answer with his career and, arguably, his life.
• The Borscht Belt: Stand-Up's Only Real SchoolFor forty years a chain of kosher resorts two hours north of New York paid comics to work three rooms a night in front of people who had not come to see comedy — and when it died, the training went with it.