Expectations For Our Comedy Show Performers

We’re adding this post to our website for all of the comedians who perform on our shows (from students and open micers to 20+ veterans with multiple television credits). Please do not take offense if anything mentioned below is something you already know or something you think people already know and understand. We’re just trying to share this information with the widest swath of our performers as we can.

As you may or may not know, we opened our second onsite showroom at the Amazing Comedy Theater in Huntington Beach last month and we are now set up to host weekly standup shows every Wed, Thurs, Fri and Sat.
The shows will start at 7pm with the goal of adding a second 9pm show for popular nights by this summer.

This means that we’re going to have a lot more stage time to give out in the coming months.

So, we want to take a moment to lay out what we expect from comedians performing in our showrooms moving forward.

1. Only send in avails for dates/spots that you are 100% committed to showing up for. Don’t flake on spots that you’ve booked with us. Short of dying from cancer will being run over by a truck while being attacked by a grizzly bear wielding a chainsaw made out of AIDS, we don’t want to hear excuses. Traffic, car trouble, family drama, dayjob hassles, etc. – yep, we have all those, too. But we still show up for every single show we produce and we expect you to show up as well.

2. Show up on-time. And to our venue and shows “on-time” means 10 mins before the start time for the show you are booked. If you’re booked for a 7pm show, be onsite and check-in by 6:50pm.

3. Come with jokes and/or an act ready to perform. Do not show up at our shows expecting to do crowd work. If fun crowd interaction happens organically during your set (as it often does) that’s terrific. However, we expect comedians to show up with enough jokes and material to fill whatever amount of time they’ve been booked for. And nothing is more annoying to venue or its patrons then having 3 to 17 comics in a row go up in a small room and ask the audience, “What do you do for a living?,” “Why are you here?”, “Do you smoke weed?”, “Are you two fucking?”, etc. Please show up with prepared material (even if it’s new and not that good yet) and perform this material to the best of your ability.

4. No tripods on the floors or tables in our showrooms. They’re cumbersome, pose a liability for our guests and your fellow performers, and they look like shit when 3 to 4 of them are setup in the back of a showroom that holds less than 40 people. If you’re chasing TikTok stardom, we’re very happy for you. However, do it somewhere else. We expect our performers to show up ready to entertain the people who are actually in the room watching the show. We have a small bookcase against the back wall of both of our showrooms where you comics can discretely set up a small tripod with their cameras/phones. And we’ve also installed mounts on the side walls of each showroom that will hold most cellphones (vertically or horizontally) for video recording that you are welcome to use to tape you sets with a phone.

5. Try your best. We honestly don’t care if you kill, bomb, or break even when you go up in our rooms. We just want to see you trying your best when you are performing on our stages. Whether there are 2 or 40 audience members in the room we want to see an honest effort at being funny and entertaining. And not a jerk. That being said, if performers feel the need to go up on stage and complain and shit on the room/audience/show/etc. that’s perfectly fine. We just won’t invite comedians who choose to act this way back to perform anytime soon, on any shows that we produce.

And that’s it. These 5 things are the bare minimum we expect from all of our comedians when they perform in our rooms.

We’re not trying to be dicks, we’re trying to set everyone up to put their best foot forward and to have the best shows, audiences and performance opportunities possible that we can to offer to our comedians.

The avails request email will go out every Sunday for each upcoming week. Please respond to it as quickly as you can. And, again, please only signup for spots that you can 100% arrive on-time for.

Thank you.