On a very rainy, very recent Friday evening, at an outdoor comedy show in the East River Park Amphitheater, the gray skies refused to give up. Neither would the New Yorkers sitting on the increasingly soggy lawn. “Everybody stayed under the rain. There were a hundred people,” says Nataly Aukar, a New York City comic who performed during the downpour. “I was holding an umbrella, and so was everyone in the audience. It was one of the best shows I’ve ever done, even before the pandemic.”
Comedy exists to challenge the status quo, so as the sea change that one could argue began with #MeToo, and surged and frothed along social issues of race and class, gender, creed and queerness, comedy became a battleground, test site and a weathervane. What is funny has always found playtime outside what’s male-and-pale, but there were still plenty of norms to be challenged, and new areas in which to challenge them.
In 2018, Saturday Night Live hired its first cast member that was either Asian, or queer-identifying, in Bowen Yang. This was a meteor. But it was less surprising to fans of comedy who’d followed Yang and Cat Cohen at Alan Cumming’s Club Cumming. The East Village venue has put on night after night of queer-leaning cabaret, comedy and drag since 2017. Meanwhile, it wasn’t just SNL hiring Yang, and before him their first South Asian writer (Nimesh Patel), or Ilana Glazer upending the buddy comedy with Broad City—or even Desus and Mero reinventing what it was to have a talk show. It was happening everywhere. New BIPOC voices like Ziwe Fumudoh used YouTube and her podcast, This Is Uncomfortable, to not only play with and give voice to new experiences, but to give voice to a new America. What matters in mainstream comedy has always come from the periphery, from the street or the underground, and before the pandemic — and even since it made landfall — those borderlands are bubbling.
It’s a promising sign of a new wave in comedy, where The Next Thing — from Lenny Bruce to David Cross to John Mulaney and Chloe Fineman — has never been found at the two-drink-minimum clubs; it comes from the underground. Though today, that underground might actually be outside.
Stand Up New York is producing shows in Central Park, Battery Park, Prospect Park and elsewhere. Clubs like The Stand are inviting guests to hear comedy while they enjoy brunch outdoors, while New York Comedy Club is doing rooftop shows. More under the radar, at the Lower East Side sandwich shop Regina’s Grocery, you can watch comedy from seats set up across the street. QED in Astoria has been throwing shows in its backyard, while The Tiny Cupboard in Bushwick has turned its rooftop into a venue. There are rumors of secret shows, of shows in people’s homes, of a show under a bridge.
The show at the amphitheater was a version of Tobin Miller’s weekly show, Baby Shower, which, pre-COVID, took place at the Grey Lady on the Lower East Side (a mix of beginner, up-and-coming and veteran comics that has seen appearances by Todd Barry and T.J. Miller). In July, he told his mailing list they’d be trying the show at the amphitheater. About 20 people showed up. Last week, before the rain, there were 150. About a hundred stayed. “Some people are staying just because they haven’t showered in four months,” Miller told his audience.
“It was the first time I’ve experienced this in America: the audience and the comedian, we went through something together,” says Aukar, who performs at clubs and at colleges over the country. “If there’s any place that could fight for this art form to stay alive, it’s New York City, because New York has the most dedicated comics in the country.”
“We feel like comedy is this underground thing right now,” says Espi Rivadeneira, who performs at The Tiny Cupboard, in backyards and other spots. “I had a mic at Madison Square Park and they shut me down. So I went to Central Park. We’re survivors. We keep coming back.”
