Is the Comedy-Club Booking Process Broken?

After three years doing standup roughly every night, the comic Jad Sleiman concluded that the system for finding and promoting new talent was broken.

“Whether or not you get onstage at most clubs in the city has very little to do, at this point, with how funny you are,” he wrote me recently. Sleiman went on to say that the best way to get stage time is not to work at your craft, but to network, make connections and increase your online follower count. Most major clubs use a referral system, to varying degrees: That means to get onstage, you need other comics to vouch for you, he said.

Performers, he added, naturally pick their friends, and there’s even a motivation to promote mediocrity. “Honestly,” he told me. “You don’t want to follow someone who buries you.”

In comparison to the theater, live comedy has recovered from the pandemic in great commercial shape, with the help of podcasting and social media exposure. But with success comes the danger of insularity, and while more new artists are entering the field than ever, the gulf in influence between celebrity comics and gifted young unknowns grows. Sleiman’s polemical critique of the current club establishment gives voice to a real and justifiable anxiety that it’s becoming harder for comics with more talent than connections to break through.

Young, hustling comedians have always bemoaned the choices of gatekeepers, but Sleiman is actually dedicating money and time to doing something about it. Along with fellow comics Brooks Tawil and Kyle Gillis, who share his frustration with the status quo, he recently started the Bushwick Comedy Club. One week before opening, sitting next to Tawil inside a former bodega that now houses a small stage, 50 seats and a sink held up by Goya cans, Sleiman described his plans for a more meritocratic comedy club.

“Our main difference is going to sound stupid,” he explained, “but simply put, we’re going to actually watch submission tapes.” Referrals will not matter. Nor will social media followers. Only how funny you are on tape. On Instagram, Bushwick Comedy Club promotes itself as the “only club in New York who books its lineups purely off video submissions.”