What I learned running a comedy club in March 2023
Women’s History Month, Friday night experiments, and The Open Mic From Hell’s future
I’m Chris Trew, a touring comedy person, improv coach, and booker at Comedy House New Orleans, the only full-time comedy venue in my favorite city on the planet. This is a monthly post documenting some of my takeaways from running CHNO.
In 2022, our comedy club had a variety of Women’s History Month shows. I remember making a note afterwards that I wanted to do something bigger in 2023 and what I decided on was an all-female lineup for House Party, our twice-a-week open mic. Anyone could still sign-up (it was still an open mic) but the hosts and feature acts were all women.
To be completely transparent, I already feel good about the diversity in our programming. Some months already have only women on the House Party lineup. But it felt good to participate with Women’s History Month in a deeper way. I’ve already made the note to do the same in February 2024 with Black History Month and future June’s for Pride.
As of now I will not be doing all ghosts hosting House Party in October. But no promises.
Part of my job as a comedy club booker is to create unique opportunities for the local scene to grow. I also need to produce events that will sell tickets so that the business is profitable. Best case scenario, obviously, is to create unique opportunities that sell tickets. Then the comedians AND the business thrive.
A show that I have my eyes on investing more of my time and energy in is The Open Mic From Hell. It’s a rebranded version of a show I hosted for years where comedians did their regular sets but with weird challenges thrown in. In this new version, comics have the choice to either do their set with a random challenge, OR do a brand new set, on the spot, based off words from the audience. It’s a ton of fun and always attracts a crowd.
I have a fantasy of running this show weekly and live streaming it. It will not only give comics a weekly chance to stretch their creativity, but it will be a treasure trove of content they can post on their channels.
Another learning experience from March was the ability to run themed versions of our Friday night showcase, NOLA’s Best Comedy Hour.
The show runs every Friday at 7:00 and 9:00p with the same lineups for both shows. It’s important for us to give comics the opportunity to go up twice in one night in the same venue.
But there’s other showcases I want to develop, other show runners I want to continue giving opportunities to. So in March I experimented with having other branded showcases run Friday nights. One was the return of COVEN, the all-female variety show, as part of Women’s History Month. Another week was Comedy Mixtape, a monthly event by regular Comedy House show runner Amy Collins. And then on the last week, I turned NOLA’s Best Comedy Hour into a Baton Rouge’s Best Comedy Hour, honoring the best of the best from just over an hour away.
I learned that this mostly worked enough, but my priority is in growing the NOLA’s Best Comedy Hour brand. We love the idea that tourists visiting New Orleans come to CHNO on Fridays to see what the local scene is like, while Saturdays are for the out of town comics. That pattern isn’t exactly true 100% of the time, but it’s pretty damn close.
COVEN and Comedy Mixtape will still 100% appear on our calendar (exciting news coming about one of those soon), but I’ll probably keep Fridays as is — we want to build Fridays into the most reliable, diverse night of New Orleans comedy of all time.
In March we also launched the rebranded New Orleans School of Comedy Arts. Our first set of memberships sold out quickly, but we’re adding more ASAP.
Thanks for reading this new, ideally monthly, post about running Comedy House New Orleans. I’m excited about how this will evolve.
