How Nowhere Comedy Club is Bringing Community and Laughter Everywhere

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Nowhere…is Everywhere.

It’s hard to imagine a time when the world needs to laugh more.

As the heaviness of prolonged isolation, mysterious illness, and the pain and discomfort of the country’s continued reckoning with racial injustice set in, it feels like an awful time for comedy clubs worldwide to go dark. Sensing that there was a way to lift that heaviness, comics and friends Ben Gleib and Steve Hofstetter banded together to offer a solution. And they found it, in Nowhere Comedy Club: the world’s first fully virtual comedy club experience.

“When it all shut down, Steve and I lost our income and our possibility for stand up touring, [and] so did our colleagues,” Gleib shared. But instead of letting that prospect intimidate them, the two cobbled together their experience hosting streaming and hybrid shows into a more refined, fully coordinated digital venue. Dedicating staff to serve as producers, bouncers, marketers, and other functions that hold our local venues together, what resulted was a digital space that resembles—and in some cases, exceeds the expectations of—a brick-and-mortar club. “Inviting the audience in with us, and letting them laugh, leaving their cameras and mics on,” and other small details that a number of other digital shows lack, close the gap that so many of us have been feeling. What remains is an experience that, after a few minutes, you forget is wholly online.

In addition to booking national headliners like Jackie Fabulous, Sean Patton, Jay Jurden, and Josh Johnson, the club features shows that would be considerably harder to execute in person. Gleib, for example, now hosts a monthly improv show alongside Greg Proops, who he’s been friends with and admired for years but has never been able to perform with before. And for Hofstetter, a distance-conscious approach allows him to perform alongside Australian comedian Daniel Muggleton, enabling comedy to happen simultaneously from opposite sides of the globe. As Gleib put it, “the benefit of doing a show Nowhere is that you can be everywhere.”

But building and performing at this club isn’t only presenting singular experiences for its founders. In a world that frequently feels isolating and incredibly heavy, Gleib and Hofstetter have been heartened to see how the space they’ve created is uplifting people. For comics who have been aching to return to the stage, Nowhere is becoming a popular place to break free from the confines of other digital shows and feel like they’re back on the road. Aida Rodriguez called her recent set “at the club,” “the time of her quarantined life.” And for Nikki Glaser, a begrudgingly agreed to ten minute set quickly expanded into twenty five minutes (which led to her performing at the club again soon after”), as she noted that it felt just like a real club a few minutes into her set. It’s also increasingly becoming a popular space for podcast recordings and live Q&As. Christian Finnegan put it profoundly well about his time there: “I can say, unequivocally, that headlining Nowhere Comedy Club was the highlight of my month. I didn’t know what to expect going in, but after my show I felt professionally (and spiritually) validated in a way I haven’t felt since the clubs all closed.”

What seems to be keeping the founders going, however, are the connections and experiences they’re building for fans and patrons who are coming to the shows. Gleib recalled a time when he and Proops were doing a longform improv set that evolved into a hospital drama. Seeing that an audience member was a nurse, “we spotlit her and all over a sudden, she was playing a nurse in our medical drama. She was treating COVID patients as a nurse in an ER in NYC!” And in one of the most emotional anecdotes since Nowhere opened, the pair shared the story of an audience member who had lost a parent to COVID-19, and thanked the guys for creating a space that could bring them laughter from their hospital bed up until the very end. “That was a very moving moment,” Gleib said.

A few times over the course of our conversation, both Hofstetter and Gleib mentioned that patrons had been calling for them to keep the club open even after the world returns to some semblance of normalcy. So I asked: will there be a Nowhere, even after we can go anywhere? The answer is yes, and for some really interesting reasons. First: the club taps into a previously unserved clientele that will still need digital options after sheltering orders lift. People with social anxiety, or with disabilities, or who are hospitalized are benefitting from the existence of a virtual club, and it’s not an option that they’re eager to take away. And for comics, it offers an opportunity to tour when it would otherwise be difficult: when taking care of kids at home, or when on location for a film or TV shoot. “We’re not going anywhere,” Ben says. “Even when society reopens, this will still be a part of it.”

But in the meantime, it’s comforting to know that this is bigger than just having something to do and making money for those who otherwise couldn’t—even though, in the first six weeks the club did bring in $100,000 for comedians who had to that point been out of work. “There are a couple things we offer,” Hofstetter said. “We offer distraction. We offer community. And we offer art. All of those things are really important right now.”

It’s profound that in this time of social distancing and feelings of isolation, there are groups of regulars who have attended over fifty shows and who say hi to each other in the chat. It’s profound that there are regular attendees who have started dating as a result of their interactions “at the club.” It’s profound that this is creating a sense of purpose for the comics who produce and appear on these shows; said Hofstetter, “as an artist, this has kept me from going crazy. We’ve heard that from many of the comedians.” And in pursuing sanity, Gleib is confident that they’ve created a really special place to laugh. “Our goal was, during the most bleak time in history that most of us can remember, where the news was just about darkness and death and disease every day, we gave people a chance to sit back and forget about it for a couple of hours and just laugh with a big group of people who want to do the same.”

Nowhere Comedy Club has shows booked nightly, and offers free tickets to frontline healthcare workers who present a photo of their medical IDs.

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Amma Marfo

Amma Marfo is a writer, speaker, and podcaster based in Boston, MA. Her writing has appeared in Femsplain, The Good Men Project, Pacific Standard, and Talking Points Memo. Chances are good that as you're reading this, she's somewhere laughing.
Amma Marfo
Amma Marfo
Amma Marfo is a writer, speaker, and podcaster based in Boston, MA. Her writing has appeared in Femsplain, The Good Men Project, Pacific Standard, and Talking Points Memo. Chances are good that as you're reading this, she's somewhere laughing.