Nicole Blaine, Owner of The Crow Comedy Club, Shares Six Things You Need to Open a New Club

Published by Interrobang Staff at February 16, 2023

Nicole Blaine is the owner and founder of The Crow, a comedy club and education space that is a safe space for all to laugh, learn, and evolve as humans through comedy, writing and the performing arts. As a stand-up comedian, writer, producer, and mom, she loves curating comedy at The Crow for ALL AGES, ABILITIES, GENDERS, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ humans performing, studying, and watching. Located in Santa Monica, California.

What Amount Of Effort And Time Does It Take To Open A New Comedy Club?

After seeing plenty of comedy shows, you’ve decided to open up a new comedy club yourself. It’s not as simple as you might think, since there are a lot of things to consider. It can be a tough business and even if you do everything right, it can still be difficult to succeed.

To briefly answer the question that the title asks: It can take a lot of effort and time to open a new comedy club. Here are some things that you should know before you go ahead and start the process:

You Need to Secure a Good Loan

Opening a comedy club costs money. Even a small standalone club will have a pretty sizable interior when you think about the stage, the seating, whether there will be both an upstairs and a downstairs level, restrooms, bars and a lobby. That’s going to require a decent amount of money to both secure ownership and then the month-to-month rent.

Unless you have managed to save a lot of money over the course of the years or if you have deep-pocketed friends or relatives, you’re going to need to borrow some money for financing the lease. Shop around and see what the best rates are and also try to ensure that you have a good credit history yourself.

You Need To Find a Good Location

Your location will play a decent part in your success. You need to be in an area that is accessible to many. It also wouldn’t hurt to be in a spot that a lot of people will see as they walk or drive by and may decide to check it out to satisfy their curiosity.

This is also going to affect how much you’re going to pay to lease the place, since the bett the location, the more that you are likely going to have to pay. Setting up a comedy club in the heart of Manhattan is going to be a lot more expensive than if you pick a place in a suburban shopping mall.

You Need to Come Up With a Name

This is not as easy as you think it is. You want to come up with a name that people will be able to remember while also telling what it is. If there’s anything confusing about what it is, that could keep you from getting crowds since people might not know what kind of place it
is.

Do some research and see what kind of other comedy clubs are out there. You also want to make sure that you are not going to run afoul of any copyright laws. It would be very costly and somewhat embarrassing to have to change a lot of signage after you’ve had them printed.

This also includes securing a website domain name, having that site built, getting a phone number for the club, and having merchandise and promotional materials made. Make social media profiles on all the major platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. The more ways you get your name out to the public, the better.

You Need To Set Up The Proper Decor

Don’t ignore this part. You want to create a good atmosphere for comedy. Think about everything from the outside, with any signage, artwork, and awnings, to the inside, with the color scheme, seating and stage. You also want to make sure that you get good equipment in terms of lighting and sound.

You want to create something that has a clear vision and invites people to come watch a comedy show. That can be done in an almost infinite number of ways, but you want to stick to a particular theme – don’t be all over the place. It might be a good idea to enlist the help of an interior decorator and also have local artists pitch in with murals or paintings.

Another thing to consider is whether you want to serve just beverages (“Two drink minimum”) or if you want to have a kitchen and make food, too? Bear in mind that that food and chef will cost extra and you want to make sure that you will be making money. Otherwise, you might just want to consider having packaged food like popcorn.

You Want to Bring in Good Talent

This might seem like a blindingly obvious thing here, but you want to have top-notch comedic talent take the stage night after night. Your goal is to have a reputation for bringing in name talent as much as possible. It would be good to also be known as someone who can nurture up-and-coming talent.

You Need To Be Ready For a Lot of Staff Turnover

When it comes to running a comedy club, your staff also makes a difference. You want to bring in professional people who will be efficient and also polite to your customers. Otherwise, you risk possibly getting negative reviews, online or otherwise. Of course, you also want to back up your staff if any of those customers are being unruly or threatening them.

Despite your best efforts, you may see a lot of them come and go. There can be a lot of reasons why you constantly may have to be hiring new people for your new comedy club. Some of them are within your grasp, like how well you pay them, how easy it is for them to commute to and from work, and whether they are comfortable working for tips along with working possible late hours.

Opening a new comedy club takes a lot of hard work and a lot of self-promotion. There are no guarantees and the progress, after a likely fast start out of the gate when you first open your doors when people come to see the new place, may be very slow until you have solidified your reputation as being a great place for comedy.

Just like any business, opening a comedy club can be very daunting at first, unless you have a reputation of sorts in the business, like Rodney Dangerfield did before he opened Dangerfield’s. Then people will recognize you as a known quantity and they will come possibly to see you and to also see what kind of people you are bringing with you.

Who knows? You might be able to open a comedy club that will become a local incubator for talent and ultimately become entrenched in pop culture. As a result, you might even wind up having items sent to the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York, much like ones from Caroline’s Comedy Club were in late 2022.

Ultimately, you’re going to have to have an unwavering belief in your vision and a willingness to ride out some potentially lean times before catching another wave. Your goal is to be able to look back at pride with everything you did … and enjoy a bit of luck too.