Much more from Lucas Lewis, since it really is Lucas Lewis Week. Today’s piece is about The Comedy Studio in Harvard Square. – Nick
 By Lucas Lewis
Other clubs say, “Tell all your close friends about us.” We want you to keep this quiet, due to the fact we’re not positive the Chinese know we’re here.
— Rick Jenkins
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| Rick Jenkins of The Comedy Studio |
CAMBRIDGE — Tucked away on the third floor of the Hong Kong restaurant in Cambridge, across Massachusetts Avenue from the gated majesty of Harvard Yard, sits what many funny individuals think about to be the greatest comedy club in the planet.
Amongst them are Eugene Mirman, who has released three comedy albums, written a book (“The Will to Whatevs”) and acted in the HBO show “Flight of the Conchords” Joe Wong, a Letterman preferred Shane Mauss, who had a Comedy Central specific and released an album on the station’s imprint and Frank Smiley, the senior producer (and talent scout) for Conan O’Brien.
But unless you are a comedian, there’s a excellent likelihood you’ve by no means heard of The Comedy Studio. That’s by style. When owner Rick Jenkins starting performing Sunday night exhibits at the Hong Kong 15 years ago, he didn’t set out to generate the kind of cookie-cutter, two-drink-minimum comedy club that proliferated in the 1980’s.
At 1st, he didn’t set out to produce a comedy club at all.
“I was nearly 35 and had not made it as a standup comic, and clearly wasn’t going to make it as a standup comic,” Jenkins says, “and I got a day job at a bookstore for minimum wage figuring, ‘Alright, I got to do comedy for 10 years and now I have to start the true globe.’”
Instead, his Sunday night exhibits starting carrying out well, so he added Friday and Saturday night shows. There is now a magic-themed show on Tuesday nights, and Wednesdays and Sundays have a tendency to characteristic much less polished comedians than weekend nights, but the format — about 10 comics undertaking 5-7 minute “feature” sets — has remained reasonably constant.
That’s 1 issue that separates The Comedy Studio from some of the larger clubs downtown, such as Nick’s Comedy Quit, which a lot more usually than not comply with the normal format of characteristic performer (undertaking about 30 minutes), out-of-town headliner and maybe an emcee.
One more is the crowd. Jenkins likes to joke that he doesn’t want the audience to inform their pals because “we’re not confident the Chinese know we’re here…and for the first 10 years that was genuinely accurate,” Jenkins says. “People would call the Hong Kong and they would have no notion what they were talking about.”
Jenkins is fast to point out that it’s not generally overrun with Harvard individuals, but the Cambridge location does lend itself to a intelligent, hip crowd.
“Boston is a pondering person’s town, and it’s counterbalanced with a rich and delicious tradition of a**holeism,” says the comedian Mehran, who grew up in Lexington (and attended high school with Mirman). “The right Bostonian will point out precisely why you don’t want to be so psyched to be alive, tell you to go f*ck your self and somehow invigorate your day with that information. I enjoy it.”
Smiley is the senior producer for The Conan O’Brien Show. The first time he went to the Studio, he looked at 10 comedians and had 3 on the show in the following two weeks.
“That’s pretty much unheard of,” says Jenkins. “Usually it requires at least a year of them tracking someone, and out of ten they may discover one particular they want to track.”
Not surprisingly, Smiley returns usually, and he’s quoted on the club’s system:
I take into account it the greatest comedy club on earth. It’s a return to the days of wise audiences, which I locate are rare, and I’ve been everywhere. You go to the Comedy Studio and then you come back to the New York clubs and you fall into a depression.
“The Studio has such a good crowd,” says Ahmed Bharoocha, a Boston (by way of Rhode Island) comedian who moved to Los Angeles earlier this year. “They’re normally intelligent and they’re going to like you. It is not like a road space where you have to bang it into (their) heads — which is a great factor to find out, too. I believe Rick really wants you to get your set prepared for what you believe it’d be on Television.”
And that is the most crucial ingredient of The Comedy Studio: Jenkins himself.
***
“Seven chairs on that side,” Jenkins tells a comedian who’s helping him transform the third floor of the Hong Kong into a comedy club.
There are four 20-foot long tables plastered with snapshots and press clippings that constitute the bulk of the seating at the Comedy Studio. Six nights a week, Jenkins is here to set up, even though mercifully he only has to break down four of those nights. Each and every show begins at 8 and ends by ten.
Girl Speak is playing more than the speakers whilst a comedy DVD menu circles repeatedly in silence. Along the back walls is extra seating, and right after setting up the tables, Jenkins takes to arranging a handful of promotional signs from more than the years along the back wall. One features a black and white photo of a much younger-hunting Jenkins, when the Buffalo native, who’s approaching 50, nevertheless had a full head of hair.
Then, as now, when he dons a dark suit for his hosting duties (he emcees most of the weekend exhibits), Jenkins seems surprisingly straight-laced for the proprietor of a hip club regarded as to be a bastion of “alternative” comedy (see “Indie Comedy”). He credits comedian Eugene Mirman, who was a staple of The Studio for four years ahead of moving to New York in 2000, with shifting items in an experimental direction.
“He’s really the 1 that took my mainstream instincts and pushed them towards the gorilla operation,” Jenkins says.
But Jenkins’ mainstream instincts and appearance are in aspect what enable The Studio to thrive. Audiences who wander in off the street may be place off by the bizarre antics of a single comedian, but five-to-7 minutes later they have Jenkins up there smiling and delivering the type of setup/punchline jokes they expect in the course of the segue.
And it largely operates like a actual comedy club, apart from the fact that the comedians don’t get paid, so there is a professionalism and efficiency to every little thing.
“Rick does a wonderful job operating it,” Mirman says. “It has a wonderful spirit to it. It is got so numerous components that come together that make it fantastic place.”
Comedians are in a position to experiment the audience is exposed to different kinds of jokes than they may possibly see on Television without having getting pushed out of their comfort zone for too lengthy and Jenkins gets to feature a range of comedic acts and designs.
“You’ll hear a lot of comics say you require a location to fail,” says Nick Zaino III, who has covered the Boston comedy scene for much more than a decade (for The Boston Globe, among others) and runs the Boston Comedy Blog (bostoncomedy.blogspot.com). “The Studio is usually that spot, where folks are supportive enough that you can truly swing massive and whiff at times.
“But if you make contact, you’ll really have something. That’s not a thing you can get all over the place. And the Studio isn’t a huge club, but it is an established spot, so it indicates a thing to individuals to get to a certain point there.”
***
Jenkins’ willingness to attempt new things and let comedians experiment is unusual for a legitimate comedy club, especially a single that normally pulls a good crowd, but it’s central to his mission. He doesn’t just pick talented and distinctive voices he helps to foster them, usually from the beginning.
When comedians get in touch with him about obtaining on a show, he’ll send out a welcoming care package, replete with a filled letter, articles on The Studio, a listing of open mics and a free pass to the club. It’s not clear what Jenkins gets out of this, but for aspiring comics it is a excellent primer for the scene.
“Comics actually create here,” Jenkins says of Boston usually, but he could be talking about his club. “It’s truly more like a graduate school.”
He rarely provides advice without having being asked, but he has it at the ready. Jenkins even has a Comic-in-Residence program, a sort of finishing school for young comedians. Each night for a month, the Comic-in-Residence does a set at every single show, hosting or taking the bullet (going 1st) for crowds that range from teenagers to tourists to grizzled veterans of the Boston comedy scene.
One of the 1st Comics-in-Residence was Myq Kaplan, the Final Comic Standing finalist. When Kaplan initial carried out at the Studio ten years ago, he was an aspiring singer-songwriter who just believed he’d attempt some of his funnier songs onstage. He was crestfallen when he located out he only had seven minutes.
Also on the bill that night had been Jonathan Katz and Louis C.K., although at the time neither name meant very much to Kaplan. Later, when he became significant about comedy, he hosted a show at the Studio with Micah Sherman before moving to New York a couple of years ago.
“Basically Rick was the 1st person to place me on stage,” Kaplan says. “The Studio I think of as my property club. That’s where I got started out, I adore going back there. It is just a genuinely great place with excellent audiences and Rick is wonderful.”
“I don’t want to blow smoke up his a**hole a single more time, but The Comedy Studio was a actually important terrarium for me to do stuff,” adds Zach Sherwin, who performs — and not long ago released his 1st CD on Comedy Central Records — underneath the moniker MC Mr. Napkins. “Rick gave me that weekly hosting spot and then I’d do a couple other spots a month, and it just was a actually excellent community of intelligent, appreciative men and women who gave me a lot of excellent feedback early on. The Comedy Studio was enormous.”
Sherwin and Kaplan are among the most current batch of Boston comics to locate good results only to skip town. Yet another is Shane Mauss, who now lives in Austin. Mauss’ rise was downright meteoric (see “Onward”), but like Mirman and Kaplan just before him, it truly began with the Comedy Studio.
“I think of the Studio as my house club,” Mauss says. “As far as really performing, it really is my favorite club in the country. It really is not often super intelligent comedy that you see on stage, but the audiences are typically up for what ever — dumb jokes and wise jokes alike.
It’s a single of the few areas where I can do my actually weird substitute stuff, but then I can also do my blue collar-y stuff talking about drinking or my old construction job…I haven’t really noticed that in too several clubs.”
For his portion, Jenkins thinks the recipe is simple: “If you have good audiences, comics will want to be here, and if you have good comics, audiences will want to be here.”
***
You can point to several issues as evidence of the Studio’s central spot in the Boston comedy landscape, the respect it engenders amongst comics in specific. The club has sustained itself with out a single qualified promotional push. Smiley and other scouts regularly look to Jenkins to produce showcases so they can locate the town’s leading talent.
But one of the most impressive things is this: The Comedy Studio occupies this elevated space despite the fact that it doesn’t pay its comedians. The space is too little and the tickets too low-cost to support something more than Jenkins and his Hong Kong restaurant overlords. But it doesn’t appear to matter. The greatest out-of-town comics typically try to make a pit quit at the club, even when they’re playing far larger, far greater paying (and this would consist of anything that’s paying) gigs downtown. Todd Barry and Gary Gulman have recorded CDs here.
Whether it is the crowd, Jenkins, the space itself or some combination in in between, the alchemy has worked for 15 years. When asked what sacrifices he’s produced to make that take place, his dismisses the thought totally.
“I’m producing a living undertaking one thing I really like, rather of generating a decent living performing one thing I hate,” he says.
In The Comedy Studio, Jenkins has created the variety of club he’d want to attend.
Just do not tell your pals.
