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New York Comedy Festival

Eleven days. More than 300 shows. The 20th annual New York Comedy Festival offered a Golden Corral-style buffet of laughs. It was impossible to see them all, but here are the top seven performances — in no particular order — that Billboard witnessed.

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1. Zarna Garg

Garg, who closed the festival with a sold-out show at Town Hall in Midtown Manhattan on Nov. 17, took an unlikely path to stand-up comedy. Raised in Bombay, she escaped an arranged marriage by leaving home, immigrating to the United States and attending law school before becoming a multi-hyphenate in the comedy business: stand-up, screenwriting, podcasting and a memoir. She first headlined at Caroline’s on Broadway in 2020 and, according to her manager, the Town Hall appearance was one of her biggest headlining shows to date.

A lot of Garg’s comedy is steeped in Indian culture and stereotypes — “You are Indian, your pronoun is doctor!” she said during her performance —but judging from the composition of the crowd on Nov. 17, she has clearly crossed over. Garg got big laughs saying her bindi was the same kind of sticker that Macy’s uses to mark down clothes, and implied that she occasionally uses hers to snag a bargain. “You know I’m doing it!” she said. And she elicited a huge roar from the crowd after telling a story about keeping her comedy work from her parents. When her mother found out, instead of disowning her daughter, she told her that if it would help with her career, “May you tell your audience that your father likes to do it doggy style.”

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2. Jeff Arcuri

The Michigan-raised, Chicago-based comic opened the festival on Nov. 7, when he brought his Full Beans Tour to the Beacon Theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and proved how he has blown up over the past year: with crowd work, which has gone viral on social media. Arcuri is so lightning-quick and scalpel-sharp that attempting to take notes of his back-and-forth banter with audience members — done with a big, wicked smile — is a fool’s errand. So, check out this video and note that, unlike other comics who single out members of their audience, Arcuri practices largely cruelty-free comedy.

3. Jordan Jensen

The Ithaca, NY-born former contractor — she called her company Lady Parts Carpentry, because her name was often misconstrued as male — Jensen is a tattooed bomb cyclone of funny, who became the first woman to win the festival’s New York’s Funniest competition in 2021. Her act is seeded with the wins and losses of womanhood and dating, growing up with a lesbian mother and an estranged weed-loving father, and her battles with OCD and intrusive thoughts. As one of Jeff Arcuri’s openers at the Beacon Theater, Jensen had the crowd screaming with laughter over a wild bit on the realities of menstruation.

4. New York’s Funniest

The winner of the festival’s annual joke-off — which catapulted the careers of Jensen and Michael Che, among other comics — was New York-based stand-up Jamie Wolf, who delivered a polished set that closed with a killer, seemingly new bit on why he’s pretty sure God is a woman. “Picture dicks and balls,” he said. “They’re so first draft.” It got better from there but go see Wolf to hear it firsthand. As they say in the business, it’s all in the telling.  

Wolf was one of 10 comics who competed at the Hard Rock Hotel on Nov. 16, and two in particular brought to mind a comment Chris Distefano made in an interview with Billboard last week, in which he talked about his comedy originating as a “defense mechanism” that arose from his parents divorce.

The competition’s opener, Soo Ra, who is Korean, was born missing fingers on one hand and adopted as an infant after she was found in a box that had been left outside a police station. A devastating story, but Ra, whose delivery is could be described as cheerfully deadpan, got a lot of laughs out of it, telling the crowd she might have been abandoned when her real mother looked at her unformed hand and decided, “This baby cannot fix Samsung phones.” She also said that when people ask her which Korea she is from, she replies, “The one you can get out of.”

Next up was Nick Viagas, who used his stutter to land a lot of laughs. He told the crowd that if he didn’t make it in comedy, “I can always get a job as a turn signal.” And that when he was put in charge of the countdown at a New Year’s Eve show, “That was the longest year.”

5. Ricky Velez

One of Judd Apatow’s favorite comics — he even made Velez a producer on The King of Staten Island New York City in which he co-starred with best friend Pete Davidson — the Queens-bred smart-ass repaid the kindness with a charged set for Judd Apatow and Friends at the Beacon Theater on Nov. 9. In addition to compelling storytelling — check out his Dominican drug dealer in the bit online — Velez likes to rile up the politically correct, and in his addressing the influx of migrants into New York, he told the audience, “I like migrants a lot because they’re fucking up the white-woman agenda. That makes me very happy. [In] 2017 white women canceled cat-calling in New York City. Well, guess what. Venezuela never went through a #MeToo Movement. So, good luck telling Papi that ass ain’t fine, Mami.”

He also welcomed more crime in the city, which he said was “the war on gentrification,” adding that he recently saw “three men eating croissants on the corner.” Declaring such a brazen act of refined tastes “crazy,” Velez had the crowd wheezing when he said, “This is New York City. That can’t happen. Those men need crime,” adding: “Croissants and tote bags. If you’ve got a tote bag as a man. Time to move, bro. We back.”

6. Chris Distefano

Distefano did back-to-back-to-back shows at three outposts of the New York Comedy Club, which is owned by his manager, Emilio Savone — in part to re-record classic bits he did on Netflix and other comedy platforms so that he could reclaim ownership. He dubbed them “Chrissy’s Version” in homage to Taylor Swift. But he also riffed on the results of the presidential election and some of his successful friends’ reactions to it. “I will say this. If you made a post crying about the president, you’re a p—y” Distefano said. “You gotta be an adult here.”

He further explained that a number of friends he met through comedy “do big things. They host TV shows. I took the bus here.” Some of those famous friends “are crying,” he said. “I’m like, relax. You’re a multimillionaire making believe. You live in America. Shut the f—up. Everybody’s just got to take a deep breath. It’s gonna be fine. Now, do I know for sure? No. I went to Nassau Community College.”  

7. Stand Up For Heroes

Year after year, this benefit for military veterans brings out top-shelf talent to raise tens of millions of dollars. This year, Bruce Springsteen, Norah Jones, Jon Stewart, Jim Gaffigan, Jerry Seinfeld and Mark Normand put on a really big show, which you can read more about here (and watch a video of The Boss performing “Long Walk Home”).

For more than 40 years, Caroline Hirsch’s name has been synonymous with comedy in New York City. Beginning in 1981, when she opened a small club bearing her first name in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, comedy’s greatest performed on — and in some cases, made their bones on — her stages: Dave Chappelle, Jerry Seinfeld, David Letterman, Jon Stewart, Gilbert Gottfried, Jay Leno, Kevin Hart, Bill Burr, Paul Reubens and Michael Che, among many others.

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In 2004, Hirsch and her partner in business and life, Andrew Fox, decided to expand the Caroline’s brand beyond the walls of the club (which had since moved to Midtown Manhattan). The New York Comedy Festival debuted in November of that year, spanning approximately 15 shows over five days. On Nov. 7 the festival kicks off its 20th season which will feature more than 300 shows over 11 days, including its annual Stand Up for Heroes benefit — now in its 17th year — where Bruce Springsteen, Jim Gaffigan, Seinfeld, Stewart and other comics and musicians have raised a total of $84 million for wounded and ill military veterans. There’s also The Eras Tour: Taylor Swift Comedy Show and Dance Party.

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“Twenty years is a long time to be in business, especially in New York City,” says Hirsch — who, along with Fox, spoke to Billboard about how the festival and comedy have evolved over that time.

How has the festival evolved over the last 20 years?

Caroline Hirsch: Most noticeably is the depth and length of the festival. We started out with 10 big shows and three or four headliner shows. Now, the festival is 11 days, with over 300 shows and 22 headliners. And I would attribute a big part of that to the fact that comedy is more of a staple in our lives today.

Andrew Fox: When we started, so few comics playing theaters. New York has such great theaters — Carnegie Hall, the Beacon Theater and Madison Square Garden. For comics, these are bucket list shows.

Hirsch: Before 2006, the only person who played Madison Square Garden was Andrew “Dice” Clay, and that was because of his relationship with Howard Stern. In 2006, we put Dane Cook into Madison Square Garden for two nights. We sold 38,000 tickets. Since then we’ve put Kevin Hart, Bill Burr and Trevor Noah at the Garden.

Fox:  When we played Dane there, it really changed the way people looked at the comedy business. When we look back at that, from our humble beginnings. It was a game changer for us, agents and managers in the industry.

Hirsch: Now Carnegie Hall is considered a steppingstone to the Garden or other arenas. A lot of comedians we worked with at Caroline’s wanted to play bigger venues. The festival enabled us to do that. And we continue the tradition started at the club of building talent. Zarna Garg started with one night at Carolines, and at this year’s festival, we’re presenting her at Town Hall on the last day of the festival.

You closed your club in at the end of 2022 because your landlord wanted a significant rent increase. Do you have any plans to reopen it in another location?  

Hirsch: The festival is about moving beyond the four walls of Caroline’s and doing comedy in a bigger way. The only way we’re thinking of Caroline’s right now is as a bigger event.  

Fox: People are always coming to us with different ideas for events and branding opportunities, and we listen. Consumers trust us if they’re not familiar with a particular performer.

Caroline, you recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News about comedy being more important than ever given today’s political climate. Can you talk a bit more on that?

Hirsch: Comedy is important for society, and it has become a central part of our conversation today as you saw with some of the stuff that came out of the political rallies. Joe Rogan’s podcast had a lot of influence during the presidential campaign, and I’m curious to see what Bill Maher’s play is. Bill’s in the center, and he calls it right on. I think hearing what he has to say will bring relief to some people.

You’ve also said that it has the power to bring people from different backgrounds, political and cultural perspectives together.

Hirsch: Ideally, comedy is about taking information that may be controversial or polarizing and making it more palatable in a communal setting where everyone comes together to laugh and let off steam. We live in a country where 50% percent of people are pissed off, and 50% are happy. How do we bring those two sides together? By making them laugh. Laughing is a healing process. It soothes the soul.

Andrew, in another conversation, you said that stand-up tours are hotter and more important then ever for comics’ careers.

Fox: People are getting their comedy in all different forms today, including social media and streaming and podcasts, but there’s nothing like the live experience of sitting in an audience, on a date or with friends.

Hirsch: It used to be that everybody wanted a sitcom. Now they want to tour. And for comedy fans, it’s like going to see a band. People want that first-hand experience, and they’ve wanted it more since Covid.

How has stand-up comedy changed since the festival started?

Hirsch: It’s a lot smarter, much more political. It used to be very left-leaning, but now it’s more balanced. There’s a right-leaning side to it now. Women play a much bigger role in comedy now, too. Also, the number of headliners has increased. In the early days, I had maybe 18 headliners. Today, there must be a hundred comics that can headline. I think Caroline’s had a lot to do with that growth. We also played a role in the media’s increased interest in comedy. In the early ‘80s, no one covered comedy. I had to convince people to cover it at the [New York] Daily News, Page Six and on the Howard Stern show.

Is there one particular show at the festival I should not miss if I want to see comedy’s next headliners?

Hirsch: New York’s Funniest. Every year we survey the canvas, so to speak, and select 10 promising comics to participate. Some major comedians have come out of it — Nate Bargatze and Michael Che won in different years. It continues to grow year after year, and it’s a way for comedians who aren’t know to get known and to get agents and managers. The night Michael Che won, he got an agent and a manager at the bar at Caroline’s.