After three years doing standup roughly every night, the comic Jad Sleiman concluded that the system for finding and promoting new talent was broken.
“Whether or not you get onstage at most clubs in the city has very little to do, at this point, with how funny you are,” he wrote me recently. Sleiman went on to say that the best way to get stage time is not to work at your craft, but to network, make connections and increase your online follower count. Most major clubs use a referral system, to varying degrees: That means to get onstage, you need other comics to vouch for you, he said.
Performers, he added, naturally pick their friends, and there’s even a motivation to promote mediocrity. “Honestly,” he told me. “You don’t want to follow someone who buries you.”
In comparison to the theater, live comedy has recovered from the pandemic in great commercial shape, with the help of podcasting and social media exposure. But with success comes the danger of insularity, and while more new artists are entering the field than ever, the gulf in influence between celebrity comics and gifted young unknowns grows. Sleiman’s polemical critique of the current club establishment gives voice to a real and justifiable anxiety that it’s becoming harder for comics with more talent than connections to break through.
Young, hustling comedians have always bemoaned the choices of gatekeepers, but Sleiman is actually dedicating money and time to doing something about it. Along with fellow comics Brooks Tawil and Kyle Gillis, who share his frustration with the status quo, he recently started the Bushwick Comedy Club. One week before opening, sitting next to Tawil inside a former bodega that now houses a small stage, 50 seats and a sink held up by Goya cans, Sleiman described his plans for a more meritocratic comedy club.
“Our main difference is going to sound stupid,” he explained, “but simply put, we’re going to actually watch submission tapes.” Referrals will not matter. Nor will social media followers. Only how funny you are on tape. On Instagram, Bushwick Comedy Club promotes itself as the “only club in New York who books its lineups purely off video submissions.”
That means if you send a tape of yourself telling jokes, usually in front of a crowd, the three owners will watch it and if all three give it a thumbs up, you become part of the rotation. One dissent kills your chances. They’ve already pored over 1,000 tapes and signed up 70 comics.
Sleiman, 35, and Tawil, 26, are both short, and full of coiled intensity, while Gillis, 32, towers over them with heavy-metal hair hanging past his shoulders. With more than a dozen years’ performing and producing comedy, he has the most experience booking shows, independently and at other clubs, including the Tiny Cupboard, another Bushwick spot. He speaks about clubs like someone who has had to bite his lip for too long. “We’re going to watch more comedy than anyone else,” Gillis said, adding that just “really caring about quality is novel enough to make us stand out.”
Sleiman traces the inspiration for their booking system to the moment at a comedy festival in Indiana that he met Josh Sandoval, a seasoned booker who helps program the Netflix Is a Joke festival, the country’s biggest annual comedy showcase. In Sleiman’s telling, this gatekeeper was asked by a performer what he looked for in a good tape, and he responded by saying that he couldn’t remember the last time he had watched one.
“It struck me as insane, because this guy could go to all the top festivals in the country, get all their tapes and simply watch them,” he said. “This is a man whose job is to discover the next big thing in comedy.”
Sandoval told me this was taken out of context. His full statement, he said, was that he didn’t only use tapes. Word of mouth and seeing comics live is also important. He added that he was doubtful the Bushwick club would rely solely on tapes. “Jad asked me if I would tell high-profile comedians to go to his club,” he wrote in a direct message, “which I felt was odd given that I had just met him, nor had I been to the venue.”
THERE IS REASON FOR SKEPTICISM about the success of Bushwick Comedy Club. Making any new arts institution work in this city is famously difficult. And anyone who has seen someone popular online try standup knows that a tape does not necessarily translate to live comedy in the room.
Several New York club owners, including one at the Tiny Cupboard, describe only watching tapes as impractical (not enough hours in the day). They also say this critique mischaracterizes the process, which typically finds talent through multiple sources, including submissions. Felicia Madison, the booker for the West Side Comedy Club, said she took referrals but also reached out to comics after seeing them at an open mic or on an Instagram video. The Comedy Cellar’s owner, Noam Dworman, said that while he thought most new comics were booked at his club through referrals, he also found new talent in a multitude of ways, including submissions. As an example, he said, he added Gray West to the roster after seeing him at another club, Rodney’s.
Referrals weren’t part of the process when the New York Comedy Club opened, said Emilio Savone, a co-owner. He praised the idealism of the new Bushwick enterprise before questioning its sustainability. If the club succeeds, its roster of new talent will become a veteran stable and the owners will discover there’s not enough stage time for everyone. “If a comic becomes big, do you wash them out to keep a pipeline for young comics?” he wondered. “Talk to me in three years.”
Savone did say that the scene had changed in the last two decades and that there were many more comics who could draw audiences today, which had led to clubs’ spending less time developing talent. Asked about the new club, the comic Sam Frank, who also books a biweekly independent show in the West Village, said he wasn’t convinced that watching tapes would be a panacea but added that Sleiman was onto something: “The referral-based system is a flawed one that often prioritizes people skills over comedy skills,” he said.
The owners of the Bushwick Comedy Club all point to their experience as comics — Sleiman is a former Marine from West Virginia who is a Muslim of Lebanese descent, a background that inspires some of his jokes — as an advantage in knowing where talent is emerging at independent shows. And they balked at the idea that they might recreate the favoritism they see in other clubs on the grounds that they care too much about their reputation.
THIS ISN’T THE FIRST TIME Sleiman has mounted an unlikely challenge to an establishment. After getting fired from his job at an NPR member station in January 2023 because of jokes online that his bosses claimed violated social media policy, Sleiman fought the decision and triumphed, winning back pay. He connected with his partners after posting on Instagram that he wanted to use this money to start a club. He landed on the neighborhood of Bushwick at a moment of expansion for comedy in the borough.
Until 2018, there weren’t any comedy clubs in Brooklyn, which was better known for an alternative scene. In the last few years, traditional showcase clubs opened in Williamsburg (Flop House, Williamsburg Comedy Club), near Downtown Brooklyn (Eastville) and in Bushwick (the Tiny Cupboard). While Brooklyn crowds have a reputation for being progressive and quick to offend, Sleiman rejects that as an old caricature. “If this were 2018 and Twitter was everyone’s life, I might think that,” he said. “But people here are normal. Like, they want a fun time.”
Twenty minutes before their debut show, Sleiman was sweeping the lobby as audiences congregated outside the windowed doors. Instead of head shots of comics, a more traditional design choice, the walls were covered with a sprawling mural featuring a dinosaur, taxis and a giant shark. On either side of the stage there were cabinets of oddball objects: an Artie Lange memoir, a small globe and a fish tank.
In between cigarettes, Sleiman said he hadn’t been this tired since he was in the military stationed in Afghanistan. He took tickets, Gillis worked the sound board and Brooks hosted the show, cracking the inaugural joke: “My name is Brooks. I’ll be one of your Jews for the evening.”
Onstage was a mostly funny, diverse lineup of little-known comics, riffing on the election, dating, being broke. Benny Feldman, an absurdist who favored cockeyed one-liners, delivered the standout set, poking fun at his own Tourette’s syndrome, which manifested in periodic jolts to the side and clicking sounds. “Tourette’s is sort of the abstract art of disabilities,” he said. “A lot of people are like: I could do that.”
Sleiman ended his set with a heartfelt thanks to the packed house, saying he hadn’t been sure anyone was going to show up. Gillis also let a moment of vulnerability show when talking about how much weed he smoked.
“I think I am going to get fired from my day job because they know I am coming in high,” he said, pausing for a moment to smile at the crowd. “So, this place has to do well now.”
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