One year ago, Creative Loafing published a cover story titled “Finding the Funny,” about aspiring young comics. The title could aptly describe the recent travails of Charlotte comedy club-goers.
Months after the closure of The Comedy Zone on College Street, Charlotte lacks a venue dedicated purely to comedy. Sure, the nationwide chain, based here, still has shows in Matthews, Belmont and Lake Norman. And Queen City Comedy brings comics to The Big Chill in Dilworth every Wednesday. But in the absence of The Comedy Zone downtown, this city’s stand-up fans have been bereft of a club dedicated solely to professional comic relief.
Luckily, the laugh scene could soon see a big turnaround. Queen City Comedy’s backers are searching for a permanent home by January 2008, says Antoine Johnson of A & J Entertainment. The Charlotte Comedy Theater, an improvisational comedy group, is moving June 1 from SK Net Café in Elizabeth to The Graduate, soon to open at the corner of Central Avenue and The Plaza.
Also, The Comedy Zone hopes to have a new home soon. Its booking agent, Joel Pace, wouldn’t say when that might be, but he did say owners have found three possible areas for a new location: near Bank of America Stadium, inside N.C. Music Factory (also home to CL‘s offices) and in NoDa (though he wouldn’t say if the north Charlotte spot was still being considered).
“We will definitely be back,” Pace says.
This isn’t the first time The Comedy Zone has left downtown. The club had been in a downtown hotel in the 1980s before moving to Matthews and then moving to College Street in 2001. Regardless, the void — however impermanent — created by its absence has raised a question: Does Charlotte support comedy?
The Comedy Zone says it left College Street after its lease ran out, and not because the club wasn’t drawing customers. David Clark, A & J Entertainment’s director of corporation operations, says attendance at Queen City Comedy performances ebbs and flows, with some of its Wednesday nights sold out. A visit on a recent amateur night found an appreciative crowd that grew to standing-room only levels as the night wore on.
Queen City Comedy began about four years ago at The Neighborhood Theatre in NoDa after Chris “Funnyman” Robinson urged Williams to fill the niche. Roughly two years later, it moved to The Big Chill.
Its headliners — among them notables like Kat Williams, Rickey Smiley, and Tommy Davidson — were more likely to have been seen on Def Comedy Jam or BET’s Comic View; The Comedy Zone’s performers — such as Dave Attell and Dave Chappelle — were more likely to have performed on Comedy Central, says Johnson. When asked, Clark says that comedy in Charlotte, like many cities, is often racially segregated: “We’d like to have a place where we could kind of break that divide up.”
He hopes Queen City Comedy’s permanent home will be as close to downtown as possible. “One thing we’ve realized about Charlotte, to be able to get all folks from all demographics, the best place is Uptown,” Clark says.
Keli Semelsberger, director of Charlotte Comedy Theater, says her theater has struggled to get its name out, and the improvisational comedy its actors and students perform doesn’t necessarily attract the crowd that comes out for stand-up comics. The closing of The Comedy Zone didn’t have much effect on the Theater’s crowds. “They’re different audiences,” says Semelsberger. “It’s not like all those people came over to us.”
Semelsberger performed with improv theaters in Chicago for 8 years before opening her theater in 2002. She says grassroots comedy has difficulty gaining traction in Charlotte. “It’s just, nobody knows that there are real people like us, and some other offshoot groups that are still keeping it alive, but barely,” she says.
She’s hopeful the Plaza-Midwood location will work in favor of the theater, which expects to add sketch comedy and stand-up to its lineup.
“There is a void for new artists, for comedians who want to come out of the Charlotte area,” says Clark. “Every time we put out a notice that we’re looking to do an amateur night, we have comedians just calling and calling.”
According to Johnson, a smaller scene could work in a new comic’s favor. “Someone could really come in here and make a name for himself,” he says.
Clark, a D.C. native, says the influx of professionals from other metropolitan areas should be good for the comedy scene. Just a few years ago, he points out, on many nights of the week it was hard to find an open jazz club. Now two are open many nights. “With the amount of people you’re getting moving in from D.C., New York, Chicago, Jersey, Florida and the Atlanta area, they want (comedy) just like any other entertainment,” he says.
This article appears in May 16-22, 2007.
