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Caloroga Shark Media. Hello Chi Meg with your Daily Comedy News this week. The first annual Columbus Comedy Festival takes place the fourteenth through the eighteenth, featuring over one hundred performers including national, regional and local comedians. Headliners include Jason Banks, Michael Ee, and black Tony Rock, Irene Ii fumu Abe, and a bunch of others. My guest today is Walker Evans.
Walker is putting this thing together and as you’re about to hear, dude knows his stuff. And this is no little comedy festival. This is not the as you’ll hear me say during the interview, the Smallville Comedy Festival where we grab the locals from the chuckle Hut and called it comedy festival. This is a real deal. So we get into the business of it.
And as you listen, you’ll hear that Walker knows his comedy. So it’s the Columbus Comedy Festival, kicking off on August fourteenth, five days, one hundred and fifty plus comics. Here’s Walker. So I’m really curious on your background. I’ve definitely attended festivals.
I’ve even put together a few events. It is no small task, whatsoever? What’s your deal? How do you come to put together a comedy festival? And as we dive into the details of it, this is no small festival.
I’ve looked at the sponsor list, the number of events, the level of comedians. This isn’t you know. Hey, I’m friends with the guy at the club. We’ll throw a two night event and call it a comedy festival. This is a real deal.
So what’s your story. Yeah, My wife and I have run a local news publication here in Columbus for the past twenty three years, started in two thousand and one called Columbus Underground, and about eleven twelve years ago, we decided to pivot into event production. Instead of doing like a paywall model that a lot of news organizations do, we throw events and so we can tell our readers, Hey, if you like journalism, if you like what you’re doing, buy a ticket, come to an event, have a good time, and know that helps to fund local journalism here in Columbus. Some of our events are on the smaller side to three hundred people, but we’ve run a coffee festival since twenty sixteen that has grown. Last year, in the eighth year, it’s sold out in advance with eighty five hundred people in attendance, so that event has grown into a pretty big undertaking putting this coffee festival together, So we do have experience with like larger scale of end production.
We’re aiming for ten thousand attendees this year in October. But we’re also big fans of comedy and there isn’t a festival in Columbus currently, so we’re like, why don’t we rally the troops and try and pull off one of these to a large scale? All right, so many questions, So let’s start with the business sides. Presumably you have existing relationships with sponsors, You’re known in the community, so it was a little easier to reach out as opposed to if I just showed up in small town, USA and I was like, Hey, it’s the Smallville Comedy Festival. Who wants to sponsor it?
Can I have a check? So I assume it was a little more straightforward because of your two decades. Yeah, yeah, we’ve built a pretty good reputation on being able to pull off the events that we say that we’re going to produce. So we’ve got a little bit of history and again, twenty years yeah, connecting. Columbus is a really interesting city because it’s a region of two million people, so we’re a pretty big city.
But it’s pretty easy to get to know people here. You just reach out and say, hey, do you want to get coffee, and you can connect with people pretty pretty easily. There’s not a lot of gatekeepers, so yeah, and I think people really like We love festivals. We have a whole summer lineup of the Arts Festival, the Asian Festival, the Red White and Boom. We have a huge Pride festival, so all some are long.
People are looking for things to do. And because we’re not replicating something else that’s already here. There’s six different Taco festivals. We’re not like, hey, we’re going to be Taco fest numbers step because we’re doing something different. There isn’t a comedy fest currently.
There have been some in the past that have come and gone. People seem to be really excited about something new to add to the lineup. Who’s uh, I don’t necessarily need a specific name, but who’s helping you with the booking? Because there are some big time comedians on this list. Again, this isn’t the Smallville Comedy Festival.
We’ll just get the regulars from the Chuck ohad do you play there every Tuesday? You’re bringing real names in, knowing something about the business. Again, no small feat and discussions and logistics going to that. So how are you tackling the bringing in the Mike Leean Blacks of the world. Yeah, so I guess to rewind to last year, like last October, when we were sort of noodling on this idea.
We brought together all of the local venue operators, promoters, different groups in town to say, hey, what if Columbus Underground runs the festival as a whole, But then each of the different venue partners can program their own events, do their things their own best way, and it’s all under the umbrella the festival. So that allowed others to do their own things. And so, for example, the Attic, which is a local club, they’re bringing in Jim Florentine. They have a pre existing relationship with him, so they’re able to tap into him pretty easily. The Funny Bone, which is the big dog in town, got Tony Rock, so that’s obviously a big name and they had their relationship there.
But the events that we’re programming, we just started reaching out to people to see who we could get, who’s available, whose price range and budget we can work with. And there’s been a couple of folks that you reach out to one agent or management or group and you get one person, They’re like, oh, what about this person? This person they’re on tour. Anyway, adding a Columbus date might be pretty easy. So some of it, like Mike William Black just came through talking with Curtis Flag in Chicago.
I think I reached out to him originally about Kristen Toomey and He’s like, here’s the rest of the list that I represent, right, who can we plug it? And I’m like, yeah, I love my people Black, I love the States. I’m old enough to remember the state from the nineties on MTV, and so yeah, it ended up being just throw a. Lot with the wall and see what sticks. Approach.
Let’s talk about these specific lineups and catch a listeners up on it, and I will be doing raps about it on the particular individual days, but in multiple venues, multiple artists every night, can you just give us an overview of who’s coming in what a typical breakdown is both headliners and I always advise the audience if you go to festivals, especially the really bigger name ones, I always say, don’t go see Chris Rock. You can see Chris Rock on Netflix. Go see somebody who maybe you’ve never heard of, who’s in up in comer. So just if you can give us an overview of what the next few days look. Like, Yeah, sure, I mean I would say, even like the bigger shows in the bigger rooms, the bigger headliners are still like emerging.
Upcomer might not be. The best term for them, But people like Chloe Radcliffe who’s been doing it for a while, building an audience, but still very much not an arena level comic, but headed on that trajectory. I would say her, Sumi Abe who’s coming in on Friday, Sam Jay, who was recently on the roads to Tom Brady. Some of these folks, I think being able to come and see them in a little bit more of an intimate environment in a room that seats two hundred to four hundred people is going to be something special because those folks when they come back to town and play like the big arena in a couple of years, that’s when the tickets are going to be a lot more expensive, and that sort of thing. But we have a lot of great regional comics, not just from Chicago, but Cleveland and Cincinnati.
Ramon Revas is a big name in Cleveland that’s coming down. Ran Barnaclough and Blake Hammond from Cincinnati are coming up. But a lot of great locals though too. Jason Banks is one of our big kind of hometown heroes, Simon Fraser, who’s semi local. Yeah, there’s gonna be a lot to choose from, and a lot no matter what your style of comedy is.
We try to go for diversity and style of comedy as well. What comedy are you into? No, I hate comedy. I’m just doing this festival some question. Yeah, No, I like a variety of things.
I would say I love a good weirdo. Okay, me too, yes, yes, so on. One person I’m very excited to see is Comrade Tripp. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with them. He’s based in Minneapolis.
Definitely like an emerging talent, but he’s very monotone and dry. His humor is very nihilistic, it’s self deprecating. It’s really funny if you like that style of comedy, a little emo phillips ish I would say a little Mitch hedbergish in terms of like tone. So folks like that I really enjoy quite a bit. But I’m really excited to see Pat Burscher.
He’s a Canadian comedian based in New York. He’s had some really great viral clips that I’ve watched and fell in love with on the social media, so we’ll be going to see a full set from him too. I think we’re speaking the same language. There are different styles of comedy and there’s the straightforward approach, and it was recently a notable Netflix special where the comic and question went straight down the middle, and that’s fine, but I prefer personally to play on the edges as well. As I was prepping for this and clicking on Walker Evans and seeing what comes up, you got to see Mitch Hedberg.
Now he’s not someone I saw. Just to catch you up and the listeners, I started running Serious XM comedy. I think it was two thousand and four, so Mitch was around and hot. I’ve told the listeners a story before. We were doing a broadcast at the Javit Center at the New York Car Show.
Jim Brewer was our afternoon drive host, and it’s been twenty years. Jim was a little pissy that day because the night before, Mitch didn’t show up for a show. We later found out the reason Mitch didn’t show up for the show is because he had passed away. But he was booked on the show that day, so I never got to see him. I never got to meet him.
I know his wife reasonably. Well. What was it like seeing Mitch Hedberg in concert? It was great. We were big fans.
This was it the what was then the Cleveland Improv. I think it’s rebranded to the Cleveland Funny Bone. But like, his level of fame and popularity had gotten to the point where he’s on stage and he’s trying to tell jokes and there are people in the crowd finishing the punchline because they had listened to his material, like they bought an album, and so you could see that like wearing on him and frustrating him. And at one point halfway did the show, he said something along the lines and I’m paraphrasing, but he’s you know what, screw it, I’m going to do all new material. It’s not as good, but at least you people won’t be able to finish my punchlines because you’ve never heard it, and everything we cheered that, we’ll like, yeah, let’s hear some new stuff.
So he was rolling with it, but you could tell like maybe the fame was getting to him. He wasn’t able to cope with it in a way that other people do, so it was really of his past. It’s really interesting to me to hear you tell that story unless you’ve listened to fifteen hundred episodes of Daily Comedy News and you were familiar with the story I’m about to tell. So when Mitch passed away, I’m not a vulture. I wanted to do something for Mitch on the radio station, but I’m not like, Hey, your husband passed away three hours ago, let’s do a tribute show.
So I like waited whatever amount of time, and I reached out to Lynn and I’m like, hey, we really want to do something. And she came in and shared with me that this is going somewhere that she had shared me that she hadn’t really heard from anybody was excited about it. So she came in and I was sitting in one of the little edit boots with her, and she had some tapes of Mitch late in life sets, perhaps a show you were at, and she’s playing them and they’re really well recorded, and I’m like, you’ve got an album here, and I don’t make comedy albums. Just as a fan, I want to hear it. And we connected her with Comedy Central and a guy named Jack Vaughn and that became the posthumous Mitch Hedberg album.
But she had shared with me exactly what you said, that he was frustrated that his timing was getting off because he had to speed up and tell the punch before somebody in the audience got to the punchline, and he was really struggling with his cadence there. So it’s fascinating to me as a fan to hear you tell that story that you experienced that. Yeah, Yeah, that was a really Despite the issues that he was dealing with on stage, it was a really fun show. He put on a great show and we couldn’t have been more pleased to have the opportunity to see him. I will say too, we had a local comedian here at Columbus Pass relatively recently within the past month named John Summerville, who I didn’t really know very well.
He ran a lot of open mics like ten to fifteen years ago. So a lot of the folks who are coming up now really wanted to pay tribute to him because of what he helped build in the local scene here. And we noodled with the idea of doing something like in remembrance or making some sort of award in his name, maybe for comedian during the festival, but it feels a little too soon because it was so fresh, and so it’s one of those things that we need to talk with his family and maybe see if there’s something like next year, like some sort of legacy award or something, just to kind of keep his name in the spotlight. Yeah, I think your sensibility is in the right spot. There’s always that careful walk of your heart wants to do to the right thing, but sometimes things are just better off if you take a beat, and I think legacy things like that are great.
I was recently speaking to Jerniy Gunderson, who runs the National Comedy Center, about how comedians get forgotten. We were specifically talking about people like Richard Jenny or Robert Shimmel who were huge twenty five years ago and you don’t hear their names now, and there’s their material doesn’t really surface. I guess Netflix really isn’t going to put up a twenty five year old special, and the YouTube algorithm is more friendly towards newer things, so it’s a shame. So anyway you can keep someone’s name out there, I think that’s really important. Yeah, we’re doing something else now that you mentioned that, and I guess this will in the past at the time this is released.
But this Friday we are screening the Aristocrats film from Henerie, I should say, from two thousand and five, which I’m like, man, it’d be great if it was the twentieth anniversary, but that would be next year. And you go back and watch the trailer and look at the list and how many people have passed that. Were in that. George Carlin was in that when that was recorded, but Bob Saggett has passed, Gilbert Godfrey has passed, Richard Lewis has passed. So I think it’s going to be fun to watch this, especially with some comedians in town who are like in their twenties, so they’ve never even heard of this documentary, let alone seen it.
But my wife and I saw it in the theater and. The one theater in town that would play it because AMC wouldn’t play it back in two thousand and five. So I think that’s gonna be really fun just to watch some of these comedy legends like really go off the rails. Have you seen that Cash? Well?
Absolutely, You’ve got my brain thinking now that it has been a minute since it came out and there’s this whole generation. I wonder what a Shane Gillis or a Sam Morrell or somebody like that would do with the aristocrats. I’d love to see an dated version of something like that. Yeah. Yeah, So we’re partnering with the local theater here at the Gateway Film Center.
They’re going to do a screening and we have a couple of local comedians who do like some sketch kind of stuff, like some short films. We’ll tie in some local little bits before that as well. So it should be a lot of fun a way to kick off the festival. That’s awesome, all right, more with Walker Evans in a second. It’s the Columbus Comedy Festival kicking off August fourteenth.
How are you staffing? Having ran a very small event, I know it’s hard when you’re not in the room and worrying about what’s happening in the other room and the three things that are going to go wrong, and your phone’s going to light up because somebody’s cranky about something. What do I do here? How are you staffed up for this one? Yeah?
So we have a full time events director, Daniel Hagworth, who works for us with Columbus hunder Grounds, so she’ll be in charge of a lot of that stuff. We’ll have people at each of the venues that we’re operating to make sure that volunteers are checking people in, directing people to where they need to sit, pointing out where the bar is, that sort of stuff. We’ve got a pretty good group I think about thirty five. Volunteers that’ll help reset the rooms, clean up trash, do the legwork of that sort of stuff. But then with each of the shows, we’ll have a show runner assigned to make sure that the comedians are checking in when they need to, the lights go down, when the lights need to go down, the audio comes on, and that sort of stuff.
And then a lot of just background logistics type of stuff. We have someone in charge of like ground transportation to make sure that the headliners have a ride to and from the airport, hotel, venues and stuff like that. So it’s a pretty big undertaking, and there is stress knowing that I’m not going to be in every place all at once, and I want to make sure everything goes as best as it can. We’re good at delegating and trusting and people to make sure that everyone has a good time. Are you feeling good going in?
Look? I’m looking at the sponsors White Castle. How did you pull White Castle? They’re based here in Columbus, so I’ve known the VP of marketing there for a good long time. It’s a great I think it’s easy to make fun of sometimes it’s like the drunken late night food.
But it’s still a family owned business after one hundred years of operations. So it’s a really good, like fourth generation local company, and they really care about the local community a whole lot. Yeah, just tapping it into those resources and leveraging them. But overall, I mean feel good. You know, there’s always like the nervousness speak out from an event.
I feel a little better knowing that it’s completely indoors, so whether it’s too hot or rainy or anything won’t really affect it. With our coffee festival. It’s an outdoor event, so we always start checking the weather, hitting refresh onweather dot com and praying that it doesn’t rain. But no, I think we feel pretty good. People seem to be really excited.
We’ve got some local media coverage on it, and the buzz has been pretty positive. Good. Nervous energy is always a good thing. I’ve been doing this in some form since ninety two, and I still get that nervous energy before a live show, before a big show. I think it’s a good thing.
I’m thinking now what my brain two went to is what it was at Serius XM. We did comic Con radio a few times, so that’s part of my insight into knowing what goes on behind the scenes. So we would show up there and have to put together an entire radio station from scratch when the door’s open, so we would do if Comic San Diego Comic Con was Thursday to Sunday, we’d land and not have anything and have to be on the air by six pm Eastern, which was three pacifics So the doors didn’t open un till noon Pacific. So somebody go record a panel, and somebody go talk to some fans and get some audio, and I’d send it back to New York and till my number two, who would stay back in New York to run the show. Okay, I’ve got six minutes of us talking to fans, and we’ll have a panel in eight minutes.
But I don’t have it yet, but be ready, here comes a file, upload it and he would just handle everything back and then I guess this is your role for next week. I would try and stay calm in the middle and never let him see a sweat and I’d have a million questions in my mind, but just stay calm. Yeah, yeah, I think we’ve learned with the iterations of the coffee festival, the minutia, the detail that can get under your skin and make you freak out in the moment. You’re the only one paying attention to that. Everyone else is having a good time, and you’re just like, you’re so focused on some of the little tiny things that like you have to learn to like let some of that go and just look at the thing as a whole.
So yeah, I was at my daughter’s musical last weekend and she was saying, I don’t know, somebody missed a line or somebody had to add lib something to cover something, and I said, I’m in the audience. I didn’t notice. I don’t know right going there. What other comedians are you into these days who aren’t at the festival? What are you watching?
What are you digging? Yeah, I would say some of the ones that I wanted to have, and they either weren’t available or some other sort of scheduling conflicts. I’ve really been enjoying Jeffrey Asthmas a whole lot. I’ve seen him live at times. He is a killer.
His crowd work is probably some of the best. I know. Crowdborks an overdone thing, but he’s hilarious. Sam Talent is another one who The special he released earlier this year is really good, the Toad’s morale, his videos he’s been posting on YouTube. His travel videos have been really great.
Trips to Tokyo and Paris just like tag along with Sam Talent and friends, those have been fun. Jordan Jensen is another one who I love to see. She’s coming to the Funny Bone and September, and they’re one of our venue partners, so it didn’t really make sense to have her in town August and then September would cannibalize, so maybe we’ll try and get her next year.
And then one of the specials that really blew me away.
I mostly listened to it on a bike ride and then I stopped. I stopped my bike ride and got off to like finish watching it on my phone was mo welch Sure new special Dad jokes. Yeah, that was so well done because one part documentary, one part stand up. Special and it just it blew me away. I got those are a few, I guess.
So another thing that’s coming across here in kudos to you is you’re not a business dude who went and we could probably make some bucks if we dore a comedy festival. You’re clearly a fan. You clearly know the space. Yeah, I try. I’m sure I have my blind spots.
I’m sure there’s comedians out there who are great that I’ve never even heard of. But yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, we are trying to make money because we’re trying to fund journalism and keep that alive in some way shape. We’re paying every performer, even if they’re just on stage for five minutes, they’re getting a little bit of something. Because I went, not just to the headliners, but the locals to feel like this is a career path for me and something I can develop, And so I want the venues to make money. I want the bartenders to make money.
If everybody comes away from this like having a good time, feeling good, and a little bit more money in their pocket at the end of the day, then we all win and hopefully that could be something sustainable too. If I were a quick cash grab sort of a thing, like we could just try and do as much, but then people wouldn’t want to come back next year. If they’re like, well, I performed, but. I didn’t see any sort of profit or benefit, then it makes asking the comeback second time a tough question. Yeah, sometimes people will get weird about when you’re just being real about money.
For example, I’m enjoying talking to you. I’m excited for the festival. I like comedy.
Also, I’m going to run a three minute commercial break in the middle of our iā¦
This is a fun hobby, but it also pays the bills at some point and the commercial so there. I hope your festival makes a lot of money, so you can do the festival for twenty five years or however long you enjoy it and then pass it to the next person. Right, there’s a business here, thank you Castle. Yeah, yeah, I mean it’s it’s how the world works, right, we’re just living at it. I’m not good at geography.
How far away is Yellow Springs? Because I know there’s some comedians over there, and he chanced. Yeah, yellow Springs is super close. It’s maybe an hour drive, like fifty miles. It’s a little bit closer to Dayton than it is Columbus.
But it’s like a fun road trip because Yellow Springs is. Very like there’s some great hiking. It’s very hilly and scenic over there. But I’ve not been to the new club that Chappelle opened, the firehouse that he renovated. I know it’s delayed because of the pandemic, but it soft opened, I want to say, like at the beginning of the year.
But the local club I mentioned earlier, the Attic, built a relationship to his son and had Dave come to the Attic here in colamb It’s nice. Yeah, he did three This was last summer. He did three like unannounced shows, so like tickets went on sale at noon for the show that night at eight pm, and they sold out in fifteen seconds because the venue only seeds like eighty, so it was like a living room show with Dave Chappelle and my wife and I went to the first one because we know the owner and he’s like, the tickets are going on sailor two seconds but such a and Dave, you know, love him or hate him, it was an interesting show that we wanted to be there and be a part of, and so it was very electric, like the club was really like alive that night, which is a lot of fun and hopefully they can do more of that sort of stuff. They did something similar earlier this year with Mark Normand who was in town doing like a bigger show in one of the downtown theaters, and he did like a sort of unannounced walk on twenty minutes of the attic and it was one of those things like if you knew he was going to be there, you bought the tickets, but it wasn’t really advertised. So fun stuff like that.
That’s fantastic. You mentioned crowd work and good crowd work and bad crowd work. I’m a fan of good crowd work. For example, if Dave Attel walks into a club, I’d rather Dave just free form for an hour. I’ve seen Chappelle a few times due where he’s not doing his act, where he just takes the stage and just talks for and it can be anything from fifteen minutes to two hours.
I love that just free forms stuff. So that’s awesome that you got to see him do a pop up show, and he does a lot of those. I usually prep this show in the morning, recorded around midday, and then it goes out at three a m. The next day. The amount of times I’ve told the listeners Dave Chappelle and has to pop up show, but it’s already he’s held out.
I would have told you about it, but I didn’t know. But that happens a lot. Yeah, Yeah, it’s really cool and we I should shout out the other venue partners as well that Don’t Tell crew that space here in Columbus. Over the past two years that they’ve been running Don’t Tell shows, they’ve turned it into the number one ticket selling market in the country here in Columbus. And so Simon Brazier shout out to him who books all that Don’t Tell shows.
He’s operating out of. Chicago now and helping to book Don’t Tell in Chicago. They do a great job and bring in something and that’s where I’ve seen Jeffrey Aspas twice in the past two years. Is it don’t tell shows here in Columbus, but they bring in some talent to those shows that we’re also working with Hashtag Comedy, a newer club started as an improv troop and they do a lot of variety shows and sketch shows and improv shows and they We’re also working with next theater that was founded by some old school Chicago improv trainees that have been doing it for twenty years called The Nest Theater and Tara and Rants are amazing at improv and they they sell their shows out. They do a great job with all their improv work.
But I feel like comedy we decided to go the route of instead of doing like big expensive festival passes. It’s fully alic heart and the median ticket price. Is twenty bucks, so people can feel like they can go see two or three or four different shows without feeling like they’re breaking the bank and investing in a three hundred dollars festival pass. So I would just recommend people pick a random show, pick someone you’ve never heard of, you’re gonna have a good time no matter what, and it’s only twenty bucks. He’s Walker Evans, I’m Johnny Mack and it’s the Columbus Comedy Festival, kicking off Thursday, five days, one hundred and fifty plus comics in.
That is your comedy news for today. See you tomorrow with a normal episode.