"Comedy, in Bozeman??" Part 2

So last time on "Comedy, In Bozeman??" I talked about how we had a small contingent of comics who would go to open mic. But the mic was tough, because the host was EXTREMELY offensive. We were also very sensitive to the fact that one open mic every two weeks was not enough for us to get good.

So, my friends Thom, Garrison, Alex and I decided to start a new show and thus was born #comedygate. #comedygate was a monthly showcase show. We booked the Zebra Cocktail Lounge would run 5, sometimes 6 comics, and each comic would get 15 minutes.

The show was a wildsuccess. People seemed to love it, and kept returning for more and more. It was especially gratifying for me. My mom had passed away a month before, and she owned a ballet studio. She worked her whole life to try and create venues and opportunities for people to dance ballet and the arts, and I felt like I was carrying that torch to some extent.

A few months passed. Brian, who had the open mic show at the Eagles, came to talk to me and Garrison after a #comedygate. He said he was leaving town, and he wanted to pass the show over to us. He said “We haven’t always gotten along, but I wan’t you to carry on this show.”

The next day we met to discuss things, and he told us that he had been kicked out of the Eagles. Hah! I had been running sound and lights for that show, and while I was out of town Brian tried to run lights, and I guess destroyed all the presets that were programmed into the soundboard.

So Thom, who had started #comedygate with us, started a new open mic show and Bar 9, the local frat bar. As a small aside, Thom is an amazing person. In the course of a year, he went from being homeless in his truck to working for Oracle and buying a new car. I’m so proud of him.

Both #comedygate and the Bar 9 show continued to snowball into great successes. Initially, the Bar 9 shows were tough. Not many people came, a lot of people were not interested in comedy, they just wanted to do normal frat bar stuff. But we kept doing the shows. Thom would keep me as a floater — if people were being too loud, or some new comics had gone up and the crowd had lost interest, I would go up and yell at them until they were paying attention again. Eventually, the Bar 9 shows developed a critical mass. People began showing up because they wanted to hear jokes, they paid attention, and they kept coming back.

All of a sudden, we pretty much had a show every week. We were getting the chance to do 15-20 minute sets. Bozeman is a big enough town to where theres a big demand for the arts, but small enough to where there wasn't an established comedy scene. Nobody could tell us what to do and not do.

We started booking people from out of town. They would tell us, I've been doing comedy in a big city for years, and I've never done a showcase. We started to realize that we had done something kind of special. At one point, I got ambitious and booked some comics from Minnesota. My friend Andy had taken me around to open mics in minnesota, so I wanted to get him booked in Montana. His car broke down in North Dakota. I happened to have some friends swinging through the next day, and they picked him and his compatriot Sidney up. We got them out to the show, and it was so wildly successful we were able to give them extra money in order to get them back to Minnesota. It was pretty wild, and I couldn't believe it worked out

Where do we go from here? Special things keep happening to Bozeman Comedy. Stay tuned!!