There are loads of new places to see comedy in Toronto. What's behind the boom?

On a typical Wednesday, Hannah Veldhoen might be hitting Backroom Comedy Club, Nothing Fancy and Salto — an erstwhile restaurant in Wychwood. Thursday, she co-hosts a comedy show on the patio of FreePlay, an arcade bar on Toronto's College Street, and later that evening, she might zip up to Bloor for spots at the Royal Comedy Theatre and The Comedy Lab. Fridays are usually stacked too. Maybe she's found a slot at the Free Times Cafe or hopped on another open mic at The Lab. But she also could have landed a line-up at Comedy Bar on Bloor — or Yuk Yuk's downtown, maybe repping for Oshawa in a Your Hood's a Joke comedy battle. 

In fact, she's onstage in Toronto every day of the week. "I'm going to as many mics as I can fit in a night. Maybe it'll be two. If I'm lucky, I could fit in three," she says. "I'm trying to get out there — trying new stuff, trying my best." And the hustle's still new to her; it was only last September when Veldhoen did her first set. 

There's something about a global pandemic that'll make a person reset their priorities, and for Veldhoen, that meant finally chasing her dream of becoming a stand-up comedian. Less than a year into the grind, she has a long list of favourite stages to play: Nothing Fancy, Backroom Comedy Club, The Corner, Tonight, Tallboys, The Comedy Lab. 

Before COVID, none of that would have been possible. For one thing, most of those places didn't even exist. Three of them aren't even six months old, and The Corner — previously found off an alley north of Queen and John — moved to its current digs on Queen West just last year. 

Post-Omicron Toronto would seem to be experiencing some kind of comedy boom, and performers like Veldhoen are watching it happen in real time. Why's it happening? Whatever the answer, there are loads of new places to laugh.

Where were all these stages three years ago?

Watching more stages open around the city, Danton Lamar says it's an optimistic time for comedy in the city. Lamar opened The Comedy Lab in February. Found in the basement of the old Labyrinth Lounge in the Annex, he describes his spot as "a little speakeasy cave." It runs multiple shows Thursday through Saturday.

Lamar's a comedian himself. "I think we're actually at a good point now," he says. Between new stages like his, and long established clubs including Yuk Yuk's, Absolute Comedy and Comedy Bar — the latter of which opened a new venture of its own late last year, Comedy Bar Danforth — "there's enough places that people can actually get adequate stage time," he says. But he didn't feel that way back in 2019, the year he arrived in Toronto. 

An American, Lamar had been living abroad, teaching English in countries like Russia, China and the Czech Republic — places where he'd also been performing and producing stand-up for years. "When I first got to town, it took me three weeks to find an open mic. It had never taken me that long moving to a new city before," he says. Once he was in, though, he says the Toronto scene felt weird — "cliquey"— with lots of shows featuring "five straight white guys and one something else," he laughs.  

"I was disappointed," says Lamar, who is Black. "I thought it was kind of weird for a city that's internationally known to be so diverse. I felt like there was kind of a gap in the market that needed to be filled." And at The Comedy Lab, diversity is a priority when booking every bill. 

If it weren't for COVID, he would have opened the club earlier. "I was just tired of asking and waiting to be put on lineups, so I took it in my own hands," he says. "I was like, 'I don't need to wait for somebody to give me a green light. All I need is a space and a speaker and a mic.'"

DIY not?

Like Lamar, the guys running Backroom Comedy Bar (Brandon Sobel and Ariel Kagan) decided the best way to get on stage was to build their own. 

Their place also launched in February this year, and they occupy the downstairs stage at the Christie Pits Pub just west of the park. There, they host curated shows five nights a week on top of a summer satellite stage that's running out of the Boxcar Social location at Harbourfront Centre.

Sobel and Kagan (a comedy duo otherwise known as Bubbie's Boys) had been performing together more and more throughout the GTA in recent years, booking shows at spots including FreePlay, Parkdale Hall and Snakes and Lattes, a board game cafe with locations all over the city. But they figured running their own theatre would be easier than juggling spots at half a dozen different venues. So far, their hunch has been right. "One hundred per cent," says Kagan. 

"It's still a runaround and it comes with its own set of headaches," he says. (The duo were actually in the middle of repainting the club when reached by CBC Arts.) "But instead of us wondering where we're going to get onstage next, we have our guaranteed 11 shows a week." 

They're not just in it for the stage time, though. Sobel hopes they can make Backroom Comedy Club into the kind of place where people discover Toronto's next great talent — and there are loads of performers in the city right now who believe that star could be them. 

"I think there are so many new comics after the pandemic," says Veldhoen. "Like me, they're just wanting that stage time." And they're making their own shows, she says — pitching whatever venue will have them.

More stages, more opportunity

That drive isn't unique to the pandemic era, says Rush Kazi, a Toronto comedian who's been doing stand-up in the city since 2011. Kazi started their own open mic back in those newbie days — Laughter Luau at Hawaii Bar, a Dovercourt dive that's since shuttered. Now the producer of several shows around the city, including the Asian Comedy All-Stars revue at the Rivoli, Kazi can't say whether there are more stages around Toronto than there were a decade ago; shows are always in flux. But fresh opportunities can only be a good thing, especially right now. "A lot of new comedians have popped up," says Kazi. "They have to go somewhere."

Over at The Comedy Lab, baby comics regularly pass through the open mic nights. "I would say at least three times a month I have somebody trying it for the first time," says Lamar, and a bunch of those comics are now regulars. Veldhoen is one of them. "The Lab: they were my supporters from day one," she says. 

"The more stage time we get, the better we're going to be as comics," says Veldhoen. "I think the benefit is that you're going to start seeing more comics coming out of Toronto and hopefully making it."

In addition to The Comedy Lab and Backroom Comedy Club, other new spots include The Royal Comedy Theatre on Bloor West, which resurfaced from the Omicron wave in March after officially launching in October 2021. Take a quick bike ride southeast to Kensington Market, and you'll find Nothing Fancy, a two-stage venue on Augusta. That spot opened in July; their original location, which emerged in the summer of 2020 at Dundas and Ossington, has since rebranded as yet another place to see stand-up, 1185 Comedy Club. 

A pandemic pivot that stuck

And then there are the bars and restaurants and other all-purpose event spaces that have either introduced or dramatically boosted their comedy offering since the lockdowns were lifted. Tallboys, at Bloor near Shaw, is now hosting roughly 20 comedy shows a week in their downstairs room, says co-owner Phil Cacace, and its sister bar Wenona (down the street at Bloor and Havelock) is booking nearly as much. Both spots have run comedy nights since they arrived in the neighbourhood nearly a decade ago, but pre-COVID, they might have booked a monthly or bi-weekly showcase at most. 

That all changed starting in the summer of 2020, when Tallboys began running regular comedy events on their patio. Comedian Rob Bebenek was the booker on that project (Comedy Rebirth); he's a friend of Cacace's and a repeat performer at JFL in Montreal. "A lot of people that had left Toronto had come back, so the people that we were booking on the shows — especially during that second wave in 2020 — was absurd," says Cacace, name-checking performers such as Steph Tolev, Seán Cullen, and the late Nick Nemeroff. 

Two years later, both Tallboys and Wenona have committed to their pandemic pivot. When restrictions fully lifted, they started booking comedy five and six days a week. Still, Cacace doesn't consider Tallboys a comedy venue per se. "First and foremost, we're a pub," he says. "The space is there; let's just let these artists create." 

Comedy, for a bar, is an easy flip.- Jake Yakobi, FreePlay co-owner

But for many businesses with space to spare, their motivations aren't necessarily as idealistic. They'll try anything to bring in customers, and comedy, it seems, is a low-risk proposition.

"Bars and restaurants have obviously been hurting. The hospitality industry on a whole has been hurting," says Jake Yakobi, co-owner of FreePlay on College. His own business opened just before COVID hit in early 2020. Live entertainment was always part of his vision for the place; a retro arcade bar, it's on the same spot as the departed Rancho Relaxo, a long-time indie-music dive. For much of 2020 and 2021, opening up the dancefloor would have been impossible. Comedy, however, was doable within the bounds of public-health restrictions.

"Comedy, for a bar, is an easy flip. They can just put up a mic and a speaker in the corner and, you know, whoever comes comes," says Yakobi. "It was just a natural pivot." 

But Yakobi also happens to be a comedy fan. FreePlay currently hosts a monthly event (8-Bit Comedy), and there's free comedy on their patio every Thursday. "I stuck with it because I have a passion for it," says Yakobi, and he hopes to book even more regular shows in the future.

Alberto Richards took his pandemic pivot even further. The owner of Nothing Fancy, Richards got the bar's original location up and running in the summer of 2020 with dreams of becoming a go-to spot for craft beer. But COVID had other plans, and within days of opening, he needed a strategy that would bring folks to his undiscovered hole-in-the-wall. 

Some friends in the industry suggested he try a comedy night. "They said the magic words of 'comics drink and comedy's easy.' So I said, 'OK, let's give it a shot.'" Within two weeks of opening, Richards was already booking stand-up for the bar's outdoor patio. 

Was it easy? "It's not easy to run a show well," he laughs; McGyvering a viable stage out of pre-existing patio seating was challenge No. 1. But the shows were quick to produce, he found, and it brought in the crowds. 

"Comedy was one way in which I could get my brand name out," says Richards. "I would sometimes work the door at Dundas, checking tickets and maybe letting people know about the show. It was encouraging to hear people walk by and be like, 'Oh, that's the comedy place.'" 

In November last year, Richards made it official, adding the phrase "comedy club" to Nothing Fancy's sign in the window. He hired a dedicated booker too, who brings in two shows nightly. The bar's since graduated to a larger space in Kensington Market, which will be an official partner venue during JFL Toronto in the fall. He has big hopes for its upstairs stage, one of two 40-seat rooms in the building. Richards pictures it being used for album and podcast tapings, plus other "comedy-adjacent" events someday soon.

Room for everyone

"I do think comedy's experiencing a bit of a boom," says Richards, who isn't fazed by the number of new comedy venues operating in the city. "Hopefully I'm in good company. I think fellow bar owners probably saw that [comedy] programming was what was bringing people to their bars."

At the Royal Comedy Theatre, which shares a western stretch of Bloor with Backroom, Tallboys and neighbourhood mainstay Comedy Bar, owner Mat Mitzy thinks that being crawling distance from the other stages is only going to boost his business. "It kind of helps bring more awareness to the industry on Bloor Street," he says. "I look at it as more of a benefit than anything that's going to be a threat."

Yeah, we are competition ... but I don't think that somebody has to lose.- Danton Lamar, The Comedy Lab owner

"To see Toronto now, every other bar has a night that's doing stand-up comedy," says Yakobi. "I mean, we're turning into a little Manhattan, I think — slowly — which is fantastic in my eyes."

"It's giving more people more places to flourish, and it's just honestly getting us all more exposure," says Lamar, who'll occasionally do a set at the Backroom; the owners there love going to The Lab in turn.

 "Yeah, we are competition," says Lamar, "but I don't think that somebody has to lose." He brings up Toronto's status as the fourth largest city in North America. More than six million people live in its metro area. "That's a lot of people that want to see comedy."