How LaughTrack Finds Comedy Shows That Are Hiding in Plain Sight

There is no master calendar for live comedy.

That sounds obvious once you say it out loud. There is no National Department of Stand-Up quietly maintaining a spreadsheet of every open mic, club weekend, theater tour, brewery showcase and one-nighter at a VFW hall.

Still, the internet has trained us to expect this stuff to be easier.

You can identify a song playing over the speakers at a grocery store in seconds. You can find every coffee shop within three miles of your house before you've put on shoes. But if you want to know who is doing stand-up near you this Friday, you may still wind up checking a comedy club's website, three ticketing platforms, an Instagram account, a theater calendar and a Facebook post from somebody named Greg.

That mess is a big part of why LaughTrack exists.

The problem isn't that live comedy is hard to find because there isn't enough of it. It's almost the opposite.

There is way more comedy happening than most people realize. The information is just scattered everywhere.

Every comedy calendar is its own little island

A large touring comedian might have dates on a major ticketing platform, their own website and the websites of the theaters they're playing.

A comedy club might maintain its own calendar.

A small independent producer might announce shows primarily on Instagram.

A brewery might have one comedy night buried among trivia, live music and a seasonal discussion about pumpkin beer.

A theater might publish a calendar that includes stand-up alongside plays, concerts, improv, drag, film screenings and whatever else fits on the stage.

And sometimes a show appears in several of those places at once, each with slightly different information.

LaughTrack currently brings together listings from large ticketing sources, individual venue calendars, event feeds and other public sources. But that's only part of it. We also spend time looking for comedy the old-fashioned way: following venues and producers, finding shows on social media, noticing gaps and asking some version of:

Wait, why don't we have this?

That question has led to some surprisingly large holes.

Sometimes nothing is broken. We just haven't found it yet.

A good example is The Elysian in Los Angeles.

The Elysian isn't a sleepy room hiding behind a laundromat. It operates three distinct performance spaces — the Main Stage, the Skunk Room and the Vault — with stand-up, open mics, works in progress, experimental shows, clowning, improv and plenty of things that become difficult to categorize somewhere around the third sentence.

And for a while, LaughTrack wasn't tracking it.

There wasn't a clever technical failure to diagnose. It simply wasn't part of our coverage yet.

Once we added it, well over a hundred upcoming events came with it.

That's an important distinction.

Building a useful live-comedy calendar isn't only about keeping the venues you already know about up to date. It's also about discovering the rooms you don't know about yet.

That gets much harder once you leave the obvious list of famous clubs.

The comedy map gets weird fast

We've written before about U.S. cities with more live comedy than you might expect. The same thing happens at the venue level.

Comedy does not restrict itself to places with "Comedy Club" written above the door.

It happens in theaters and arenas, obviously. It also happens in breweries, bars, casinos, restaurants, hotel rooms, community spaces and VFW posts.

Keep looking and the map gets even more interesting.

Take Alaska.

Getting a touring comedian to Alaska requires considerably more commitment than adding another stop between Philadelphia and Baltimore, but the state has a real and persistent comedy scene. Anchorage has local showcases alongside larger touring acts, and independent producers have spent years bringing comedy to communities far beyond the state's largest city.

Alaska Comedy says it has produced shows not only around Anchorage and Fairbanks but in places including Juneau, Sitka, Ketchikan, Nome, Bethel, Dutch Harbor and other remote communities. Anchorage's local scene includes independent groups such as Rubber Ptarmigan, which produces showcases, headliners and experimental comedy events.

That is exactly the kind of thing that makes building LaughTrack interesting.

If you start with the assumption that live stand-up means New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and a few famous clubs, you miss an enormous amount of what's actually happening.

The same lesson keeps showing up in our data. We saw it while looking at international comedians touring the U.S.: once you stop following only the biggest American comedy accounts, the touring map suddenly includes comedians from Scotland, Australia, Ireland, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, France and beyond.

Comedy is very good at ignoring the neat little map you had in your head.

The information exists. It just doesn't agree on where to live.

This is the less glamorous part.

There isn't one standard way venues publish events.

One venue has a straightforward calendar. Another uses a ticketing company. Another has an event feed. Another puts the useful information directly on individual show pages. Another announces something on social media before it appears anywhere else.

Even within the same city, two comedy rooms a mile apart can publish their calendars in completely different ways.

So LaughTrack has to meet the information where it lives.

At a high level, that means pulling together public event information from multiple kinds of sources, matching venues and comedians, removing duplicates where we can, keeping dates and showtimes current, and continuing to look for rooms that aren't represented yet.

Some of that can happen systematically.

Some of it still involves seeing a comedy club on Instagram and thinking, Huh. That's a lot of shows. Why aren't those in LaughTrack?

The goal isn't to build an impressive collection of incompatible calendars.

The goal is for you to never have to think about any of this.

You shouldn't have to know where the comedy is to find it

That idea has become one of the simplest ways to explain what we're building.

If you already know your favorite comedian is coming to town, finding a ticket is usually pretty easy.

Discovery is harder.

What if you don't know who's touring?

What if the best show near you is at a venue you've never heard of?

What if your local comedy scene doesn't have one famous club?

What if the comic you'd love is playing 15 minutes away, but the announcement lives on an Instagram account you don't follow?

That's the gap LaughTrack is trying to close.

We're not going to pretend we've found every comedy show in America. We haven't. New rooms open. Independent producers start shows. Venues change calendars. Events get announced in places we haven't found yet.

But every new club, theater, promoter and weird little comedy night makes the map a little more useful.

So search LaughTrack for comedy near you. And if we're missing a venue, comedian or show you think should be there, tell us.

Seriously.

We're probably not snubbing your local comedy night.

We just haven't found Greg's Facebook post yet.