New York Comedy Festival Celebrates 20 Yr Anniversary

Melissa Rivers says her mom told her never to be afraid to laugh at herself. If you don’t, mom warned, “You could be missing out on the joke of the century.”

Melissa’s mom was, of course, Joan Rivers, the late, great comic who blew the doors of comedy open for women and, along with George Carlin and some others, reinvented comedy to skip the punch line and instead observe that nothing is funnier than the world we were all trying to live in, together.

So, it certainly seems fitting and proper that the twentieth New York Comedy Festival, the longest running comedy festival in the country, will open November 7 with a gala festival of comedy at the Apollo Theater to honor Joan Rivers, who died ten years ago.

“There’s something basically wrong with you if you don’t like to laugh,” says the founder and impresario of the comedy festival, Caroline Hirsch.

“Laughing is good. It’s a stress release. It’s good for your stomach, it’s good for your muscles. It’s good for your head, and it’s a stress release. Because maybe the hour you’re at a show and not playing with your phone you really can get out of your body and concentrate on somebody else besides yourself. And that’s the stress reliever.”

The Comedy Festival rose out of the wreckage of 9/11. It persevered through the collapse of 2008, and the cycles of both the Great City and the world. Last year there where those who wondered if it was ok to laugh after the attack of October 7.

Over the years, Hirsch says, she has constantly been asked whether we need to laugh now more than ever.

“Yeah?” She pushes back. “So, what is that saying? Is the world just getting worse and worse and worse every year? But everybody says that to me. So, I guess let’s pick this year. We have a very difficult election coming up, and I guess this would be the year that you need to laugh.”

The opening night Joan Rivers event is the Thursday after election day, although it is anyone’s guess whether the election will actually be over.

“So, the good part is that we’ll be laughing from right before the election to after the election. So, we’ll have a lot of sides of the story that will be presented during the festival.”

A lot has changed over twenty years in comedy. “First of all, a lot more people are doing it,” exclaims Hirsch.

The inaugural festival in 2004 featured a dozen standup sessions over five days. This year’s events will last eleven days and “brings together over 200 of the top comedians from across the country and around the world,” if the organizers do say so themselves.

Headliners include Judd Apatow, Bill Maher, Gabriel Iglesias, Rachel Brosnahan, Tracy Morgan and Jerry Seinfeld.

“This November is the fortieth anniversary of my start in Comedy,” said Apatow, “I’m so excited to share it with hometown friends.”

Indeed, the festival remains a very New York event. While some folks surely do fly in to catch several shows, Hirsch says, most of the audiences are from the metro New York area. Schedules can be found (and tickets purchased) at: https://nycomedyfestival.com/

When the festival started Caroline Hirsch was best known for her comedy club of the same name. But amid Covid and its disruptions she shuttered the club. The festival is now where the creativity goes, she says, and that may include spinning off new versions and variations in years to come.

Honoring Joan Rivers seemed obvious, Hirsch said. Her impact on comedy is so large, Hirsch observed, that her long career is the inspiration behind not one but two television series, Hacks and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

She not only cleared a path for other women, she also cleared the way for a style of humor now practiced by any number of woman and men.

“Joan was like, if she thought it, she just said it,” said Hirsch. “There’s no filter there. And you can’t filter comedy. You just can’t. And she never did. Even though she’d make some enemies here or there. But she set a pace. I remember watching her as a young kid, sitting on the couch with Johnny Carson. I was kind of amazed at the stuff that used to come out of her mouth.”

After all, you never know where the joke of the century will come from.

The gala will raise money for Joan’s favorite charity, Gods Love We Deliver. Apatow’s special, at The Beacon on the West Side, is to benefit Hurricane Helene relief efforts.