Material Non-Public Information
I love pithy little pieces of advice that make you feel like an insider. Anthony Bourdain was great at this; his warnings against seafood dishes at Sunday brunch and his love of weekday dining still loom large in my mind, years after reading Kitchen Confidential:
Brunch menus are an open invitation to the cost-conscious chef, a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday nights or for the scraps generated in the normal course of business…
During the week — when the kitchen staff has more energy, the ingredients are fresh from the market, and the tourists haven't yet piled in for a Friday night on the town — is when the food is really going to be good.
Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential
Rules like this make me feel like I have a little edge, some MNPI about life, and they give me things to talk to coworkers about at the beginning of meetings.
I was recently walking through the village and glanced at the sign where the Comedy Cellar posts their lineup, and I wondered whether comedy clubs, like restaurants, vary predictably in quality throughout the week. Is there a Bourdain-like rule about when you should go see standup?
In the summer of 2021, one of my old roommates visited New York from San Francisco. We booked tickets to the Comedy Cellar, the preeminent New York comedy club, for a Monday night. The city was thawing out after pandemic lockdowns and I hadn’t been to a comedy show in years. It felt risqué just sitting inside a small room with a bunch of people, and there was a nervous energy as we watched several excellent comics perform.
An hour into the show, the host announced “a man who needs no introduction,” and Louis C.K. walked onstage.
The buzz in the room grew to an audible hum and then a complete hush. How were we meant to react? Here was this famous comedian doing a surprise set, but also he’d done a bunch of awful things to women comics, and had spent covid railing against the “cancel culture” which held him accountable for doing those awful things. It was a fraught, confusing moment, with everyone looking around at each other to see what the appropriate response was. I think I settled on “raised eyebrows and a long sip of beer.”
And then as soon as it started it was over — an underwhelming 3 minutes from a disheveled Louis C.K., one of the worst sets of the night. I guess he was trying out new material.
It was a bizarre but memorable experience, a story my old roommate could take back to the climbing gym in San Francisco. Being in situations where something unexpected can happen is one of the most beautiful things about New York.
Analyzing when to go to the Comedy Cellar
Having said that, you should stop reading now if you want to preserve the mystery of the Comedy Cellar in its entirety.
You can find historical lineups on The Comedy Cellar’s website, and they post their lineups a few days in advance. But if you want to book tickets a week or more advance, you’ll have to do so blind to the lineup. And if you’re a relatively clueless comedy fan like me, you may want to maximize your probability of seeing someone famous.
What counts as a “famous” comedian?
I took all of the lineups from the past 10 years and used the Wikipedia API to rank the comedians by number of pageviews on their articles, as a proxy for fame. This worked pretty well; below are some of the comedians at the top of the list. All of them are big enough to lead off a Zoom call with — “We’re still waiting on a few more folks to trickle in… anyone get up to anything exciting this weekend? I went to the Comedy Cellar last night and Hasan Minhaj dropped in to do a set, it was crazy.”
I made an arbitrary cutoff at 40 thousand views, because that felt like the point where I stopped recognizing names (sorry Rory Albanese, I am sure you’re funny!!)
Then, I looked at the probability that a comic with at least 40k wikipedia views would be in a set on a given day & time.
One interesting caveat I learned about is that some comedians use aliases when performing, particularly if they want to test material on fans who aren’t predisposed to like them. I took this reddit comment at face value and counted these aliases as “famous” too:
What day of the week should you go to the Comedy Cellar?
I looked at both the original Comedy Cellar and its sister club The Village Underground (I’ve never actually been there but it is a bit bigger than the cellar and is of similar quality). At both clubs, you’re better off going Monday - Wednesday if you want to maximize your chances of seeing a big name:
Between this and Bourdain’s advice and the patterns in fancy New York hotel pricing (Sunday & Monday nights are often relatively cheap) I am becoming a proponent for early-in-the-week revelry. Here’s an itinerary for you:
Check into the Carlyle on a Monday night (currently for the low low price of $1100)
See the 9:30pm show at the Comedy Cellar, with an expected value of 1/3rd of a famous comedian
The next day (Tuesday) around noon go to Balthazar, or someplace like that, and honor Bourdain’s memory — have a negroni. Have two. Enjoy the ride.
If you really want to optimize, you could wait until May, when you can maximize your famous comic chances at the Cellar, but February is pretty good too, and Bourdain would approve of the spontaneity — I’m publishing this on a Tuesday, so go watch some comedy tonight!
If you have any deeper insight into this world I’d love to hear about it! Thank you to my friend Tyler, a comic who you should follow, for answering a couple of my naive questions about comedy.
If you enjoyed this, you might also like this piece about the coziest bars in New York, which I’ve been too scared to try posting on TikTok.
Joe this is great!! Keeping your notes for my next time in the city.
P.S. both this and cozy bar data belong on TikTok!
I worked at cc back in the early ‘90s when the weeknight regulars, or folks hoping to squeeze a set in, were dave chappell, jon stewart, jeff ross, dave attell, ray romano and brian reagan. I found that the best night actually depended heavily on the crowd, how into it they were. If the crowd was hostile, there wasn’t much the comics could do to overcome that, and there wasn’t much rhyme or reason for a ‘good crowd’ night - if they paid a heavy cover charge, they wanted to be there, but they might have high expectations, wanting their money’s worth so to speak, and the comp nights, when you only had to buy a couple drinks, could fall flat because they weren’t necessarily into stand up. I remember one night when romano was doing his standard married mope schtick and the audience was stone faced, they gave him nothing, it was painful. then a few days later, he killed it, the audience was eating out of the palm of his hand. there was another night where the headliner was coked out of his head and completely incomprehensible. all of that is to say there is no magic night, it’s always going to be gamble because there are too many variables with live comedy…