By Joseph Thomas
Oct. 1, 2024
On a recent Sunday night, unexpecting patrons of Tony’s Trophy Room in Collierville jump at the booming voice of Richard Douglas Jones, who is standing on a stage in the corner of the bar, announcing that live comedy begins in five minutes.
Some are there to see the show. Some just want to watch NBC’s Sunday Night Football. But others have driven from places such as Memphis, Millington, Arlington, Bartlett and beyond just to get a few minutes of stage time.
“Y’all ready for me to bring the next comic on?” Jones shouts into the microphone. The crowd responds in unison, “Yeah!” This call and response precedes every new performer. Jones is a veteran Memphis comic who has hosted several comedy shows over the past two decades. He knows how to keep an audience engaged.
The show at Tony’s is one of several open mic events happening in the Memphis area during the week. They all have something in common: each one takes place in a venue that is not designed for comedy. That is because the local comedy scene, which was once flourishing, was nearly killed by the COVID-19 pandemic. And comedians are now trying to revive it in the only way they know how—from the ground up.
Long-time comic Katrina Coleman, born and raised in West Memphis, Arkansas and now residing in Memphis, said that it has always been a challenge to have shows and find venues, but that does not mean things have not been successful.
“Memphis was really, really making amazing strides in the late 2010s,” Coleman said. “So many things were happening. We had a “You Look Like”(a comedy competition show developed and hosted by Coleman) produced by Craig Brewer and picked up by the Kevin Hart network.”
Coleman said that Hart even recorded an episode of his web series Hart of the City that included several local comics. Things were beginning to happen in the Memphis comedy scene. “LaToya Polk, Mo Alexander, Richard Douglas Jones were all on it…but then we had to shut everything down.”
What the comics of Memphis had built, while growing, was not strong enough to survive the COVID-19 pandemic according to Coleman. The comedy festival never returned. The showcase shows disappeared. The open mics faded. The Memphis comedy elders laid their microphones aside. Even some of the reliable venues such as the home of “You Look Like” and the premier open mic night, the P&H Café, closed forever.
During past year or two, however, some of the older comics have begun to rebuild with the help of a new crop of young and hungry performers, such as Zach Williams, who have their own views about the state of Memphis comedy.
“I think Memphis has a good scene,” Williams said. “But I think it’s a DIY scene.”
Williams, who has been performing standup comedy for around two years, said that he noticed the struggle of rebuilding the scene and wanted to be a part of the solution, knowing that Memphis comics can bring it back.
“For the Memphis scene to grow, you need more (open) mics. You need more shows.”
There were a string of new open mics that would open up, Williams said, but would soon close down. He also noted the loss of places the losses this year of The Comedy Junt in South Memphis and Chuckles in Cordova, the city’s only dedicated comedy spaces, as setbacks but not without opportunity. In Williams opinion, a successful comedy scene is not dependent on traditional comedy venues but on effort and working together to lift up their fellow performers.
“If there’s one thing that will hold Memphis back,” he says, “it’s when everyone is trying to do their own thing—a crabs in a bucket mentality.”