The team behind the Fairfield Comedy Club, the Connecticut Comedy Festival and the New York Comedy Club will open Stamford’s first such venture in 30 years next spring.
Though the path to downtown laughs is long, Fairfield Comedy Club co-founder Joe Gerics, 42, said the new Connecticut Comedy Club aims to open in late spring 2022 on the ground floor of 422 Summer St. — also known as Stamford’s former YWCA building.
For Gerics, who moved to Stamford from Trumbull last year, the impulse to open a comedy club in Connecticut’s fastest-growing city is a matter of both business and pleasure.
“Stanford just seemed kind of ripe for something like this,” he said. “There’s so much going on. There are so many people. There are so many great restaurants. It just seems like a kind of area that would support this and would benefit from it.”
That’s the business side of things. But aside from being one of the managing forces behind the Fairfield Comedy Club and Connecticut Comedy Festival, Gerics is also a comic himself. As a resident of Downtown Stamford, there’s some selfishness inherent in the decision to open a full-time location, he admitted.
“As much as it’ll be fun to have a comedy club, the reason it’s going to be fun for me is because I’m going to have a place to perform in my backyard,” he said.
His previous ventures in the state started that way too: Gerics opened the Fairfield Comedy Club at The Circle Hotel as “a labor of love” in 2017 and has been putting on weekend shows in the hotel lobby ever since.
During the worst days of the pandemic, when indoor gatherings were a distant dream, Gerics held outdoor shows at the hotel that attracted big names like Pete Davidson and John Mulaney through the Connecticut Comedy Festival, his other local undertaking. Comedian Mike Birbiglia, who is college friends with Gerics, did an eight-night stint at the Fairfield Comedy Club during that same period where he workshopped new jokes off of flashcards.
If they could attract names big and small to a parking lot in Fairfield, Gerics and his partners — Emilio Savone, Jim Panels and Scott Lindner — are even surer about their odds in Stamford, he said.
“Fairfield has been fun,” he said. “We have a lot of fun there, but it’s limited. It’s got a downtown but it’s kind of a suburb. It’ll be nice to be in the heart of something with real action. That’s what we want.”
The future location provides the best of both worlds. For one, comedians in southern Connecticut will get a local place for shows down county instead of driving to the Stress Factory in Bridgeport. And the new spot is also closer to New York City, which means talent from “the biggest comedy hotspot in the world” could be more eager to cross the border for performances, he said.
Attracting talent from the big city can only take a club so far. Equally as important, Gerics said, is developing an organic scene for Connecticut and providing more a stable platform for local acts than he could at the Fairfield Comedy Club.
The city has not housed a full-time comedy club in three decades, though part-time operations have filled the gap. For years, Club Comedy of Stamford ran out of Mexican restaurant Hacienda Don Emilio. The Treehouse Comedy Club too hosted long-running events throughout the city. Today, the Stamford Comedy Club hosts pop-up events.
Still, the last full-time club — the New Governor’s Comedy Shop — shuttered in 1991 after a series of financial troubles.
Before fans start crowding around the stage for late-night laughs, Gerics and company still have plenty of work to do. The space they will inhabit at the former YWCA is already set up as a restaurant. In the end, the owners want to make it more like a black box theater packed tight with tables.
Until that can happen and the Connecticut Comedy Club can open its doors, Gerics said he is pleased to be patient: Like every good joke, the payoff is best when you have to wait for the punchline.
