ADOBE STOCK

On a Sunday evening in February, Steve Barth and Brad McNary welcomed the audience for their monthly show, “Your ACT With Nonsense,” at Arcade Comedy Theater.

“How’s everyone doing?” Barth asked. The 17-person crowd murmured a response. Barth replied, “That is the lackluster energy we want.”

The show, featuring Barth’s and McNary’s two-person improv team, is a community night of sorts for the two-stage, 150-seat Downtown theater. It provides a safe space for comics, improv teams and sketch writers to try out new material or to get back into performing after an extended absence.

Up that night was Xazrianna — a 35-year-old comedian whose work crosses all three of those styles — as her fan-favorite character, Beatrice Thorogood. Beatrice, the world’s oldest “everything,” according to Xazrianna, was ready for her first night doing stand-up, mere days before her 92nd birthday.

In contrast to the response for Barth’s opening question, the audience brought their enthusiasm for Xazrianna and Beatrice, the latter of whom has a succession of deceased husbands. “You know what they say,” she quipped, “the best way to get over someone is to kill another husband.”

The creativity, the support, the show that goes on every month no matter how sparsely attended — these elements encapsulate a comedy community that, according to performers, has been determined to rebuild since the fallout of the pandemic cratered large parts of it.

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A Brief History of Comedy in Pittsburgh

XAZRIANNA | PHOTO BY LAURA PETRILLA

Stand-up and sketch comedy as we know them today began around the turn of the last century. Pittsburghers in 1904 watched vaudeville comedians and comic performers at the newly built Nixon and Gayety (now Byham) theaters. Depending on your source, modern improv was born with the founding of Chicago’s Second City in 1959; by 1963, the form found a home in Pittsburgh with the inaugural performance at Bill Kramer’s Back Room, attached to an Oakland restaurant.

Theaters, clubs — including the original location of the national Funny Bone chain — and coffeehouses around Pittsburgh came and went over the decades, as did the national appetite for the varying forms.

Pittsburgh comedians place the most recent local boom around 2010, when Steel City Improv Theater opened on the North Side; that space billed itself as “Pittsburgh’s original home for long-form improvisational comedy.” (More about “long-form” soon.) Open-mic nights at Hambone’s in Lawrenceville began after a change in ownership in 2011. The year also saw the Improv Academy open; Arcade followed in 2013, alongside Unplanned Comedy. The Pittsburgh Comedy Festival, the first in Western Pennsylvania, debuted in 2014.

In many ways, the scene then was the same as it is now: Pittsburghers dedicated to their comedic craft, or those who wanted to try stand-up or improv for the first time, took classes and hit open mics in an assortment of bars, restaurants, clubs and (you can still do this!) a barber shop (Bryant Street Barbershop in Highland Park, to be exact).

Some of those opportunities closed out prior to 2020: The last Pittsburgh Comedy Festival took place in 2018. Hambone’s, which boasted 30-some people performing on any given open-mic night, closed in October 2020 after the death of its owner, Jeff Holt. The Improv Academy closed, as did the Unplanned Comedy Theater. The Funny Bone is long gone. Steel City Improv stopped putting on shows. More recently, comedy-friendly venues like the South Side’s Club Café and Rex Theater closed their doors as well.

So where do you go — literally and metaphorically — from there?

Classes, and “Getting Out There”

JOEY WELSH | PHOTO BY LAURA PETRILLA

It isn’t all bleak. Steel City Improv still offers classes, as does Arcade (improv, stand-up and sketch); since it opened in 2021, Bottlerocket Social Hall in Allentown does, too (stand-up, improv, sketch and more).

While classes are obviously not a prerequisite for getting started in comedy, they do offer skills and (perhaps more important) community. “Stand-up classes are essentially supportive of open mics,” says comic Joey Welsh, who got his start in Arcade classes in 2016. Welsh said that his teachers suggested they start getting onstage right away. After a new comic shows up often enough at an open mic, he says, other comedians begin to take them seriously and will start to offer support and encouragement.

Even after her first open mic — having never even thought about taking a class — stand-up comic Brittany Alexis says, “Everyone was so kind and welcoming.” She had assumed the experience would be a one-off, but the response and the thrill of performing kept her at it.

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And Now: How Improv Works

BRITTANY ALEXIS | PHOTO BY HUCK BEARD

“When you say comedy, people immediately think of stand-up,” Xazrianna says, explaining that people are more likely to attend a stand-up show just because it seems like a cool thing to do. “Improv and the other, smaller, more fine-tuned genres of comedy, people … show up because they care.”

The sub-world of improv primarily consists of short-form and long-form (see — promised we would return to that). The United States version of the TV show “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” began in 1998 and introduced short-form improv to mainstream entertainment; in this style, performers play games or create scenes only a few minutes in length, based on the audience’s suggestions — the sillier, the better (at least for the audience).

Long-form improv is also performed off-the-cuff by way of audience suggestions. These scenes are (obviously) longer, and they tie together thematically, the true joy coming in the surprise of the performers bringing the audience back to where they began.

“It really is just like playtime,” said Barth, “and finding the relationships between the characters to try to heighten different feelings or experiences or relationships.”

Improv, whether short or long, relies on community. Barth said improv comedians typically start as audience members, getting to know a particular space and crowd, before joining an on-the-spot team at an open mic or forming a standing team. Then the hardest part of all: stage time in a real show.

“It was way easier when we had, like, three different theaters to pick from,” said Barth. Arcade, however, is the only dedicated theater currently standing. “[They’re] really working towards trying to make that stage available for all types of people.”

And a Bit of Sketch for Good Measure

ASHER O’BRIANT | PHOTO BY HUCK BEARD

Sketches are also relatively short scenes, pre-written and rehearsed; think “Saturday Night Live” or “The Carol Burnett Show.” Arcade houses Sketch Lab, where writers hone their craft and create sketches for others to perform onstage. In contrast to the solo and competitive nature of stand-up, comedian and Sketch Lab facilitator Asher O’Briant says, “When you work in a writer’s room, or you start collaborating with other individuals, it really brings a lot more work, a lot more material.”

Arcade recently hosted its first “Sketch Lab Report” showcase, where the best material from the first year of the program was revived and produced. The well-received show featured more than a dozen sketches from local writers and performers.

O’Briant is also a writer on Arcade’s “Fridge Art Sketch Show,” which he describes as “a jagoff’s version of ‘Saturday Night Live.’” Even with that framing, the sketches, no matter how absurd, come “from real places,” O’Briant says. “Your work should be more than funny for the sake of being funny. We can do more than that.”

Where Are We? And Where Are We Going?

AMANDA AVERELL | PHOTO BY LAURA PETRILLA

Rebuilding Pittsburgh’s comedy community has opened up opportunities both traditional and somewhat experimental. Welsh’s brother, for instance, opened Playground Dropout in Millvale, where Welsh hosts “Game Show Experience,” a comedic mashup of knockoff TV game shows.

O’Briant has observed that, in terms of experimentation, Pittsburgh is the place to be. “I’ve seen so many types of comedy that would not be appreciated elsewhere,” he says.

Amanda Averell, a stand-up comic who has also been producing shows and hosting open mics since 2015, says, “It’s always an uphill climb to try and build a room into something, or a show into something, to get a recurring audience.” She’d love for a “B room,” the stand-up term for a 50-to-60-seat space, to open. It would bridge the gap between smaller shows and larger spaces like Homestead’s Carnegie Music Hall and the Pittsburgh Improv, which draw larger crowds for national acts.

In her work creating new spaces, Averell, a queer woman, is intentional in making them more inclusive. Something she and other marginalized comedians have noticed since the pandemic is the increase in women and nonbinary comedians, queer comedians and comedians of color. A decade ago, Averell says, she was one of four female comics on consistent rotation in shows.

Like Alexis and O’Briant, though, she points out that there’s still a long way to go.

“It’s hard because times are kind of changing,” Xazrianna, who sometimes describes herself as a speck of pepper in a sea of salt, says. “The [state of diversity in comedy] is overwhelmingly crappy. But then it’s hard to kind of talk about the intensity of how crappy it is when you do see little glimmers of hope here and there, because it makes you sound bitter.” She says some open mics are known for being “gnarly,” where people onstage say racist and sexist things without actually telling a joke. “Like, bro, you forgot the punchline.”

Fortunately, Averell says, there are hundreds of comics who might be part of making the community larger and more inclusive. “If you have a venue and owners of the venue that are supportive of what you’re doing, then you’re able to try new things and just take it further,” she says. “I have hope.”

Amy Whipple is a part-time writer, part-time writing instructor and full-time awesome. In addition to Pittsburgh Magazine, her work can be found in PublicSource and Imprint.