Should New York’s alt-comedy era be in a museum? Marianne Ways is working on it

Marianne Ways got her start as a comedy booker about 20 years ago by inheriting a list of working comics in New York City. In the mid 2000s, when the indie comedy scene was first coming into maturity, taking acts out of stuffy two-drink-minimum clubs and putting them in dark, divey rooms where the future television stars of America could work out their outré bits, the list she inherited was about 100 people long. These days, the list is now 6,000 people long.  

“I don't update it anymore because that's insane,” she said. 

That shift was largely due to the alt-comedy boom, which represented a seismic shift in the way comedy was enjoyed and performed in the city, opening the door for deranged acts like Oh Hello and Kristen Schaal is a Horse to flourish in the mainstream. It set the stage for many of the comedians who dominate TV and entertainment today, from Bob’s Burgers to The Daily Show to hit horror films, and boosted the careers of acts like Eugene Mirman, H. Jon Benjamin, John Mulaney, Nick Kroll, Kumail Nanjiani and Wyatt Cenac. It also led Ways to a career of booking comedy for venues, TV and the Bonnaroo music festival. 

Comedy is both more popular now and less popular in some ways, a victim of its own success that has atomized the scene across the city. Now, Ways is setting out to document this formative era of the alt-comedy scene for the first time: she’s working on an archival zine of the scene to be called Stories From the Room, with the help of a Kickstarter campaign. Her eventual goal is to create a full archive or museum of New York City comedy history, an era she helped usher in but whose impact she worries is lost on modern audiences.