Sarah Kennedy

Words and photo by Clarke Condé

Interview | Albuquerque Courier >>>

What began as an intellectual exercise has manifested into a comedy club. Why isn’t there a permanent, designated space for stand-up comedy in the state of New Mexico? What would it take to create a place like that in Albuquerque? Who could do such a thing? 

Albuquerque comedian Sarah Kennedy began asking these questions in a formal way through her podcast Comedy Ghost Town in January. In it she interviews comedians, academics and elected officials to find the edges of the problems and tries to publicly work through some of the solutions. Spoiler Alert: In the final episode she announces she and her wife Kelli Trapnell are just going to open up a comedy club themselves. On June 23, that’s exactly what they are going to do.

Albuquerque Courier editor Clarke Condé sat down with the comedian and newly-minted comedy club proprietor to talk about the challenges of opening the new comedy venue, the best entrees to serve on the laps of patrons and what’s in store for Downtown’s new comedy club, Dry Heat. The following is an edited version of that interview.

Clarke Condé: You went through much of this in detail in your podcast but for the readers, why here? Why now? Why you? 

Sarah Kennedy: I was in New York up until July of 2019, and then me and Kelli moved back here to plan our wedding. We were just like, ‘Oh, we'll go to Albuquerque. We'll live there for a year, and then after we're married, we'll move back to New York.’ Then COVID hit [laughing]. I guess we'll stay here for a little bit longer. Then we bought a house here. I grew up here, I started comedy here and my family's here. Kelli is from Texas and her family's in Houston. We're closer to our families if we're here. We love Albuquerque and I've always loved Albuquerque. The comedians here now work very, very hard and are clearly building towards something. So, let's make it happen. 

Is there a style to Albuquerque comedians?

I think there is because we haven't had a comedy club. Every show is an ambush show. Comedians have to spend almost half their time on stage fighting for people to pay attention who didn't even think that they were showing up to see something in the first place. You'll be at a bar and you're like, ‘I'm just here to meet my friend, Becky.’ And now you and Becky are audience members. So, they fight for attention and they're really good at it. Last year at Albuquerque Funny Fiesta, it was the first time that a lot of stand-up comedians got to be in a theater setting with people who were paying to opt-in to see them. It was wild how fast and hard the laughs came. You could watch the comedians on stage kind of be like, ‘Whoa, I've never, whoa.’ That was a big indicator to me and Kelli, that we could have a place like that where people were just opting-in to seeing stand-up. 

Tell me about developing a physical space where the audience feels safe as well as the comedians. 

It's interesting. Improv is very good at kicking off a show being like, ‘Everything you hear tonight is made up on the spot. We are sharing an experience that will never be replicated ever again.’ Stand-up doesn't do enough to explain what the magic trick is. The magic trick is, you are hearing from one person's perspective and we're having a shared experience while that happens. It will never happen again because even if the comedian repeats those jokes, it will never be that same group of people ever again, or it'll be just a different day, or the weather will be different and there will be different things on everybody's mind. It'll just never be replicated. We never mention that.

The fact this is a shared experience?

Yeah. I think that alone goes a long way. We have a policy and we put it out there so that nobody is caught off guard. None of the performers should feel ambushed themselves about what we've expected from them and what the content of their set needs to be. There's quality control. Want to respect people's humanity of all types. The performer. The audience. Everybody. Then on the other end of it, we can't have hecklers or people approaching the stage or threatening the performers either. There has to be physical safety and there also needs to be some ideological safety, too. Otherwise, you can't have, I mean, it's weird to say, a dialogue. Because, there is a dialogue between audience members and the performer, even though it's supposed to be the content coming from the performer and then they're supposed to be the audience. You just get a cutoff audience if they come into the space very guarded and then you can't change hearts and minds. I said this in the podcast too, but every community should have a comedy club because it is the one place where something can happen in your community or on a larger scope in the country that morning and then by the time you show up that night, somebody has already synthesized it and turned it into something that you can digest, laugh at and have some sort of commentary about it. That's cool if it happens on like the Daily Show or the Tonight Show. That's nationwide, but you don't have people talking about the car accident that happened in our neighborhood that morning that everybody maybe had seen. 

You ended your podcast that detailed your thinking about creating a comedy club in Albuquerque in April. It’s now mid-June. Has your thinking evolved?

A lot, actually. I think I brought him up a couple of times on the podcast, but David Rodriguez built the Comedy Fort in Fort Collins and he's always been kind of like a papa [laughing]. He just is very inspiring and the way that he pulled off that space is incredible. I just thought, ‘I'll just study everything he's ever done.’ I've listened to every podcast he's been on. I've talked with him in person. He's one of our friends. I was like, this should be easy, as long as I just like replicate everything he did. It's different to create just a space for comedy than it is to create a space for comedy that is also a small business that's being opened up in a building that you have to have permitting and deal with government stuff. There was so much more of that than we expected and people don't talk about it enough because it's extremely boring.

Well, here's a boring one for you. Can you share one truly funny thing about New Mexico's liquor laws?

Yeah. They did all that change in the legislative session last year and I don't know if anything has really changed at all. It's only funny to me because it's tragic.  

You're saying the legislature didn’t consider the needs of a comedy club? 

The restaurants definitely benefit from it. It's cool to be able to offer spirits with your beer and wine license, but in order to be eligible for that license, you have to have four entrees on a menu. We can't have that happen. We don't even have tables. People would sit there with like... maybe like…

Lasagna?

Maybe lasagna, like a full Garfield. We could do that.

If you were going to have entrees, what would be some of the funnier ones you could have?

Oh...

I came up with lasagna. 

No, lasagna is great. That one's all you. We've talked about doing empanadas and empanadas can be a funny word if you rhyme it with something good.

Orange roughy? That's funny.

That's good.

And it would stink up the place nicely.

Yeah, for sure. 

What about Downtown? Are you ready?

I love it. I love Downtown. We live down here. We live literally a block away from here. We know it. We walk around it constantly. We know all the cast of characters. We know everybody who's around here. I am excited to get to be a part of Downtown. I've lived Downtown every chance I could outside of living in New York and when I was in college. It's always been my favorite spot to be because it's the most city part of the city. You gotta be in the city part.

Were you tempted to put in a red brick wall behind the stage?

Yeah, actually. I performed in New York and you could tell oftentimes there’s a fake brick wall [laughing]. Like, you can tell the seam where they don't quite match up. We were going forward with the black wall and we're gonna do maybe like a neon sign in the back or something. Then we spent so much money on all this lumber and lumber prices are crazy, which is another boring thing about building stuff. But then we were at Lowes and we found the fake brick wall. It was like a devil/angel on your shoulder situation where it was like, ‘you could just do it right now. You could just get the fake brick wall and your whole thing would be done.’ [laughing]. 

What does Albuquerque need, other than a new art magazine and a comedy club? 

We absolutely have to have more art magazines. 

Done.

I've always said that we need a cabaret space. A space that has a really nice piano and you could do one person shows that are musical-based and that kind of thing. That would be the other orphan art form. We need just more nightlife overall. There are a million reasons why we don't have this right now, but we need places that are open seven days a week. We need places that are open until last call every night. I know that seems weird, but that should be a regular thing that happens in the downtown part of Downtown. There's something very special about what Albuquerque doesn't have. It makes it an oasis, kind of away from all the other hyper-gentrified bigger towns in the country so I don't wanna overdo it. I don't wanna be like, ‘A Dave and Busters on every block.’ I don't need that. But, a ski ball bar and a karaoke bar. Those two would be two really nice things that we could have Downtown. A ski ball bar would be amazing. It's the easiest Tinder date you ever go on in your life. Right? You know within 10 minutes if you like the person that you're with.