Back in 2017, Los Angeles-based comedian Kyle Kazanjian-Amory had a vision. Kind of.
He wanted to offer stand-up comedy fans intimate and affordable shows — no two-drink minimum for a typical set against a brick wall. So he created Don’t Tell Comedy, a perpetual pop-up, where you sign up to attend a show without knowing exactly where it will be (you’ll get a neighborhood) or who will be featured. Many shows are in quirky spots — a backyard or a laundromat or a rock-climbing facility and many are BYOB, creating a unique party vibe.
But don’t ask the University of Redlands graduate how Don’t Tell got so big.
“There really was no business plan,” says Kazanjian-Amory, who is now CEO. “It was really just putting on a handful of shows in my friends’ backyards and living rooms. The shows were free, so it’s hard to have a business plan. There wasn’t a whole lot of thinking that went into how this could become a financially sustainable thing.”
The audience for Don’t Tell Comedy events often don’t know exactly where the event will be or who will be performing. (Courtesy of Don’t Tell Comedy)
Eventually, he started charging “as a way to control capacity,” and saw a limited future with Don’t Tell shows in Los Angeles and New York, the nation’s stand-up meccas. In recent years, Don’t Tell has expanded to more than 150 cities with close to one hundred shows weekly around the world – a scan of the website shows events this month in Agoura Hills, Bixby Knolls, Covina, Ontario, Lomita, Pasadena, Redlands, Redondo Beach and more – everywhere from a docked steamship in Seattle to a planetarium in Nashville.
Don’t Tell now has a flourishing YouTube channel of short sets shot mostly in Los Angeles, San Diego and Santa Barbara (with one New York shoot each year). Now there are plans in the works for a series of half-hour specials and other ambitious ideas.
“In the past few years, it has reached the point where getting a Don’t Tell set is a milestone in a comedian’s career,” Kazanjian-Amory said in a recent video interview. “So that’s pretty cool.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Had you always planned to expand as much as you have, with both the live shows and the YouTube videos?
I thought that maybe we’d be able to do shows in five cities, but I never imagined that it would get this big. It evolved organically. The videos didn’t even start till 2021 and that took off faster than we expected.
Q. How were you able to attract comedians in the beginning?
Comedians are always looking for stage time and good audiences. We got a reputation in LA for selling out and having good, attentive audiences with no distractions. Plus it’s unique.
Q. What level of talent do you seek? Your lineups seem to be well above open mic night but not at the level of the major headliners.
In L.A. and New York, we’re spoiled because a lot of the comics are working stand-up full-time and you might have people who have had specials on a streamer. Mostly, it’s people who have been doing standup for at least a few years and have a solid eight to 10 minutes. Five minutes is a late-night set and that’s sometimes feels a little short, where it’s just joke, joke, joke while with ten minutes you can get into some longer stuff.
But in other cities that means we can only do shows once a month because there’s not a huge breadth of talent locally, and we have to rely on people coming in from out of town to supplement. We have to understand each local market and what the capacity is, not just from a demand standpoint for the audience, but from a talent pool perspective. Cities like Chicago, Austin Atlanta, Denver, Boston have talent who will drive a few hours to other cities — so you can get comics to go from Austin to Dallas or Boston to Portland, Maine.
Q. How do you choose the venues?
We want to keep the experiences unique, which means always finding new locations but if there’s a local business that we partner with that’s great, we’ll repeat but we try not to repeat more than once a month.
Dive N’ Surf in Redondo Beach is one of my favorites. We’ve done shows inside with surfboards right behind the comedian and shows in their parking lot, which they deck out to give a beachy vibe.
We prioritize the BYO feel because that feels more like a house party type vibe meets a comedy show. We’ll make exceptions if it’s a cool space, like an art installation museum.
But some of my favorite shows are in backyards or people’s living rooms.
Q. You’re giving audiences fun and affordable shows but you’re also giving exposure to comedians, especially with the videos. Do you think about creating a circuit for them to work in all these cities you now reach?
Yes. We are thinking about how we can create this huge network of shows that allow what I refer to as kind of the middle class of comedy – talented people who are not yet headlining clubs – to tour independently outside of the traditional systems and make standup a full-time job faster than they could otherwise.
We’re definitely not there yet, or even that close, but we have the bones of it. It would be so cool if we could sign a deal with a comic for 40 weekends a year of work across all these different markets, guaranteed. I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get there, but we’re working on it.
Q. Now you have real ambitions. What other plans do you have?
We’re going to shoot our first series of half-hour specials to be released probably in January. And we’re going to try to launch a series of festivals in different cities. We’ll just take over a city for a weekend and do shows in all these different neighborhoods and bring in elevated talent from what would normally be in that city. And we’d create buzz around one big event — as someone from Boston, I’d want to do a one-day festival in Fenway Park, with shows simultaneously in the locker room, the right field pavilion, a luxury box and on top of The Green Monster. That would be really special.
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