illustration by Eddie, he's done all of the incredible art on laugh.town :)
I yearn for a place where people wonder what the next words to be said will be, get surprised by details, and laugh together. No phones. No clips. Just existing in the same space and laughing.
Naturally, the websites and apps of today piss me off. They make us less present, less surprised, and less together.
If you want to be an entertainer of any kind though, there's no choice... you must promote yourself and this means meeting people where they're at: Instagram.
Instagram is a leach in the long run though. You want to tell your fans just where your shows are and how to buy tickets, but Instagram prevents them from seeing a clean list, prevents them from searching for "next show", and sticks gecko hat ads in the way.
This hat is actually really cool and I forget what I was talking about so I'll reset in a minute here. If I make it to the end of this post without buying the gecko hat, you'll need to share this post with a friend.
Let's talk about laugh.town. It is a place for your comedy stuff on the internet. It is not social media. It's really an old-web way of making things in a lot of ways. It aggregates comedy events from all of the club website calendars I could find and re-lists them on atproto.
I'll pause to explain the atproto bit now.
If you're familiar with RSS for podcasting, you'll know that podcast hosting and distributing is super simple because there's a single publishing format and all the podcast apps just look for that data shape. That is what laugh.town does. We define schema's of many types: a comedian schema, club, works (records/specials/film credits), and events. By making the data all an open and public standard, this will mean anyone can publish from wherever - like clubs can keep publishing to their calendars and things will just show up on laugh.town1.
I've seen loads of standup comedy aggregates while building this along the way. The thing that seems to limit them from my point of view is the difficulty of web crawl (which is solved for laugh.town, the crawl is done) or the annoyance of needing to input your event in two places: the aggregate + your club website.
So events need to be published once (from a single editor), then show everywhere. Instagram and other platforms may do well for showing the people in their little boxes, but they will not show anything useful when someone wants "shows in NYC tonight" and they certainly will not show your event on another website.
This is a screenshot from a new site: chicago.corkboard.at which shows events from the atmosphere in Chicago and the comedy events were sourced from laugh.town. You can see that here.
For the atproto nerds, laugh.town uses community.lexicon.calendar.* which is why it works so simply with corkboard. Event metadata is a super easy thing to share for nice calendars like this. laugh.town just adds a few things that are comedy specific: flag for open mics, 21+ shows, drink minimum, ticket price range, etc..
I share this to point at how easy and cool it can be to build event sharing on a common open protocol (similar again to podcasts with RSS).
What now?
Just go see shows in your neighborhood and have fun.
Chicago: https://laugh.town/chicago
There's more on the site in the neighborhood dropdown... you get the point though.
Bring your friends too.
Where to next?
The web crawl project in the US for laugh.town is done. Next is to talk with clubs and promoters to build out the publishing tooling to get more events on the site and make everything easy.
I'll be writing to clubs, comedians, and people around comedy to get feedback. And writing on here, so subscribe with your email or atmosphere account.
Everyone I have talked to so far has been super gracious and excited. I am very excited about the friends to be made and places to go with this project. Please say hi when you get a chance :)
PS I'll be adding clubs from Canada and Europe soon too
PPS I didn't buy the hat
drawing from Abby to celebrate the self-restraint of not purchasing the gecko hat