Photo credit: Carmen Morales
Jackie Kashian
When it comes to playing places not usually associated with comedy, veteran stand-up and South Milwaukee native Jackie Kashian is flexible. “Because I love standup...I have to do standup," she enthuses. “Whatever it looks like. I'll take the laughs I can get.”
From her current home in Los Angeles, Kashian boasts of taking laughs from audiences in not only comedy clubs, but performance spaces including “Carnegie Hall (brag, but it’s not set up for comedy either!), Forward Operating Bases in Iraq and Turkey, one-nighters in Iowa, Montana, North Dakota. I’ve played at coffeeshops, hat stores and laundromats in Los Angeles, New York and Minneapolis.” Her show scheduled for 8 p.m. Thursday, June 4 won’t be on her native turf, but it will be accessible to Southeastern Wisconsinites and anyone else throughout the world with reliable internet access.
That’s because she will be playing The Nowhere Comedy Club. Not a physical venue, Nowhere is an online endeavor begun by comedians Steve Hofstetter and Ben Gleib on April 16. Boasting a calendar sometimes including multiple shows on the same night from five or more days weekly, the virtual club accessible at NowhereComedyClub.com has already sold over 10,000 tickets, in the form of Zoom links, and, Hofstetter declares, “been able to help so many comedians pay their rent this summer.”
It was the COVID-19 pandemic that inspired Hofstetter and Gleib to put Nowhere on the Net and why so many humorists are seeking alternate ways to get paid. But the business model won’t lose relevance once the novel coronavirus abates. Hofstetter reasons, “There’s a million reasons a digital comedy club will last past the pandemic. We’ve had people watch from hospital beds, people who were agoraphobic, people with seven kids, a 16 year-old on an iPad hiding under his blankets so his parents wouldn’t see, and people from countries all over the world.”
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Experienced Podcaster
Kashian has become well versed performing online. Apart from her two regular podcasts, her decade-strong Dork Forest and the four-year-old Jackie and Laurie Show she co-hosts with fellow stand-up Laurie Kilmartin, she has since March used the guest bedroom in the house she owns with her husband to perform in the same manner she will for Nowhere.
“I’ve been doing these online shows for weeks, so I know that the timing is a bit different,” Kashian explains, adding. “But, in the end, it’s just another venue.”
As for the controversy among some comedy aficionados as to whether Nowhere’s dates count as legitimate as those which takes place in front of an audience sharing physical space with a comic, Kashian is OK with however and wherever she can elicit laughter. ‘There’s a lot of discussion if the shows online are ‘real’ stand-up,’ she offers but offers in retort, ‘Well. I’ve done one-nighters in Minot, ND and mess halls in Iraq. Arguably those aren’t ‘real’ stand-up if you're defining it as indoors, beer in hand and audience in pants. But heck! I’m telling jokes so jokes is comedy to me.”
Though those jokes may provide distraction, amusement and act as a pressure valve for those participating in Nowhere’s service, Hofstetter is realistic about the necessity of what he and Gleib are offering. “We’re not essential in the way a grocery store is or a hospital is, and it would be self-aggrandizing to think so. Laughter is not the best medicine; actual medicine is. But we’re happy to be able to help as much as we can.”
