You are a comedy fan stopping over in New York for one night. What is your first instinct about where to spend your precious time?

The Comedy Cellar?

Yes, of course.

But then you gotta book it 15 minutes over to The Stand.

For The Stand is as essential, small (smaller even) vibrant, packed with talent, and as vital a breeding ground for NYC working comics as the Comedy Cellar. And it’s much easier to get tickets. And their reservation system isn’t stupid at all. And there’s no two-drink minimum. And, yes, it’s totally logically feasible to go to both clubs in the same night.

Just in the five nights we were in New York, both Jim Gaffigan and Chappelle did sets at The Stand. Gaffigan dropped in on a Tuesday (we weren’t there to see it but it happened) and Chappelle selected The Stand as the venue to perform two pop-up shows on a Thursday night when he was in town before leaving for a family vacation.

That’s right. We got to see Dave Chappelle in a 130 person comedy club and we were in the front row. We were so close, he put his ash tray on our table.

Massive celebrity comic sets aside, on just any old average day, The Stand books great comics. This is where comics work out their material. In the span of 45 minutes, we saw Paul Virzi, Yannis Pappas, and Joe DeRosa, all in a 130 person room. These are headliners who sell out comedy clubs by themselves on the road and we saw three of them in one night! Oh, New York!

After the shows, most of the comics eschew the green room and just head up to what appears to be a designated comics table in the main restaurant. You can see them eating, talking, being human, and waiting to go up. Comics are just like you! They look at their phones too!

On Friday night, in the smallest comedy room I have ever been in (65 people), we saw Bonnie McFarlane, Yannis Pappas, and Aaron Berg, who walked on stage and immediately identified me as a MILF and Vince as a nerd. It was a difficult crowd full of people who aren’t passionate about comedy and just seemed like they wanted a night out. Watching comics deftly navigate this difficult crowd who hated fun was a masterclass in adapting and thriving.

The Stand takes comedy seriously. During this show, the girls next to us wouldn’t stop talking. They were just saying random shit to Bonnie McFarlane and wouldn’t shut up. Fortunately, The Stand employs a 7 foot tall bouncer who efficiently kicked them out with no bullshit or politeness whatsoever. He just came in and went “out” pointing his thumb backwards. It was badass. I don’t even know where he came from or how he knew what was going on. Real CIA shit. The next night, that same bouncer was as sweet as could be and was telling a joke to Joe DeRosa after his set.

As far as the club itself, The Stand has two rooms: a 65 person room upstairs and a 130 person room downstairs. There is a full restaurant and bar upstairs too. You could accidentally wander in, not knowing it was a comedy club and just have a great dinner. It’s the most impressive restaurant and bar I have ever seen at any comedy club ever. They have a real pizza oven, steak, oysters, gourmet burgers, and shit. And the cocktail menu is legit. Vince and I made the Green Room our drink of choice. (Green Room: Fords gin, Green Chartreuse, elderflower, fresh lime and honeydew shrub).

It’s such a legit restaurant that Joe Sasto, a Top Chef finalist, is cooking there this week.

And it isn’t difficult to get tickets. The Chappelle tickets sold out quickly, of course, but if you plan ahead, you can easily get tickets to most shows at The Stand. Comedy Cellar weekend reservations will be full Thursday morning before you can even see what the lineups are and The Stand will still have tickets. And it’s a lot of the same comics doing both clubs.

Comedy shows and restaurants aside, The Stand is a cool community that supports comics and gives them a home to work out material. They housed Joe DeRosa’s pop-up sandwich shop before he made it a full-fledged restaurant. The 7 foot tall bouncer was once an intern and now is the heckler kicker outer guy. They encourage comics, promote their specials, and they are comedy nerds who love the art form.

I don’t know anything about comedy clubs in New York but as an outsider I got the sense The Stand is better about cultivating new talent than the Cellar. The Cellar has tremendous lineups packed with murderers but do they offer newcomers a platform to develop and grow? I don’t know. But I can tell that The Stand does.

I can’t say enough about how well The Stand treated us. I started drunkenly messaging The Stand’s instagram account, manned by co-booker, Patrick Milligan, weeks before we were leaving for our trip to tell them how excited we were to go to The Stand and he offered us free tickets. It was unnecessarily generous. If not for messaging with Patrick, I wouldn’t have found out about the Chappelle drop-ins. And when we got there, we got to meet Patrick and nerd out about comedy for a while, talking about our favorite comics, mutual hatred of hecklers, and how he once broke up a fight between Michael Rapaport and Ari Shaffir. He couldn’t have been a cooler guy.

So if you’re a comedy nerd and you find yourself in New York, don’t go to The Stand if it is convenient. Go no matter what. The Stand is an essential NYC comedy club.

Regrets:

•Not seeing Joe List or Mark Normand and even though we already saw him this year in Chicago, Drew Dunn. But we did get to say hi to Drew Dunn at the bar!

•Not seeing Legion of Skanks on Monday (we didn’t get to New York until Tuesday because couldn’t miss taking our daughters trick or treating on Halloween)

•Not being able to teleport to The Stand on any given night

•Not trying the pizza, which looks amazing. I was really hungry but didn’t have the gigantic balls needed to house a pizza in front of Dave Chappelle