Will TV Change the Comedy Cellar? Comics Are About to Find Out

NEW YORK — As Hurricane Florence headed toward the Eastern Seaboard in September, Ted Tremper, the showrunner for “This Week at the Comedy Cellar,” realized he had a problem, and it wasn’t damage from the storm. He needed jokes.

It was the final day of shooting for the test show, and while he had hours of footage of comics weighing in on eight categories (Trump, #MeToo, Colin Kaepernick, etc.), he had no punch lines about Florence.

As a former producer of “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah,” he knew humorous takes on the news needed to stay current. But there was another issue. Some forecasts were suggesting Florence could be catastrophic. As Tremper explained before the first sets of the night, “The challenge is: How do we comment on this without doing a joke in poor taste?”

That’s probably not the last time he will have to answer the question of how to successfully shift the context of jokes from the Comedy Cellar, the premier club in New York, to national television. The new show, which made its debut Friday night on Comedy Central, arrives at a critical moment for the Cellar, which has become the subject of controversy just as it tries to expand its empire.

The club has been drawing intense criticism since August, when Louis C.K. returned to its stage (among other places) less than a year after having confessed to sexual misconduct. The Cellar was a punch line on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and even at the club itself when comic Ted Alexandro poked fun at the warm reception Louis C.K. had received.

The notoriety has obscured the club’s bid to raise its national profile this year. Based in Greenwich Village since 1982, it opened a branch in Las Vegas, and after a rocky start that included a brief shutdown, it now has an impressive lineup of comics, including many of the names from the New York club.

The new television series is an even bolder move by the Cellar’s owner, Noam Dwornan, who is not content to stand pat even though his space packs in crowds every night. As dominant as the Cellar is in the New York club scene right now, it’s a fiercely competitive business where reputations rise and fall. The storied Comic Strip Live on the Upper East Side was once the center of the standup world, and it now can have trouble attracting audiences.

At the same time, streaming services built on the idea that consumers can watch what they want when they want are having trouble figuring out how to make topical comedy work. (See Michelle Wolf, a Cellar comic whose Netflix show was canceled after a short run.) “This Week at the Comedy Cellar” is making a bet on jokes in comedy clubs as the next frontier in topical humor.

If the show does well, it would change not just the landscape of late-night television, but also the Cellar itself. Cameras certainly shift the atmosphere in the room, but they also encourage comics to do more newsy material to get on the air. The producers are adamant that they do not tell comics what to say, and while there is some room for evergreen jokes, the focus here is on what is happening now.

Dwornan said this will make the club better. “The comedians are going to get the hang of it, and it’s going to really inspire some great new material,” he said. “On the pilot, Ryan Hamilton, who doesn’t normally do political stuff, came up with some” that he used for weeks afterward.

This isn’t the first Comedy Central show inspired by the Cellar. “Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn,” which ran from 2002 to 2004, was modeled after the conversation at the Cellar’s comic’s table, and included club regulars like Jim Norton, Patrice O’Neal and Greg Giraldo. But that show took place in a studio; “This Week at the Comedy Cellar,” which will feature many more comics, is designed to feel more like a documentary on the club. It will include conversation at the actual table (one of two locations this show will use, along with the nearby Village Underground). “Tough Crowd” ran at a time when the no-holds-barred, often belligerent humor the Cellar is known for was less controversial (and Comedy Central had more cachet). But the Cellar’s reputation as a home to cranky antagonists of the politically correct is a simplification, a broad-brush description of a club that has showcased everyone from Mike Birbiglia to Ali Wong, Hasan Minhaj to Amy Schumer.

“My mandate is to present the most honest representation of the comics as I can,” Tremper said. Does that include discussion of Louis C.K.? He said yes — and there was one allusion to him in the premiere in a joke by Dan Naturman. The episode was dense with punch lines from young standups, including timely ones about Megyn Kelly’s show getting canceled after she questioned what was wrong with blackface. “It bummed me out because I was planning on going as Bill Cosby for Halloween,” said comic Sam Morril. “Because that’s how you make blackface the second most offensive part of your costume.”

One of Tremper’s partners, Michael Hirschorn, said the show would portray a wide array of views, and the pilot and test runs included a much younger and diverse collection of comics than what you saw on “Tough Crowd.” (While the Cellar is famous for celebrity drop-ins like Kevin Hart and Dave Chappelle, no A-listers appeared on the premiere episode.) When asked how the politics of the Cellar would work on cable, Hirschorn replied: “I’m comfortable with the level of wokeness here.” Then he laughed.

Sitting in a booth at the Village Underground next to a monitor and a guy transcribing every joke told onstage, Hirschorn and Tremper looked tired. They had been shooting film and editing through the night, and Tremper had sneaked in a quick nap.

After a few acts, standup Josh Gondelman did some material about being on Twitter in bed at night and getting angry while his wife read. The producers stared ahead, listening, but then became more visibly alert when Gondelman started discussing President Donald Trump’s reference to Hurricane Florence as “tremendously big and tremendously wet.”

After pointing out that this sounded like a lyric from an AC/DC song, Gondelman asked: “Is there one thing he can talk about without sounding like he wanted to have sex with it?”

Hirschorn looked at Tremper and smiled. “That’s good,” he said. “We needed that.”