The Upper Valley comedy scene grows, one joke at a time

Kevin McTaggart, of Norwich, Vt., hosts a comedy open mic event at Sawtooth Kitchen, Bar and Stage in Hanover, N.H., on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. Sawtooth holds comedy events most Wednesday evenings, and its open mic nights have developed a devoted group of regulars. (Valley News - Alex Driehaus)

Kevin McTaggart, of Norwich, Vt., hosts a comedy open mic event at Sawtooth Kitchen, Bar and Stage in Hanover, N.H., on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. Sawtooth holds comedy events most Wednesday evenings, and its open mic nights have developed a devoted group of regulars. (Valley News - Alex Driehaus) Valley News photographs — Alex Driehaus

Krista Patronick, of Hanover, N.H., checks a notecard between jokes while performing her set at a comedy open mic event at Sawtooth Kitchen, Bar and Stage in Hanover, N.H., on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. Patronick is working to add more gender diversity to the local comedy scene, and hosted a “Ladies Night” event featuring all women comics at Bright Side Brewing in West Lebanon in August. (Valley News - Alex Driehaus)

Krista Patronick, of Hanover, N.H., checks a notecard between jokes while performing her set at a comedy open mic event at Sawtooth Kitchen, Bar and Stage in Hanover, N.H., on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. Patronick is working to add more gender diversity to the local comedy scene, and hosted a “Ladies Night” event featuring all women comics at Bright Side Brewing in West Lebanon in August. (Valley News - Alex Driehaus) Valley News — Alex Driehaus

From left, Samantha Goveia, Rosalyn Goveia and Colin Sweeney, all of Lebanon, N.H., react as they listen to comics perform their five-minute sets during a comedy open mic event at Sawtooth Kitchen, Bar and Stage in Hanover, N.H., on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (Valley News - Alex Driehaus)

From left, Samantha Goveia, Rosalyn Goveia and Colin Sweeney, all of Lebanon, N.H., react as they listen to comics perform their five-minute sets during a comedy open mic event at Sawtooth Kitchen, Bar and Stage in Hanover, N.H., on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (Valley News - Alex Driehaus)

Kevin McTaggart, left, and Aaron Richter, look over the list of comics signed up to perform during a comedy open mic event at Sawtooth Kitchen, Bar and Stage in Hanover, N.H., on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (Valley News - Alex Driehaus)

Kevin McTaggart, left, and Aaron Richter, look over the list of comics signed up to perform during a comedy open mic event at Sawtooth Kitchen, Bar and Stage in Hanover, N.H., on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (Valley News - Alex Driehaus) Alex Driehaus

Robbie Partridge, of Loudon, N.H., performs a set about chaperoning his eight-grader’s school trip to Washington, D.C., during a comedy open mic event at Sawtooth Kitchen, Bar and Stage in Hanover, N.H., on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. Open mics at Sawtooth have drawn comics from outside the Upper Valley who come to perform. (Valley News - Alex Driehaus)

Robbie Partridge, of Loudon, N.H., performs a set about chaperoning his eight-grader’s school trip to Washington, D.C., during a comedy open mic event at Sawtooth Kitchen, Bar and Stage in Hanover, N.H., on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. Open mics at Sawtooth have drawn comics from outside the Upper Valley who come to perform. (Valley News - Alex Driehaus) Valey News — Alex Driehaus

By MARION UMPLEBY

For the Valley News

Published: 10-11-2024 6:01 PM

Modified: 10-13-2024 2:33 PM


Ten years ago, Upper Valley residents had no shortage of opportunities to see live music and theater. Between Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center and performance spaces such as Northern Stage and Lebanon Opera House, among many others, the offerings were abundant.

Comedy, however, is a relatively new addition to the area’s entertainment scene. In the early 2010s, folks would be hard-pressed to find a nearby venue to see or perform stand-up, save for the occasional show at the Meadow Sports Bar in Canaan, which closed in 2017.

But, like its prominence in the broader culture, stand-up has slowly been gaining traction in the Upper Valley. Today, the area boasts two open mics, a comedy club, and a yearly festival with big name headliners.

“It’s becoming a scene,” said Kieran Campion, who hosts comedy every Wednesday at his restaurant, Sawtooth Kitchen, Bar, and Stage in Hanover.

An early flash point in the scene’s development was when Bridgewater’s Woolen Mill Comedy Club opened in 2014. “The catalyst for us to start (Woolen Mill) was that there wasn’t anywhere to perform comedy,” said Bridgewater native Collen Doyle, who now runs the club with fellow comic Matt Vita.

In the early days, the club hosted open mics in Ramunto’s Brick & Brew Pizza inside the Mill. “In the Upper Valley, that was the big space to go,” Norwich comedian Kevin McTaggart said in an interview.

Woolen Mill would eventually transition from hosting open mics to booking talent from comedy hotbeds like New York and Boston for weekly showcases around 2017.

Around the same time, two more open mics cropped up, at Lebanon’s Salt hill Pub and the Engine Room in White River Junction.

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An average night at Salt hill garnered a list of 10 to 15 comics, said the mic’s host, Peter Pardoe, who’s also a former longtime Valley News employee. “A lot of people tried it for their first time at Salt hill,” he said.

Even though Upper Valley comics had a few local haunts to test material, hosts were still struggling to make mics a regular part of venues’ programming. At Salt hill, for instance, “there were breaks because they had to use the room for other things,” said McTaggart, who took over the mic from Pardoe in 2019.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, any momentum that had been building over the past few years came to a screeching halt, ushering in what McTaggart called “the barren times.”

By the time restrictions lifted, the Engine Room had closed, and after spending a few months trying to resuscitate the Salt hill open mic, McTaggart called it quits in early 2022. Without a local venue in the center of the Upper Valley, comics were back to square one: commuting to mics farther afield in Burlington and Manchester.

Enter Sawtooth. According to Campion, who opened the restaurant and performance space the same year, “comedy was on the docket from the beginning.” Like Doyle and Vita, Campion wondered what it would take to cultivate a comedy scene in the Upper Valley akin to the ones in New York or Chicago, where he lived before moving back to Hanover.

With the help of Josh Ocampo, a Sawtooth employee and member of the Dartmouth Comedy Network (DCN), the college’s stand-up and sketch troupe, the restaurant booked Paul Ollinger for an impromptu show in October 2022. Ollinger, who has previously headlined Caroline’s, the fabled New York comedy venue, was in town for an alumni reunion at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.

A few months later, Michael Longfellow of Saturday Night Live was doing a show at Dartmouth when Ocampo convinced him to perform at Sawtooth for a free meal. “I knew it was his first season on SNL at the time, so I figured this dude’s still kind of broke,” Ocampo said.

Despite last minute advertising, Ollinger and Longfellow garnered a huge turnout and Campion began to realize “this is something there’s a demand for.”

Still, he knew Sawtooth was unlikely to book out of town comics on a regular basis, so when Ocampo suggested the restaurant try an open mic with McTaggart as the host, Campion decided to take the leap.

In the months that followed, DCN members were “instrumental in populating early open-mics and bringing a few people in,” said Campion, and many of them still perform at Sawtooth regularly, like Dartmouth senior Vas Mahesan, who recently appeared on a bill with McTaggart and fellow comic Aaron Richter. The event has given students the chance to practice material with a fresh audiences and connect with local comics.

“It’s a good opportunity to be in touch with the community outside of Dartmouth,” Mahesan said.

A robust stand-up scene is as new to Dartmouth as it is to the Upper Valley.

“When I did a show for Dartmouth in 2019, there was almost no scene on campus,” Doyle said. While Dog Day Players, the improv troupe in which Mindy Kaling, a 2001 Dartmouth graduate, cut her teeth, has been around since 1995, the DCN was founded just five years ago by Spencer Locke, a member of the class of 2022. “I definitely credit so much to him for cultivating the on campus stand-up scene,” Ocampo said in an online correspondence.

Since those first shows at Sawtooth, the open mic has continued to gain popularity among comics from the Upper Valley and beyond. “People drive two hours to perform five minutes,” Campion said.

This year, comedy has become a permanent fixture of the restaurant’s weekly entertainment schedule. On any given Wednesday, patrons can expect an open mic, a showcase featuring local and touring comedians, or a performance by Valley Improv. ”The fourth night [of the month], I’d love to have some sketch,” Campion said.

On Feb. 17, Sawtooth will partner with the Hopkins Center and Andre Bouchard of Indigenous Performance Productions in hosting the showcase “Some Stars of Native American Comedy.”

Nearby, a new biweekly open mic has kicked off at Bright Side Brewing in the Lebanon Municipal Airport.

“The very first night there were four comics,” host Tom Zuttermeister said of the mic’s debut in April. “But after that, it grew very quickly.” So far, 26 comics have performed and last month the mic started running every Friday night, with Zuttermeister sharing hosting duties with Richter.

Even local performing arts venues like Lebanon Opera House are adding more comedy to their upcoming calendars.

“It’s been a slow, steady growth,” Executive Director Joe Clifford said.

“A lot of agents and artists don’t necessarily think of this area when they think of comedy,” Clifford said, but he has been pushing to change that. Last April, Tom Papa, who has three specials on Netflix, performed at LOH just days before a stop at the Wilbur, Boston’s celebrated theater.

Clifford partly attributes stand-up’s growing presence in performance spaces like LOH to comedians’ recent embrace of storytelling. Prominent comics like Hasan Minhaj and Mae Martin, whose special “Sap” (2023) was filmed at Vancouver’s Vogue Theatre, have incorporated other elements of theater like set design and lighting into their latest work.

“The nature of the kind of shows people are presenting is also changing where they are presented,” Clifford said.

This fall, Sheng Wang, whose first special, “Sweet and Juicy,” debuted on Netflix in 2022, will perform at Lebanon Opera House on Oct. 18.

“It’s great that we are now on the map,” Clifford said.

Later on, in December, Tim Meadows of SNL and “Mean Girls” (2004) will take the stage at Woodstock’s Pentangle Theater as the headlining act of Woolen Mill’s third annual Vermont Comedy Festival.

Last year’s festival hosted over 60 comics in four days, including another SNL veteran, Colin Quinn, who performed for a packed auditorium at Pentangle. “I think that really did establish this area as a destination for comedy,” said Doyle.

According to Doyle and Vita, the newfound momentum around stand-up in the Upper Valley is a sign of comedy’s current relevance in popular culture.

“I think we’re just kind of in a bull market of comedy right now,” Vita said in a recent interview.

“When I moved to New York 18 years ago, there was no comedy in Brooklyn,” Doyle added. “And now it’s everywhere.”

For Etna-based comedic storyteller and creator of the one-woman show “Finding the Doorbell,” Cindy Pierce, comedy’s popularity stems from a desire for levity in uncertain times. “People are desperate for humor as things get wonky in the world,” she noted in a phone interview. “Even if bits involve politics or … hard things, it’s an escape from the actual reality of it,” she continued. “There’s a great appreciation for distraction, for laughter …. We’re all in need of it.”

For all its growth in recent years, there’s still work to be done on the local circuit, especially when it comes to fostering a more diverse array of comics and producers, who, right now, are mostly men.

Hanover comic Krista Patronick is trying to bring more diversity to the scene. “I would roll my eyes when I would see a local poster with all white males,” she said in an interview.

At the end of August, Patronick hosted an all-women showcase at Bright Side Brewing. “Ladies Night” was produced by Richter, who “saw a need for women to be in the comedy scene up here,” Patronick explained. The lineup included West Windsor resident and Valley News staff writer Chris Dolan and Shelburne, Vt.-based comic Meredith Gordon, who regularly performs at the Vermont Comedy Club. That night “the place was packed,” Zuttermeister said.

On Oct. 23, Patronick will produce and perform in “Unladylike” at Sawtooth. The roster includes women, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC comics from the Upper Valley and Boston.

“On the local level, there’s a lot of work to be done,” she said. “This show is my little piece of making a difference.”

Looking ahead, Upper Valley comics and producers have big ambitions for the local scene.

“I would love to have comics from all over New England be like ‘I go to the Upper Valley and there’s great rooms there,’ ” Patronick said.

“I think there could be a comedy club here at some point,” McTaggart said of the Hanover-Lebanon area.

Campion envisions the scene becoming an incubator for burgeoning talent.

“It would be great to find a real comedy star and send them off into the world.”

Marion Umpleby is a freelance writer. She lives in Tunbridge.