Comedy’s Benevolent Gatekeeper
When 72-year-old comedian Susan Rice filmed a set for Don’t Tell Comedy’s YouTube channel in January, she went in without any expectations. While she’d enjoyed a busy career during the 1980s stand-up comedy boom, she moved to Portland in 1998 after the bust and settled into a role as an elder statesperson of the local scene. When a show producer asked in November 2023 if she wanted to be submitted for the opportunity, she was hesitant. “I’m too old for the show. They’re not going to take me,” she remembers objecting at the time.
Rice was wrong. Two months later, she flew out to Santa Barbara and, after tracking down the remote warehouse venue where the taping was scheduled, proceeded to do what she’d been doing for 41 years: She killed. On March 11, Don’t Tell Comedy posted Rice’s set online, and her life changed. “My website blew up, my Instagram blew up, and my TikTok blew up,” she says. Overnight, her inbox flooded with opportunities to perform all across the country. Two days later, she received an email from the producers at America’s Got Talent inviting her to perform for the television judges. “Doing late night back in the ’80s when Johnny Carson was working, Carson made a lot of careers,” she says. “But this, Don’t Tell, is comparable.”
Stories like Rice’s have become increasingly uncommon in today’s fragmented comedy landscape, where the pathways to recognition for stand-ups have become less defined. But Don’t Tell Comedy is responsible for many of the exceptions. In April 2022, when the company posted a set by Katherine Blanford to its YouTube channel, she was a full-time nanny in Atlanta; four months later, she performed on The Tonight Show. Alec Flynn was substitute teaching and working at a rock-climbing gym in Denver when his Don’t Tell set went online in May 2022; he now headlines mainstream clubs across the country. Lea’h Sampson was on the verge of quitting comedy when Don’t Tell posted her set in August 2023; by the end of the year, she opened for Bill Burr at Madison Square Garden. With nearly 5 million subscribers and followers across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, the company excels at exposing comics to engaged audiences of hungry comedy fans. “Every young comic wants a Don’t Tell set,” says comedian Leslie Liao. “Some comics will just blatantly ask me, ‘How did you get that?’” (Liao, by the way, was working an office job at Netflix when her Don’t Tell set went live in June 2023. Five months later, she performed on Netflix on its Verified Stand-Up series.)
Don’t Tell Comedy began in 2017 as an experimental ploy to get comics more stage time. Founder and CEO Kyle Kazanjian-Amory, then an L.A.-based comic himself, had been tinkering with different ways to produce shows and lure audiences to unconventional spaces like backyards and living rooms. Audiences, he found, liked the option to bring their own booze to shows, because standard comedy-club two-drink minimums made nights out prohibitively expensive. He’d also drawn inspiration from Sofar Sounds, which built a global business around secret pop-up concerts where audiences buy tickets in blind faith, then find out the venue and lineup the day of the show. Kazanjian-Amory thought, Why couldn’t this work for comedy?
That year, he tested his theory by organizing a free show and sending invites out to family and friends. The result was an enthusiastic crowd in his friend’s Silver Lake backyard and a lineup of comics who loved the experience. Encouraged, Kazanjian-Amory planned more shows, each time lugging chairs and PA equipment around in the back of his car and physically setting them up himself. The first time he charged for tickets, he says, was purely out of logistical necessity: Too many people were RSVPing “Yes” to the free shows online then no-showing, so he couldn’t get an accurate read on how many people to accommodate. On a whim, Kazanjian-Amory decided to test the model in San Francisco in January 2018. It worked there, too, so he continued experimenting with shows in Portland and Seattle. Today, Don’t Tell Comedy produces shows in over 200 cities, including international markets like Paris, Berlin, and Melbourne. In 2024, Kazanjian-Amory estimates the total number of shows will top 4,500. Past venues have included boxing gyms, thrift stores, and art galleries — basically anywhere but standard comedy clubs.
The CEO isn’t still driving from city to city with chairs in the back of his car, but at just 11 people, Don’t Tell’s full-time staff remains small. Its business relies entirely on a vast network of contractors, many of them comics themselves, who produce Don’t Tell shows locally in each of its cities. The legwork of scouting unconventional venues, booking show lineups, coordinating chair rentals, and configuring lighting and audio falls to them. Don’t Tell, for its part, buys targeted social-media ads, promotes upcoming shows to its mailing lists, and sells the tickets.
At first glance, the model seems like an Uber for comedy: Workers on the ground do all the labor, while a remote company armed with a solid sales and marketing platform benefits. But selling tickets to comedy shows in backyards and thrift stores, especially outside of big cities, is a difficult task, which is why the contractors who work with Don’t Tell say they’re happy with the arrangement. “You’re always gonna have to work when you produce a show,” says Natalie Norman, a Toronto comic and producer who proactively pitched Don’t Tell on expanding to Toronto in 2022. “With Don’t Tell, you’re 90 percent guaranteed a sold-out show, an amazing crowd, and you know you can pay comics.” Kazanjian-Amory says much of the company’s expansion into new markets has unfolded this way: People in different cities approaching him to ask if they can start Don’t Tell locally. “Working for Don’t Tell is the best thing I’ve done in my comedy career,” says BK Sharad, a comic who produces Don’t Tell Shows in Denver, Fort Collins, and Boulder. He says there are only two downsides: Producing shows has become his full-time day job, so people occasionally forget he’s a comic too, and he now gets an overload of DMs from local comics asking for spots.
As Don’t Tell’s live-show operation gained momentum, Kazanjian-Amory decided to try filming comedy in unorthodox spaces too. In 2019, the company shot Danny Jolles’s YouTube special 6 Parts as a proof of concept. It was filmed in six locations: a surf shop, barbershop, music studio, gym, art gallery, and comedy club. The pandemic hit soon after and forced the company to reassess its strategy. After the lockdown in early 2022, Don’t Tell invested in shooting a couple weekends of shows in an effort to revive ticket sales. Posting lots of short sets, they determined at the time, was a better content-marketing strategy than producing entire specials. Instead, the videos had another effect. “It was hard to see if it was making an impact on our shows and selling tickets,” Kazanjian-Amory says, “but in terms of having an impact on the comedians we had on the tapings? That was pretty immediate.” The company’s first taping post-COVID, which took place in November 2021, featured comedian Michael Longfellow (among others), months before he was cast on SNL. His set currently has over 1 million views on YouTube. Don’t Tell’s online content quickly became as well known, if not more, than its live events — even if its live shows still bring in the bulk of the company’s revenue.
Three years later, Don’t Tell is constantly scouting talent to book for upcoming tapings in order to keep up with its cadence of publishing two new sets each week, but its process is still a bit of a black box to young comedians who covet this opportunity — even to those who perform at Don’t Tell’s live shows. “I was very aware of the Don’t Tell YouTube sets,” says Liao of her disposition going into performing her first local Don’t Tell show in L.A. “I didn’t exactly know how it worked — how a comic got chosen.” Though she wasn’t aware of it at the time, Kazanjian-Amory happened to be in attendance and booked her for a taping two months later. Flynn has a similar story: Kazanjian-Amory happened to be at a show he’d organized in an attic in Boston’s Chinatown. The short answer to how to get a Don’t Tell taping is to impress Kazanjian-Amory. He books all of them himself.
It’s a lot of responsibility for one person to manage, which Kazanjian-Amory says he doesn’t take for granted. He strives to compensate comics competitively for participating in tapings ($1,500 plus $500 for flights) and often crowdsources recommendations from his network of local producers so the process feels more democratic. That’s how Ralph Barbosa — perhaps Don’t Tell’s most famous individual success story — came to be featured on Don’t Tell’s channel in June 2022: Comedian Laura Sogar, who produces Don’t Tell shows in New York, recommended Barbosa to Kazanjian-Amory, he corroborated the recommendation and booked him, and a little over a year later, Barbosa landed an hour-long Netflix special.
“One thing we don’t care about is social-media following,” says Kazanjian-Amory of Don’t Tell’s booking practices. (Rice, he points out, had just 1,200 Instagram followers when she taped her Don’t Tell Set; that number has since ballooned to 94,000.) Prioritizing diversity, he says, is a creative decision rather than a corporate DEI practice: “There are great comedians that come from all walks of life. We just really care about who’s funny, and I think that ends up bringing a diverse group of people.” Even as the company has begun platforming more established comics who’ve already had mainstream opportunities like Kyle Kinane and Matt Braunger, Kazanjian-Amory never wants the platform to stop being a hub of emerging talent. This commitment extends internationally, too. In late 2023, Don’t Tell was so committed to taping a set with Canadian comedian Malik Elassal that it helped him get his visa to work in the United States. “It’s changed my life,” Elassal says. He’s since been cast on an FX pilot titled Snowflakes.
Kazanjian-Amory can offer only educated guesses about why Don’t Tell sets do so well online compared to analogous sets posted by Comedy Central or late-night shows. For one thing, Don’t Tell’s clips are visually alluring; their slick production value and unconventional taping locations help them stick out on a scroll. Kazanjian-Amory also believes Don’t Tell audiences are just better, and better mic’d, so comedians are presented in a more appealing light. A third theory is that Don’t Tell is more “artist forward”: Comics don’t have to submit material for approval before taping, they’re given the opportunity to review the edit, and they can even scrap their set and re-record it if they’re not happy with it. Beyond that, Kazanjian-Amory chalks a lot up to the mystery of the algorithm. He says the company got lucky when it first started releasing clips because the timing coincided with YouTube’s aggressive push of Shorts, and the social-media overlords rewarded the Don’t Tell channel for maintaining a consistent release schedule. “What Comedy Central is doing is they’re releasing their back catalogue of content along with their shorter sets,” he contrasts. “The tough thing about YouTube is the algorithm is so fickle. You need to stick to a system so people know what to expect. As soon as some videos aren’t getting as much engagement, it torpedoes the overall channel.”
The algorithm is also a determining factor in why some of the sets Don’t Tell posts perform better than others. As much as the company has a high hit ratio, not every comedian it platforms sees an equivalent rise. Still, of the ten comedians interviewed for this piece, none had anything critical to say about the company. “They don’t really fuck up,” says Flynn. “As a comic, you want to be bitter and hate everything, but realistically, they changed my life.” Sampson agrees: “If there was some fuck shit, I’d let you know, but they really are such a great team.”
For Kazanjian-Amory, if Don’t Tell has maintained its goodwill among comedians, it’s because the company has always remained true to its live-show ethos. “This is mostly a comedian-run organization,” he says. “Usually, with gatekeepers, they’re very separated from the actual comedy community. But we’re everywhere. We have boots on the ground.” He doesn’t deny that Don’t Tell is now an influential decision maker within comedy with the power to make or break careers. The company, for example, is going to expand into shooting half-hour and hours for comedians in the coming months. He just tries to be conscientious: “I hope that maybe we’re a more fair gatekeeper than other people.”
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