Comedy Central’s Colossal Clusterfest Was a Festival Done Right
Photos by Dan Samiljan
From food to comedy to music, there’s no shortage of festivals these days. There are so many that it can be hard to keep track, and lineups can be so similar that it can be a struggle to tell one apart from another. Except for the Fyre Festival. Nobody will ever forget about the Fyre Festival.
Comedy Central entered the festival game earlier this month with the inaugural Colossal Clusterfest in downtown San Francisco. They wisely teamed up with Superfly, the company that runs Bonnaroo and Outside Lands, to bring Clusterfest to life. The three-day festival offered five comedy and music stages packed with (you guessed it) comedians and musicians, along with local food and recreations of sitcom sets. I was there for all three days covering the festival for Paste, and I am here to tell you that the festival went, ya know, well. Real good.
Let me be honest: I don’t go to a lot of multi-day festivals. I don’t go to music festivals like Coachella and the only comedy festival I’ve attended is Riot LA, which is less festival-like and more a-bunch-of-shows-all-over-the-place-like. I do not often commune with the masses in this way, so rushing from show to show, shoving over-priced food in my mouth, and avoiding drunk people was somewhat new to me. But I did it! I lived to tell the tale, and here it is: my Clusterfest story and my thoughts on the whole shebang.
The festival kicked off on Friday June 2 at Civic Center in the middle of San Francisco. I picked up my wristband, which looked like a new age friendship bracelet and included a chip that scans you into the festival and, if you let it, tracks you all around town on social media. I did not let it. They’re lucky I let them put the thing on me. I was also informed that you can’t take it off for the entirety of the festival—it tightens but does not loosen, and even though it’s “waterproof,” it stays nice and soggy on your wrist for a half hour after a shower. Note that you could also purchase 1-day passes for Clusterfest for any of the three days of performances.
Friday’s line-up included Kevin Hart, Moshe Kasher, Sarah Silverman, Natasha Leggero, and Ice Cube, among many others. I attended a taping of the podcast Beautiful Anonymous, in which Chris Gethard wrestled a vuvuzela away from a drunk lady and talked to a delightful couple in Boston on the phone. The show was held in the Larkin Comedy Club, which is a big room in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium with chairs set up and a bar in the back. Along the tops of the walls were large photos of comedians including Steve Martin, Betty White holding an urn, and Miss Piggy (?). Pretty much everyone I saw on that stage commented on these weird photos. It was also the only stage that required tickets. This wasn’t an issue on Friday, easily the least busy day at Clusterfest, but the lines got long quick on Saturday and Sunday.
I rushed over to the huge, indoor Bill Graham Stage to see a string of stand-up including James Davis, Aparna Nancherla, Rory Scovel, Natasha Leggero and Chris Hardwick. I don’t know if I was still fresh and ready to laugh or what, but this show ended up having a couple of my favorite performances of the weekend. For this big stage and the two stages outside, people were allowed to walk in and out whenever they pleased. This is great if you want to watch part of a show, but also weird as an audience member and probably as a performer. Luckily, there weren’t a huge amount of people going in and out of the doors during the shows early on in the festival, especially on the ground level. I’ll explain why this changed a bit later.
I stayed glued to my seat for the following show with Moshe Kasher, Beth Stelling, Aparna Nancherla again (but with totally different material!), and Sarah Silverman, who tried out some new jokes after her new Netflix special debuted. If there was one thread through this first day of comedy, it was masturbation. It felt like half of the comedy I saw was about masturbation. I might be exaggerating a bit, but maybe not. There was a lot.
After a few hours of sleep, we cut to Saturday. The festival opened at 2 PM that day with the first shows at 2:30. This means that when they finally let the long lines of people through the gates, some fans were literally running to get Larkin tickets. Not to brag or anything, but since I had a media pass, I went onto the grounds early to check out the TV set recreations. Inside the Bill Graham building they recreated Paddy’s Pub from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, with gross bathroom and all. The bar was operational, and offered drinks and some show-themed food. They also hosted karaoke and a few other events in the pub throughout the weekend.
In the middle of the grounds was South Park, with cartoon mountains and shops with lots of life-size cutouts for photo ops. Next to that was a Monk’s-esque Seinfeld restaurant and a soup booth which sometimes had the real-life Soup Nazi in it serving soup. A giant tent with a perpetually long line housed a recreation of Jerry’s apartment, where Seinfeld fan after Seinfeld fan waited to do their own Kramer entrance. A number of hopefully well-paid individuals wandered the grounds wearing giant heads of the characters from It’s Always Sunny and Seinfeld.