Coffee shop by day, comedy club by night, the goofily named SPORTS DRINK, just off the corner of Toledano and Magazine, has gained quite a following over the past year. That was evident last month when over 300 people packed into a one-block stretch for the inaugural Toledano Street Comedy Festival.
Comedy in the New Orleans area has always been somewhat disappointing—with so many live performance venues, you’d think aspiring comics could cut their teeth at bars and progress to the regional scene, then eventually make it big nationally. After all, we’re a live show-going city, right? Yet excluding a dedicated handful of shows across the years, stand-up comedy hasn’t really taken root.
“In 2010, I started doing comedy here,” local comedian Cyrus Cooper shared with me in an interview. “The first place I performed was Carrollton Station open mic, hosted by Cassidy and Mickey Henehan. There were definitely no [comedy] clubs at that time, just bookings at bars.” Lost Love Lounge once held Tuesday night shows, and there’s still Comedy Beast at the Howlin’ Wolf Den. “There were a bunch of enterprising comedians trying to keep a scene alive with no club. The closest thing back then was La Nuit Theater on Freret, which offered mostly short-form improv.”
Between semi-weekly open mics and headliners performing in big theaters like the Saenger, there hasn’t been much regular stand-up comedy on offer in the city. Enter Andrew Stephens, SPORTS DRINK’s energetic proprietor hailing from Baton Rouge. “The local scene’s unfortunately neglected,” he said. “There’s just not many comedy venues that make sense size-wise. The Joy seats 700 to 1,000 people, Mahalia Jackson 1,000… so you can bring in really, really big names. But a lot of great comics could sell 300 to 400 tickets in a weekend, and that wouldn’t fill up a lot of theaters here. It doesn’t make financial sense for either party.”
SPORTS DRINK came onto the scene as a dedicated comedy club in early 2024. Stephens’ dream? Establish a thriving local scene that gives back to the community. In its first year, the tiny club, with its infamous 32 orange Igloo coolers as backdrop (which Stephens “got a good sale” on), has landed stand-up stars like The Sklar Brothers, Liz Miele, and Liza Treyger. “It doesn’t need frills, because the comedy will be good,” Stephens said. “The comedians we want to book want to be here, so it doesn’t feel like a strain. And we haven’t always been able to fill it perfectly… but we seat about 50 for a show, so comics coming in on the national stage will usually perform four shows over a weekend and sell out at about 200 tickets.”
They’re not just booking big names, either. “A more regional comedian—somebo dy with a lot of fans that might drive in from Mobile or something—can do a day of shows and sell around 100 tickets. It’s a very modular comedy space because you want to fill the rooms you’re in… have the laughs bounce back at you.” That’s an advantageous opportunity for aspiring comedians, like those from Lafayette and Baton Rouge who performed at the festival. “Local comics should be skeptical based on the comedy scene here for the last 10 years. There’ve been people who’ve tried and failed, people who’ve taken advantage of others, every combination of reasons why things don’t work.”
Aside from several weekly comedy shows, SPORTS DRINK has devoted serious time and resources to community-building, something unusual for a comedy club. “If we can’t do it the way we want to, it’s not worth doing,” Stephens told me at a recent Tuesday community night. At these weekly non-comedy events, people make sandwiches for community fridges. Then they participate in skill sharing, like Narcan training, or hear from local organizations, including environmental groups. The first night I went, around 10 of us made almost 100 sandwiches, followed by an info session on how to report noxious odors from cancer-causing particulate matter wafting over from the industrial business formerly known as Blackwater to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.
Left to right: Andrew Stephens, Misho Shakur, and Marcus Bond
Realistically, an inaugural, “hyperlocal” four-day, four-venue comedy fest in a city not known for comedy (at the tail end of festival season, no less) could have easily flopped. Booking over 75 comedians—including national headliners like Dulcé Sloan, Sean Patton, Ian Karmel, Shane Torres, and Tom Thakkar—at a first-year festival is ambitious. And pulling it off required more space than SPORTS DRINK has. So neighboring gym F45 housed the bigger acts, including live All Fantasy Everything podcast tapings. Banh Mi Boys and The Daily Beet joined up to host smaller shows of 45 to 60 people, featuring rising stars like Abby Govindan, Sureni Weerasekera, David Gborie, Jamel Johnson, and Jay Whittaker. Local comedy shows “Moral Panic” and “Broken News” and comedians like Saya Meads, Andrew Polk, and Marcus Bond performed across the venues, solidifying the lineup. Ticketing catered to both residents and visitors chasing laughs, and afterparties were held at local bars. SPORTS DRINK also posted dozens of plugs on social media and donated around 50 passes to beloved small businesses for promotional giveaways. The festival had free, non-ticketed attractions, too: food and retail pop-ups, a champagne stroll, a Keep It Rolling Brass Band performance, and an unplanned cameo by the N’awlins D’awlins Baby Dolls to boot.
N’awlins D’awlins Baby Dolls
Though SPORTS DRINK only has three employees, over 15 friends and family members teamed up to coordinate the event. “This is what building a scene looks like,” Stephens said. “A lot of it was, ‘Hey, who can be here at this time?’” Organizing a comedy festival, it turns out, largely happens via group chat. Everyone takes turns working as hosts, bartenders, doormen, and cleaning crew. It was decidedly ragtag: Ticket wristbands were tracked using Google Sheets. Social media promos were mostly selfie videos of Stephens on Toledano, sharing vibe checks a few times a day. “It was just a lot of people who wanted to see something cool happen, who were glad to be part of it. It honestly went better than I could’ve expected,” Stephens said afterward. Things were by no means perfect, but overall, it went mostly as planned. “People grant you grace if they see that you’re trying,” Stephens said. “The people that are here for a weird inaugural comedy festival are probably OK with getting rained on and delayed shows. A lot of that ends up not mattering.”
And it didn’t, because the festival was fun. The comedians chatted with the audience members on the street, and it felt like a block party. The jokes were entertaining—a blend of national and regional humor that the 50/50 local/tourist crowd could all appreciate. Dulcé Sloan (The Daily Show correspondent), shared new material at F45 on Saturday: “Stop dating broke dick. It’s only good because these men have nothing else to offer you,” she advised. “Mine’s a brie household, and they’re bringing Velveeta problems into it.” Jamel Johnson unpacked a suitcase of odd thrift finds onstage at Banh Mi Boys, distributing items to the appreciative crowd. On Friday, New Orleans’ own Sean Patton grumbled, “Is there even anything in these damn things,” pressed one of SPORTS DRINK’s 32 orange Igloo spigots at random, and erupted with the rest of the crowd when a surprising amount of water splashed onto the stage. On Sunday, Saya Meads publicly aired her private beef with her doctor, and Shane Torres commiserated with the audience. “I know I look like I’ve been calling it the ‘Gulf of America’ for awhile, but…”
Dulcé Sloan performs at F45
Two days later, when Stephens finally sat down for our interview on community night (after clocking over 80,000 steps in Crocs), I saw once again the day-to-day impact of SPORTS DRINK on Toledano Street. While we chatted, a neighborhood fixture, Peaches, dropped by to pick up a sandwich. “He’s just a good person,” she said of Stephens while he ran inside to get her food. “He helps me out just about every day to get something to eat. That’s why I respect him, I respect his place.”
“I was very thankful for this place when I found it,” Cyrus Cooper shared with me. “It gave me an easy social circle to fit into that was very accepting. It’s all about trying to build something fun, cool, and welcoming. There are too many things that are cool and exclusionary.”
“It’s comedy; we touch on taboo topics, but we’re not alienating the people we want here,” Stephens said. “At bare minimum, if we’re sharing a space in New Orleans it has to be inclusive of what New Orleans represents, which is queer culture, Black culture, things that have been tried to be written out of the city forever—specifically the past 20 years.” Historically, a lot of stand-up comedy’s bread and butter is punching down on marginalized communities: women, people of color, people of size, LGBTQIA+ folks. While that may sell out shows, it’s culturally poisonous.
“Something I find really nasty is that [what] the ‘free speech’ comedians want to do is often just hate speech, which freezes out a lot of great artists,” Cooper pointed out. “Some of my favorite comedians in town are trans. I feel lucky they’ve performed at SPORTS DRINK and feel they can be wholly creative here, and engage in their free speech in a space that knows they’re fully human individuals, instead of all the dehumanizing bullshit.” That sentiment rang out in many conversations over the festival weekend. “It sucks that some of the worst people on Earth are getting platformed, but that follows political chains,” Stephens said. “There’s a lot of bullshit grifting in our political world right now, and comedians are no different.”
Local newcomers to SPORTS DRINK can expect two free tickets to their first show, a bro-y yet welcoming environment, and a teeny room… for now. “It’s a weird place. It’s very stupid, but ultimately I think we prioritize the right stuff,” Stephens said. “Citibank and Northrop Grumman types probably end up sponsoring a lot of these [festivals]. We threw ours in a fucking gym.”
Next year, the festival will be back, hopefully bigger and better. “I’m not going anywhere, I have no grand Hollywood ambitions,” Stephens told me (though he did play Celtics forward Kevin McHale in the HBO series Winning Time). “Louisiana influences so much of the country and the world without getting credit for it because it’s repackaged by people with money and exported into larger markets, and comedy has been like that too. There should be more touring New Orleans comics, more people coming to see our comedy.”
Top photo: DoRi Dimplez and Isaac Kozell team up for the “Wait, What?” show
All photos by Nkechi Chibueze
