To comedy impresario DNA, the 13th Santa Cruz Comedy Festival, October 12–17, feels like a homecoming. Comics who started at the Blue Lagoon, who found their voices in DNA’s iconic comedy open mic, are returning as headliners, bringing careers that grew to national heights from a few desperately coveted minutes on the Pacific Avenue stage.
The six-day festival features 75 comedians, with headliners appearing throughout the week. On Saturday, October 17, the reunion reaches the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, where all 13 headliners will perform together at 7 p.m. For audiences, it’s an opportunity to see what became of talent that Santa Cruz helped raise.
I asked DNA what he recognized many years ago when these young comics were doing whatever it took to get stage time.
“Every single one of those comedians had perseverance,” DNA says. “You could see it.” He says some try standup and you know they’re not going to make it because they’re not going to put in the work. They’re not going to give up everything to be out there five nights a week.” DNA says those comedians came up in Santa Cruz during a time when they had shows every night of the week, a supportive scene with venues that allowed them to grow. “Comics were taking the bus several hours each week just to get five minutes in that room.”
Comedians perform stand-up because they don’t really have a choice, they have to do it. There is nowhere else for them to learn their craft but onstage and that’s what DNA gave them.
DNA says, “I love misfits and broken people. Comedy was my tribe and I wanted to give a leg up to every person that was committed to setting up the Blue, taking it down, showing up each week. It was a reciprocal experience for all of us.”
I talked to five comics who feel that playing the Santa Cruz Comedy Festival is coming home.
A Place for Misfits
Jordan Thewlis, 32, attended UCSC from 2012 to 2016 and started writing for the on-campus newspaper satire Fish Rap. He produced quarterly campus shows at the Barn Theater, where fellow students enthusiastically received jokes about student life. “But when I was starting, the Blue Lagoon was the show that was the biggest show in town. That was the premier, the one you wanted to get on.” He arrived early to set up chairs, hoping for a better spot. When heavyweights from San Francisco showed up and Jordan got bumped, he was crushed.
To get in the door at the Blue Lagoon, Thewlis says he got into the Blue Lagoon using a driver’s license a friend had found on the ground. Thewlis said, “DNA did this thing where he would throw beers into the crowd at the Blue Lagoon to get people to sit in front. I remember being 20 years old and when DNA wasn’t there, I’d do it for him when he was absent. I was 20 years old tossing beers to my friends who were also under 21.”
Performing downtown required an adjustment. He found that adults who had just gotten off work weren’t particularly interested in student life, and he tried to sound older. “I was trying to trick the audience by talking about mature things, but I learned that’s really not the right move. If you’re the outsider, you have to play the outsider.” He remembers that magic moment the first time one of his jokes made the audience really laugh hard.
“I went, ‘Amazon is the name of the largest bookstore in the world, but it’s also the name of the rainforest, where they cut down the trees to make the paper that makes those books. If you’re buying from Amazon, you’re literally buying a piece of the Amazon.’”
Now, Thewlis posts stand-up clips, builds an email list and fills theaters across the country. He is clear about his gratitude and trust for DNA. “He’s a great person. A lot of people will say, ‘I care about community and bringing people together and having a good time,’ but DNA means it,” Thewlis says. “He’s got that 1960s old hippie mentality where his goal is to bring people together.”
When a Dive Bar Became a Church
Jon Alcabes, 31, remembers the Blue Lagoon when he started in 2014 as a freshman in college. Getting an early slot as a beginner felt enormous. When he was underage, DNA met him outside and escorted him in to perform. Returning as an experienced comic produces a double vision. “It was the big, hot show,” Alcabes says. “I can look at this dumpy dive bar with all the love in my heart.” Other comics razzed him for describing the Blue Lagoon as a church. “I guess it was the aspect of service and community.”
Now living in Los Angeles and contributing to the satire site Click Hole, Alcabes looks forward to his first performance at Kuumbwa.
For Natasha Collier, 28, the connection began during her sophomore year at UCSC. At 19, she needed an escort in and out of the Blue Lagoon for her first set. What kept her returning was the company: people from different walks of life who probably wouldn’t otherwise have hung out together. Comedy gave them something to share. After graduating with a history degree, she moved to San Diego, and then Los Angeles, continuing because she couldn’t stop. Onstage she talks about a houseless man who surprised her on the street by saying he wished he could buy a calendar featuring her every month. She concludes that unhoused men have an advantage over men with houses when delivering compliments. “If a guy’s got a house, he’s just trying to get you back to it,” she says. “The unhoused are just doing it for the love of the game.”
Collier says she loves the homecoming nature of the festival. “I get to reconnect with all those early people who are the ones that kept me going in the first place.”
The Reluctant Mentor
Tony Zavala says the Blue Lagoon is where “I started going to comedy before I started doing comedy.” A UCSC student, he began attending the free Blue Lagoon shows around 2012. Heartbreak helped push him onto a stage in 2016, first at the Poet and the Patriot.
Zavala calls DNA a “reluctant mentor,” someone other comics looked to for experience even while he recognized that he was still learning himself. Zavala lives in Los Angeles but still regards Santa Cruz as a second home. If comedy hadn’t required him to move, he would still live here.
His relationship material includes declaring that, as a comedian who likes validation, his love language is words of affirmation. After his partner delivers an extravagant statement of devotion, he reconsiders: “Maybe it’s physical touch, actually.”
I asked Tony what advice he would give a young comic. He said, “Don’t take advice.” When I asked DNA about his mentoring strategy, he said that if they wanted input, his response would probably be short, abrupt, and to the point.
DNA says, “I was less a paternal figure and more like the HR person on the set of Kids where the HR person is autistic. If they needed to just vent about something, I created space. I didn’t always say the right thing, but I tried to do the right thing. That was my people pleasing gene.”
Tony Zavala remembers Santa Cruz open mics having something beginners elsewhere might envy: actual audiences. Comic Curtis Taylor III agrees, “It never was really, like, the amount of people in the room. It was the value that people were in the room, you know?”
Curtis Taylor III came from San Jose, driving Highway 17 to the Blue Lagoon beginning in 2011. To shake off what he calls the “fighter pilot experience” of that drive, he would dance.
“I would drive in coming from that crazy ass drive down that hill, and I was like, okay, I need to relax, because I just sat through a fighter pilot experience, so I would dance, and then walk over to DNA, ‘What number am I?’ If The Blue was a comedy club, it would be my home club.”
Thirteen in One Room
For DNA, inviting these performers back as headliners feels like a “Hakuna Matata” moment. He looks forward to Lara Beitz, who tours with Joe Rogan and Marc Maron. He’s also excited about Toni Nagy, whose online following is more than a million. Nagy will teach a somatic body workshop earlier Saturday, then perform comedy that night at the Kuumbwa. DNA describes her comic mission as “tearing down the patriarchy.” He says every show has headliners sprinkled into it, “but the only place where you can see all 13 is at the Kuumbwa.”
Elsewhere, the festival offers distinctly different evenings. Saturday’s Blue Lagoon show is raunchy. Alley Oop, in the former Poet and the Patriot space, offers an early, intimate show in a room DNA says holds just 50 people. Woodhouse presents an extravaganza: three hours, 21 comedians and three headliners. Free shows offer another route into the festival, including Saturday stops at Streetlight Records, Get Faded Barbershop and Abbott Square. Comedy fans can wander downtown and spend an evening laughing without buying a ticket.
“This is one of the only festivals that has no sponsors, and no submission fees for comedians,” DNA says. It is “curated by a comic, for comics, and for comedy fans. The ticketed shows revenue pays for all the comedians and expenses. In theory. Santa Cruz is the perfect place to host a comedy festival. I have an incredibly big vision for this festival and am always looking for people to collaborate with.”
DNA resists the father-figure label, yet speaks with a father’s bittersweet affection, “So, you know, to me, they’re still, like, the kids. But they’re all growing up.”
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