Funny Business

The Berkshires Makes Room For The Stand-Up Comedy Boom

By Scott Edward Anderson

Photos By Gregory Cherin

July 2026

Read Berkshire Magazine's July 2026 Issue.

Comedy in the Berkshires has long been something of a side dish, competing with the main cultural menu of Tanglewood’s world-class music, Shakespeare & Company plays, and dance at Jacob's Pillow. At least that's how things used to be.

But the global live comedy boom appears to have hit home.

Comedians performed live for 12.3 million fans worldwide last year, according to box office figures reported to Pollstar for 2025. From comedy clubs with 100-seat rooms to arenas with capacity crowds and even an occasional stadium, the overall gross at events featuring comedy headliners reached a staggering $837 million.

Netflix has aired more than 350 stand-up specials since 2013, turning club comics into household names. In addition to comedians streaming in your living rooms and selling out arenas, audiences also are looking for venues closer to home to get their live comedy fix. The timing couldn’t be better to ramp up live comedy shows in the region— and that’s exactly what’s happening in the Berkshires. Stand-up is staking its claim on a cultural landscape that always had a taste for a well-delivered punchline.

Dan St. Germain, a stand-up comic and television writer who writes for some of the sharpest comedy acts in the business and who calls this region home, will take the stage on July 3 at the Indigo Room, an intimate performance space located right next door to the historic Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center. Cathy Ladman, a veteran of The Tonight Show who has been doing stand-up since 1989, is making what she calls her Berkshire debut with two shows at the Indigo Room on July 11. Tom Papa brings his Grateful Bread Tour to the Mahaiwe on July 18. “Weird Al” Yankovic is performing at Tanglewood on July 21. Robby Hoffman will be at MASS MoCA’s Hunter Center on July 24, and Jay Jurden performs at Club B10 on August 29. The Ivy League of Comedy Tour featuring Moody McCarthy, J-L Cauvin, and Jane Condon takes the stage at the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield on September 12. And David Sedaris, something of a Berkshire regular, returns to the Colonial on October 1.

The groundwork was laid long before last fall’s opening of the Mahaiwe’s Indigo Room. ZipStohr Comedy was founded in 2005and produced over 60 shows at the former Crowne Plaza in Pittsfield, the Colonial, Barrington Stage, Adams Theater, and other venues. “I’m certainly proud that ZipStohr promoted stand-up comedy for nearly 20 years,” says Rick Stohr, who co-founded the series with his late business partner, Dave “Zip” Zerbato. The names they broughtto the Berkshires are, as Stohr puts it, a “comedy Mount Rushmore”: Nate Bargatze, John Mulaney, Bill Burr, Nikki Glaser, and Michael Che—many of them before most of the country knew who they were. ZipStohr eventually wound down, a casualty of Covid and of audiences, Stohr says, whose attention spans shortened and whose phones became harder to put down. For now, ZipStohr remains on the sidelines.

Into the void stepped Tom Attila Lewis, a Berkshire resident of 25 years who has been producing comedy here for several years, including open mics at the former Rumpy’s Tavern in Lenox and professional shows at The Well in Great Barrington. He has made a slow and deliberate effort to build what he calls a sustainable local scene in contrast to “carpetbagger” shows that roll in and disappear. “What I was really doing was trying to cultivate local performers,” he says, “because that’s how it’s sustainable.”

When Michael Beuth, senior manager of programming and booking at the Mahaiwe, approached Lewis about programming and hosting the Indigo Room, Lewis saw the partnership as stand-up comedy finally getting the institutional home it had earned. “Kudos to them for stepping up to do this,” Lewis says. “We have a whole bunch of theaters here, but no one else is really doing this.”

THE OTHER ST. GERMAIN

If you haven’t heard of Dan St. Germain, that’s more or less the point. “I’ve been on probably 25 TV shows,” he says, with cheerful resignation. “Nobody knows whoI am.” His credits prove otherwise: He was one of the writers behind Michelle Wolf’s infamous White House Correspondents’ Dinner appearance; he has staffed Glaser’s show; he has multiple development deals with Dan Soder; and he was in the writers’ room for Netflix’s The Roast of Kevin Hart. He performed stand-up on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and made multiple appearances on Conan. He delivers dark, self-lacerating comedy with manic energy, sharp storytelling, and just enough vulnerability to make the cynicism land—and offers a metaphor for where he fits in the comedy landscape: “I’m not Joe Montana, but I’m a really good quarterback’s coach.”

St. Germain didn’t come to the Berkshires for the comedy scene; he came for his father, the playwright Mark St. Germain, whose work is so woven into the fabric of Barrington Stage Company that a 132-seat theater bears his name. Mark’s house in Sheffield is where Dan and his wife, Sara J. Allocco-St. Germain, now live. A prominent New York-based casting director and producer known for her extensive work across film, television, and digital media, Sara frequently collaborates with Dan on creative projects, including their horror movie podcast, The It Couple. When the pandemic arrived, Dan and Sara stayed, and the hills turned out to be exactly what he needed. “If I was in the city during Covid, I would have walked into the ocean,” he says. “It would have felt like such a trap.” Instead, he found himself in peace and quiet, in a place that had a way of recalibrating things. “You sit down, and you’re like, ‘Oh, okay, all that stuff is just stuff. And this is what it’s about.’”

He is clear-eyed, even affectionately skeptical, about what the Berkshires does and doesn’t offer for stand-up. “The Berkshires is a great place to write long- form for sure,” he says. “Any vacation town is a hard town to do stand-up in because they have a better option”— meaning hiking, swimming, a summer evening outdoors. He calls it “an eating- a-fennel-salad-outside place,” not an obvious comedy destination. Yet he looks forward to performing here on July 3, in part because the Indigo Room represents genuine progress. “A lot of the places I’ve done in this area are nice,” he says, “but there are people playing board games.” He pauses. “So, this is a real step up for me in this area.” Coming from a comic whose delivery runs at manic pitch even when the material turns tender, that’s not a small thing to say about a 100-seat room in Great Barrington.

A COMIC WORTH LISTENING TO

Cathy Ladman is, by her own reckoning, the only performer to have appeared with Johnny, Jay, and Jimmy on The Tonight Show, and has spent decades developing an act that is, in her own words, “very autobiographical,” drawn from her own experience but built on what she calls a “universality” that makes it resonate as everyone’s story. The observational precision of her comedy— the way it catches the small truths people recognize but rarely say out loud—is exactly what makes her a natural fit for Berkshire audiences, who tend to reward intelligence and attentiveness over noise. And the Berkshires, it turns out, is not entirely unfamiliar territory for her. Her sister lives in South Egremont, which means July 11 is something more than a booking date; it’s a chance to bring her family and friends to see her perform.

Ladman is not an act that runs on din and drinks, and the Berkshires crowd— educated, curious, willing to sit still for something—suits her sensibility. She’s looking forward to the intimacy of the Indigo Room and to the kind of audience that intimacy tends to attract. Ladman’s act demands attention in a particular way. “People need to listen to what I talk about,” she says, without apology. Alison Larkin, the British-American performer whose one- woman show Grief...A Comedy appeared at the Mahaiwe this summer (see our profile in the May/June issue), describes the local audience as offering “an intelligent crowd for the right kind of comedy, a deeper kind of comedy.” Ladman, with her 35 years of carefully observed material, is exactly that kind of comic.

The fact that Ladman is doing two shows on July 11 itself is an important data point. “I am really looking forward to it,” she says. “I know a lot of people who are coming to the shows, and I hope that a lot of people I don’t know come to the show.” She’ll be bringing new material to the Berkshires, having recently performed a show with 16 new bits in 50 minutes. “By the beginning of July,” says Ladman, “I’m sure I’ll have something I haven’t even written yet.”

AN INTIMATE SPACE FOR COMEDY

At the Indigo Room, which has sold out every comedy night it has hosted thus far, Beuth is discovering that people will show up, repeatedly, for a good hour of stand-up at a reasonable price.

The audience that will fill the room is, as St. Germain puts it, genuinely hard to predict. “It’s kind of fun in this area because it’s like the combo of yuppie, hippie, and ‘Masshole,’” says St. Germain. “You never know which one you’re gonna get.” Lewis sees that mix as a creative asset; comics come up from New York specifically to work in front of what he calls “real people,” crowds that don’t share the hyper-specific references of a Brooklyn club at midnight. “You might destroy there,” he says of those rooms,“but as soon as you go 20 miles outside of New York City, people are just looking at you like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’”

A Berkshire crowd, in other words, forces comics to find the broader human note, the kind of comedy provided by headliners like Jon Stewart, who made his Tanglewood debut this summer; John Mulaney, who has appeared at the Mahaiwe and Tanglewood; Bob Marley, who performed at the Colonial in June; and Patton Oswalt and Paul Reiser, who each were at the Mahaiwe last year.

“It’s a food-and-drink business,”St. Germain says, and he means it. Servers’ tips rely on the room being full and entertained. Beuth has structured the Indigo Room around that reality carefully: reasonably priced tickets, wine and beer available, and doors open an hour early for conversation before the lights go down.

The broader comedy industry is undergoing a transformation that makes live rooms more valuable, not less, St. Germain notes. “The old pipeline of the Comedy Central half-hour, then the hour, thenHBO special is gone,” he says. In its place, a comic’s Instagram clips can outperform their Tonight Show appearance. “Ultimately,” he says, “it’s still a put-butts-in-seats business.” And the Berkshires, with its mix of year-round locals and culturally hungry seasonal visitors, has seats worth filling.

Beuth is not inclined to overthink the momentum. “People keep coming out, and they have faith in what we’re doing,” he says. “I wouldn’t see why we’d stop.”

Asked to define what he represents or what he’s building toward as a comedian, St. Germain finds the question almost philosophically unanswerable, yet answers it anyway. “How can anyone be certain about anything?” he says. “Everything is constantly evolving around us. The world is literally shaking beneath our feet, and we’re trying to hold onto this false sense of self. So, I guess my brand is ‘I don’t know.’”

But what is known is that the Berkshires appears well on its way to building a sustainable comedy ecosystem, and the momentum is only growing. Clubs, theaters, and small rooms are proving that audiences show up year-round, and younger comics like St. Germain keep returning, drawn by the rare chance to write, recharge, and workshop new material in front of genuinely receptive crowds. The region has always had culture in abundance, and now it’s embracing an exciting new truth: that laughter, in the form of stand-up, belongs here, too.