Erie's Simmering Comedy Scene

Rustin McCann

Flagship City Comedy founder Anthony Morelli (40 Under 40 Class of 2022) has had a formative hand in creating Erie's local comedy scene and with it the annual Flagship City Comedy Festival coming up in April, featuring nationally touring talent alongside local acts.

Beginning on Wednesday, April 22 and wrapping up on Saturday, April 25, expect to hear plenty of laughter around Erie. For comedy fans, Erie's Flagship City Comedy Fest has swiftly ingrained itself as a local holiday of humor: multiple evenings of stand-up comedy showcases, events, and nationally-touring headliners bringing audiences to hysterics in venues across the city.

Headliners this year include well-known comics such as Tony "T-Robe" Robinson, Mary Santora, Brent Terhune, and Luke Null, all performing at the 1020 Collective, as well as Tien Tran who will conclude the festival with a show at the Erie Art Museum. Venues for showcases include Black Monk Brewery, Calamari's Squid Row, Hazards Social Pub, and King's Rook Club.

"I'm most excited to see people laugh," says Anthony Morelli, founder of Flagship City Comedy and 40 Under 40 Class of 2022 alum, who organizes the festival and has been instrumental in growing the local comedy scene in recent years. He's particularly excited about closing this year's festival with Erie native Tien Tran, a former member of Chicago's Second City whose credits include the Hulu sitcom How I Met Your Father and the Peacock comedy series Mr. Throwback.

Since its inception in 2023, Morelli has worked ceaselessly to expand the festival. He has also been instrumental in building (pretty much from scratch) a local comedy infrastructure throughout the region to nurture local talent. In 2022, Morelli told me that the local comedy scene was "bubbling." Today? "It's at a nice simmer," he says. "Local comics have stepped up in a big way."

He's not joking. I tell him that a decade ago, I probably couldn't have named one Erie-based comic off of the top of my head. Today, I can recite 10. If you've ever considered getting up in front of people to tell jokes, there are now an abundance of opportunities. Flagship City Comedy has been hosting open mics at 1020 Collective on the first and third Mondays of each month (which will begin again in September). Connor O'Kane has been doing Tuesday open mics at The Set Closet (located inside ASCEND Erie) along with bringing in touring headliners. Kellar's Magic & Comedy Club have hosted autism-friendly open mics along with a comedy competition.

It's created, in a relatively short amount of time, a rather tight-knit community. "Each and every [comic] has taught me something," Morelli says.

Nicole Walkow Benedi is one of these comics. She (along with husband, fellow comic, and horror author Jamie Benedi, also known by his pen name R.J. Benetti) will be one of a dozen local comics performing alongside the 40 who will be gracing Erie stages during the festival. The duo also have been essential in growing the scene, hosting open mics at Coach's Sports Bar & Grill (monthly on the second and fourth Wednesdays) and The Hippie Hideout (Thursdays).

Benedi's stand-up odyssey began with a quarter-life crisis. In her mid-20s, she was living in Washington, D.C., miserable at her job, and going through a "never-ending breakup." On more than one occasion during venting sessions, friends told her how funny she was and asked if she'd ever tried stand-up.

"I had heard the same thing years earlier when I was a disgruntled teenager lifeguarding at Presque Isle, airing my grievances about annoying beach-goers and my deep aversion to Dave Matthews Band," Benedi recalls. She'd never seriously considered it though. That changed when she saw that the DC Improv was offering a stand-up comedy class.

"I figured I had nothing to lose," she says. She signed up without telling anybody. She soon wrote her first joke, which involved Richard Simmons, cocaine, and his head exploding. "No one laughed," Benedi recalls. "After that, I did what every person that can't handle criticism and thereby isn't successful in show business does: I quit."

She stopped attending classes, but after "a lot of pacing, a few panic attacks, calling out of work, and the teacher's goading," she agreed to come to the improv's graduation show. Once there, the host introduced her, she walked out on stage, grabbed the microphone, and just started talking.

"And somehow, they started laughing and kept laughing. It was the strangest thing," she remembers. The fear and anxiety? Gone. "I remember thinking, 'Oh… I like this.'"

Again though, she didn't stick with it. As she describes it, her comedy journey became a series of starting and stopping, but she kept finding her way back to the stage. More time passed and she was going through another "miserable phase of life." She showed up to a poorly attended open mic on a whim and, from then on, she was part of the D.C. stand-up community. She finally found her people – including the love of her life, Jamie.

The two were soon looking to make a move and considered Los Angeles and San Diego, but after a visit, neither city felt right. Jamie though had always enjoyed their visits to Erie. During one visit, they decided to check out the housing market. The rest is history.

"Most comedians move to New York or Los Angeles to advance their careers. We moved to Erie, Pennsylvania," quips Benedi. Part of their calculus was that they were within driving distance of Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Toronto. "Fortunately, when we moved here, Erie already had a comedy scene that was growing thanks to Anthony Morelli."

Amanda Daniels is among the local comics featured in the upcoming Flagship City Comedy Festival – she got her start in comedy at open mic nights as she worked out her material and got comfortable enough not to feel like she was going to pee her pants and throw up simultaneously.  (Contributed photo)

"I'm always impressed by the national talent that Anthony Morelli is able to bring to our city," observes Erie comic Amanda Daniels. She highlights how great the local scene is now. "I'm always in awe of the talent that we have here and just how open and welcoming people are," she emphasizes. It's a consensus she hears from comics from other cities in other comedy scenes: it's unusual for people to be so nice. "Which is funny to me because I think sometimes Erie people get a bad reputation for being curmudgeons," she says, adding jokingly, "So take that, Tom Segura!"

That, of course, is wisecrack about comic Tom Segura's trash-talking of Erie on his podcast ("I hate Erie, Pennsylvania so much" he said to a giggling and excitable Joe Rogan, calling Erieites "a bunch of losers") which turned into a farcical feud with Erie weatherman David Wolter, culminating in a one-on-one basketball game which currently has 1.2 million views on YouTube. Yeah, that was a weird sentence to type out.

As a child, Daniels remembers memorizing one-liner jokes off of a "You Know You're Getting Old When" poster at her doctor's office, which she then performed for her parents and their friends. "I've always loved stand-up," she says. When everybody in the house was asleep, she remembers sneaking downstairs at night so that she could watch An Evening at the Improv.

Fast-forward to January 2023 and a close friend sent her a text message with a link about open mic nights in Erie. She'd been wanting to try stand-up since adding it to a list of goals for 2020. "That didn't work out so great," Daniels says. "I just ended up watching Tiger King and crying a lot." She had already been writing and working on a five-minute set though, so she was interested, but also terrified. She emailed Morelli. Should she come and watch an open mic night first or dive right in?

"I say dive right in," Morelli, now one of her biggest cheerleaders, replied reassuringly. Once the weight of just getting on stage and doing it is lifted off your shoulders, it becomes much easier, he told her.

So, she went. "It was jam-packed with probably 60 people in the audience," she recalls. Such a crowd was highly unusual for an open mic. "First time?" comic Jim Franks, now a good friend of hers, leaned over and asked. She was sweating profusely and thought she might pee her pants and throw up. You'll do fine, Franks encouraged.

She went up, did her five minutes, and got some pretty good laughs. She was hooked. "It was a huge adrenaline rush," Daniels says. Three years later, she still loves it – but yes, sometimes she still feels like she's going to throw up. The community has been a lifeline too, especially as she's worked remotely from home over the past decade. "I find everyone to be incredibly supportive and genuinely happy for each other when good things happen," she adds. "When I see my friends get up there and kill, the sense of pride and joy I have is almost indescribable."

Benedi agrees. The friendships and watching other comedians grow has been the coolest part of being in the community. "We've seen people try stand-up for the very first time at one of our mics and then eventually get booked on paid professional shows with Anthony and other bookers around the region," she says. "Watching someone go from their first nervous set to getting real stage time is really exciting."

Comic Nicole Benedi (Contributed photo)

For Morelli, he stresses the importance of fostering a positive and inviting environment. He recognizes that many people in the open mic audiences are there because they want to try it out, but are hesitant or want to watch how it's done first. By the end of an evening, after seeing the fun being had, some will even ask if they can go up. "It's a very deep pride I have in knowing that what myself and others are doing is helping people achieve goals," Morelli remarks, adding that getting up on stage can even be life-changing for many people.

"Long term, we just want to keep building momentum," says Benedi. "More comedians improving, more shows happening, and more audiences discovering stand-up the way it's meant to be experienced: live." If you're considering hitting up the stage at an open mic? Just stop by, Benedi says. You can participate or you can just watch and see how comics develop over time.

"Honestly, just do it!" says Daniels. "Life is short. As my friend and fellow comedian Brian Bailey has told me countless times: 'None of this matters.'"

Bailey agrees: if the thought has crossed your mind, just give it a try. "You may find that stand-up is not for you, but at least you'll know for sure," he says. "But," he warns, "you could end up addicted to stand-up and find yourself driving three hours for three minutes at an out-of-town open mic."

"Open mics are where you bring life to a new joke, and stumble and replace words until it feels comfortable," says Morelli, a reminder that nobody is expected to be a seasoned veteran at an open mic. From there, one moves onto showcases where crowds can be more receptive and jokes can be refined and tightened further. Ticketed shows then are very fun. They can also be intimidating, Morelli warns, knowing that audience members paid money and are expecting a comic's best material with a performance meant to feel natural and unrehearsed.

"The best way to get better at stand-up is pretty simple: keep doing stand-up," advises Benedi.

Opinions vary online, but you will often see comics say it takes a decade (or longer) to get really good on stage. Refining jokes is a consistent and ongoing process in stand-up. "It took me a long time to realize I can embellish, or to plainly put it, lie, to make the story funnier," says Morelli. He notes that a lot of jokes fail. It's figuring out which ones work and then figuring how to make them even better.

Then there is the business side of it too. Through his work with open mics and organizing the festival, Morelli has enjoyed the mutual support of the arts scene as well as developing relationships with small businesses around Erie. "The constant shifting behind the scenes like venue changes, artist cancellations or substitutions, organizing activities that show off Erie for 30-plus people while they are in town each day, understanding and signing contracts, and much more have shown me the well of patience I didn't know I was capable of before," Morelli explains.

Each year, the festival has grown and improved – and each year, so has Morelli's confidence that the next festival will be even better than the last. Improvement means not just bigger and better venues and shows, but consistency and seeing comedy that is both unconventional and fun.

"Our goal is really just to help grow the scene by giving local comedians a place to hone their craft every week," Benedi says of her and Jamie's ambitions. As for the Flagship City Comedy Fest, Benedi appreciates how it's just a really fun and celebratory week that connects comedians and audiences, showcasing comics from around the country while simultaneously "shining a spotlight on the local comedy scene."

Daniels is particularly excited to see Mary Santora and Tien Tran, but is also looking forward to performing and meeting new comedians. "I will be out and about for the duration of the fest just creepin' around and mingling," she says. Beyond the festival, she is also eager to see how the community continues to evolve as she keeps writing, getting stage time, and trying out her jokes in other cities. She also wants people to know the importance of the local hosts in this process, who often do a tricky and thankless job.

"Basically, my goal is for other people to keep doing all of that hard work so I can show up with my jokes, pee my pants a little bit every now and then, spiral about whether I did a good job or not, threaten to quit comedy when I don't get laughs, threaten to quit my day job and just do comedy whenever I get big laughs, and repeat the vicious cycle over and over again," Daniels jokes.

On top of her stand-up and hosting duties, Benedi recently completed a feature-length screen adaptation of her husband's horror-comedy novel The Slappening. She's also "toying with the idea" of recording a comedy album in her basement and adding in her own strange audience sounds and interactions. It's an idea that she admits could be "terrible and obnoxious," but that doesn't deter her. "That's part of the creative process," she says. "If it makes me laugh, I'll do it. And if it makes you laugh… well, that's nice too."

Morelli plans to continue cheerleading for the Erie arts scene and become even more involved in cross promoting events around the region. "When I feel like I'm all out of gas and the festival comes and I get to see the community I helped build laughing and having a good time," Morelli concludes, "it strikes me that this is why I do it."

On Instagram, you can find Morelli at @anthonymorellicomedy, Benedi at @nickyshowbiz, Daniels at @amandadanielscomedy, Bailey at @brianmbailey77, and Franks at @jimisabrand. Give them all a follow.

All times, locations, and ticket information for the Flagship City Comedy Fest can be found at flagshipcitycomedyfest.com.

Jonathan Burdick runs the public history project Rust & Dirt. He can be reached at jburdick@eriereader.com