GarageComedy.com started in 2003 in an actual two car garage with a show called “Live From a Garage in East LA” although the show wasn’t live it was the idea of doing a free spirited live show from a garage that continues as the inspiration of GarageComedy.com to this day.

In order to understand the spirit of Garage Comedy please indulge in this brief digression about the history of “club” comedy, which is comedy performed in nightclubs. Since the death of Vaudeville the world of Comedy has been segregated into small groups according to the type of comedy performance and the level the particular performer is at career wise. In the 80’s if you went to a comedy club, you would go see a guy wearing jeans and a blazer behind a microphone doing monologue observations with an almost scientific three laughs per minute joke ratio. For many years this style of comedy was the only style of comedy. In the 90’s they invented “alternative” comedy which was more story telling and less scientific but still essentially a guy behind a microphone talking. On the other side of the Comedy tracks long before the 70’s, troupes of comic actors had been performing what is know as Sketch Comedy, which is scripted scenic comedy bits. These shows were done mostly in theaters sometimes in comedy theaters but rarely in nightclubs. Sometime in the late 80’s comic actors starting performing Improv Comedy, which is improvised comedy scenes. Improv Comedy was also a type of performance that was relegated to theaters. Along the sidelines was the neglected little brother of comedy, the Variety Arts, comedy music, magic, puppetry, freak acts, rubber faces, pretty much anyone who performed outside of a theater troupe and used any kind of “prop”. Variety Artists weren’t even associated with comedy let alone allowed to perform at comedy clubs. The last type of performer the newest branch of comedy, Internet Comedy Video makers started popping up around 2000 even currently their only outlet is the internet itself, which isn’t the same as playing a film in front of a live audience.

When Val Myers arrived in Los Angeles in 1995 she was hoping to perform her own strange brand of comedy at nightclubs where the audiences were more enlightened then the clubs in Seattle. Instead she discovered the audiences weren’t the problem, there just wasn’t a venue for any type of comedy performance that didn’t fit into the two very separate worlds of mainstream and alternative comedy. Val joined the Groundlings (a sketch comedy school/troupe) eager to obtain a receptive stage. Again Val was met with disappointment found the sketch comedy world to be more restrictive then the comedy club scene. In 1997 she decided to start booking and performing at her own show. She started at a club in Silverlake with a show called “Powerful Feeling” a mix of alternative comedy and sketch, which grew to 100 plus comics in two years. The LA Weekly called it “punk rock sketch comedy”. Eventually the nightclub was condemned and turned into a Sushi restaurant but Val kept starting new shows; Ben Slabby, Junior Farcity, Look at Me, $ellOut and many more. In 2000 Val scored a gig where she could do live comedy (audio/video) on the Internet. This show changed Val she was determined to combine the nightclub comedy show with the Internet and finally in 2003 while shooting videos in an actual garage she came up with the idea for GarageComedy.com. In 2005 Val started “Garagecomedy.com The Show” at El Cid in Silverlake and at long last the show is broadcast live on the Internet.

On any given night at “Garage Comedy Mondays” you will see: homemade videos by funny kids no one has ever heard of, seasoned comics trying out new things, random absurd performances free from the formulaic confines of traditional sketch comedy or traditional stand-up comedy, experimentation with technology like playing with sound mixers, iPods and video projection. Some bits that can best be described as performance art. Pranks, audience participation. Even variety acts like magic and freak show stuff.