Which apartment building plays host to its very own comedy show, and soon its own comedy festival?

Every once in a while, you'll see a live stand-up comedy show somewhere you'd least expect to, like, say, someone's apartment. Chris Gethard (Comedy Central's Big Lake, UCB-NY star) did this as stunt once.

In Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood, however, there's an apartment building that not only hosts its very own weekly comedy show for its residents and friends, but also is about to throw a weeklong comedy festival in a variety of spaces open and not-so-open throughout the building. Welcome to CastleBraid. As profiled earlier this summer in the New York Times, CastleBraid is more than gentrifying Bushwick all by itself, with a complex that caters to artists with a recording studio, lending library and screening room. And with a marketing director who also is a stand-up comic in Taylor Clark, maybe it's not so surprising to learn that he decided to carve out a spot for comedy within the building.

Castlebraid Comedian Scott Moran has produced the weekly show on Thursdays for the past four months — I was at a show the week they moved it from a vacant apartment to the screening room — though the weekly show will be dark for the next few weeks to prepare for the Castlebraid Comedy Festival: Sept. 20-25, 2010. The Tumblr has been releasing names of the performers a couple at a time each day. So far, they've said they'll include performances from: Andrea Rosen, Kurt Braunohler, Adira Amram, Adam Cayton-Holland, Ted Alexandro, Julian McCullough, Dan St. Germain, Victor Varnado, Sara Schaefer, Ben Kronberg, Reggie Watts, Barbara Holm, Emmett Montgomery, Ali Wong, Mike Lawrence, Matt D., Katina Corrao, Ryan Hamilton, Brooke Van Poppelen, Phil Hanley, Sheng Wang, Mark Normand, Jared Logan, Seth Herzog, Louis Katz, Team Submarine, Sean O'Connor, Calise Hawkins, Rob Cantrell and David Angelo. More names are sure to follow.

Moran tells me "the goal is not to have another big-names-only festival. I really want to showcase my peer group (the up-and-comers) and am trying to get as many of them on as possible. There will be about 70 comics total when I'm done booking."

He'll also be screening Jordan Brady's documentary, I Am Comic, for the fest, and is looking into other films to show, too. "The best thing about this festival, and what inspired the idea is that there are so many great areas of the building to do shows in," Moran told me. Aside from the screening room, he also plans to throw a different show each night in a different location in the building, from the lobby to the yoga room to the rooftop to even the turf balcony of a resident's apartment. Stay tuned for more details as they're released on the Castlebraid Comedy Festival site.

Sean L. McCarthy

Editor and publisher since 2007, when he was named New York's Funniest Reporter. Former newspaper reporter at the New York Daily News, Boston Herald and smaller dailies and community papers across America. Loves comedy so much he founded this site.

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