The Comedy Club Podcast · The Comedy Club of Kansas City

Sam Tripoli On How Social Media Changed Comedy, Challenges For Club Owners, & More! | Ep 46

·29 min·1 clip

When you tell your brother you have COVID, and he drives to New York.

Sam Tripoli comes in as a familiar return guest, and Dustin Kaufman opens with the memory of Tripoli being one of the first road comics back after the COVID shutdown. The two settle right into club-world talk. Tripoli remembers the odd stretch of gigs from that period, including places with food and drink bans and rooms that barely had anyone in them. He treats those dates as the kind of road work comics had to do while live comedy was restarting and still finding its footing. Kaufman keeps steering the conversation toward what club owners and comics were dealing with once rooms began opening again. From there, the discussion moves into how comedy has changed because of social media. Tripoli argues that comics can now find their own crowd instead of depending only on older industry pathways. He says the game used to reward different kinds of careers, but now anyone can build something directly if they put in the work. Kaufman presses on the promotional side of that shift, and Tripoli frames social media as the new gatekeeper. He talks about visibility, what gets boosted, what gets buried, and how the business now runs on that attention. The episode keeps tying those ideas back to club reality. Tripoli and Kaufman talk about how radio and TV do not really move club tickets the way social media does now. They also talk about the pressure on clubs to actively promote instead of waiting for people to show up. Tripoli tells a story about doing a small road tour with Chad Zumach roughly twenty years ago, then another about a Wednesday night at the Syracuse Funny Bone in a blizzard where 50 people showed up. He says he was happy with the turnout and did not care about the smaller cap because he just wanted to work. That story becomes a point about how clubs can leave money on the table when they do not push harder. Kaufman keeps returning to the idea that clubs have to attack promotion now, not just list a show and hope. Tripoli agrees that the comics who keep posting clips are the ones adapting best. He makes the case that the landscape is easier in some ways because promotion is easier, but only if comics and clubs actually keep up. The conversation stays loose and repetitive in the way real shop talk often does, with the same point circling back from different angles until it lands. Later, Tripoli talks about platform problems that have followed him for years. He says he has been shadowbanned, could not run Instagram ads for a long stretch, and lost access to both his Twitter and Instagram accounts for years. He says he finally got the accounts back and even had to pay someone to recover his Instagram. That turns the discussion back to how much modern comedy depends on systems the comic does not control. Tripoli mentions his Tinfoil Hat podcast and jokes around the edges of the whole thing, but the core stays the same: getting seen is harder than ever, and the business now belongs to whoever can keep attention moving.

As heard by us

Road stories, platform headaches, and club-level survival, told with just enough grime to feel real.

Sam Tripoli and Dustin Kaufman spend this one on road stories from the Comedy Club of Kansas City, with the reopening after the COVID shutdown sitting in the background.

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Press play if you want comedy-world shop talk that actually sounds like the comedy world.

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