Here’s Why Our Comedy Festival Looks Different This Year

Hell Yes Fest runs in New Orleans November 15th-19th

Hell Yes Fest has never once looked the same. One year it was extremely heavy on stand-up with just a shred of improv and sketch and most of those improv and sketch groups were local.

Another year we had a couple of stand-up headliners and then curated the rest of the performers from recommendations or people we met while on various tours.

The next year we had half a dozen headliner acts, the next year we had about ten, last year we had over fifteen, including our biggest act ever, Sarah Silverman in our biggest venue yet, The Saenger Theater. We used to not take submissions, then we started taking submissions. This festival has never once looked the same.

While nobody on HYF’s staff regrets the star power of last year’s festival, we don’t see a universe in which we go back to that style of booking anytime soon. We got away from the heart of HYF which is a collection of unique, weird shows served up in a walkable environment that are accessible to all.

What I’ve learned is that when you have a couple of headliners, the festival becomes about them. Those are the people the press wants to interview, those are the shows that people buy tickets to.

When you have a lot of headliners, the festival becomes about wrangling the talent. So much time and energy spent in that department instead of where I believe we excel — giving those on-the-rise people a platform to perform to hungry audiences and network with one another.

This year we are sans traditional headliners. This festival is about the art of comedy and the power of community more than anything. Not that it can’t be about these while also booking headliners — many festivals do this very well — it’s just specifically not what we are trying to do at this moment in time.

We want to feature weird format shows that we love (like Part 2 or Sudden Death). We want to spotlight shows that anchor comedy scenes in other cities (like Portland’s FlyAss Jokes or Huntsville’s Epic Comedy Hour). We want Hell Yes Fest to feel like a genre film festival — no summer blockbusters or red carpets but you’ll never forget that time that weird thing happened.

Another quirk to Hell Yes Fest 2017 is that we’re using this as a platform to launch several “mini-fests” in 2018, thematic takeovers of The New Movement in both Austin and New Orleans. Chicago Invasion, BABE WKND, and Thalia Night are all shows at Hell Yes Fest, and their own standalone multi-day events in 2018.

Crossing fingers that New Orleans audiences arrive in force, down to laugh, clap, cheer for the shows that we’ve put in front of them despite the people performing not oozing with TV credits that a non-comedy nerd would recognize (yet!).

We’ve morphed, evolved, changed, heightened, and scaled back. We’ve listened and learned. We’re still figuring this thing out but are very much in love with the process. We don’t know what 2018’s festival will look like because we don’t know how this one is going to be received. And we’re very much okay with that.

Buy your tickets, passes, and learn more about Hell Yes Fest here.