To say that the comedy scene in Burlington has come a long way in the past decade would be an understatement. I still recall the way local aspiring standups milled around shows at Nectar’s and the Monkey House, hoping to pop onstage between punk bands to tell jokes to a boisterous, heavily intoxicated crowd that wanted to mosh more than laugh.
Trust me, you haven’t seen cringe until you’ve watched a neophyte comic trying to be funny at a Monday open mic between Sublime covers and poetry readings. But that was the standard comedy showing in Burlington not so long ago.
Nathan Hartswick and Natalie Miller changed all that. Oh, they’ll hand-wave and mention lots of comedians and friends who helped establish Burlington as a comedy hot spot, both as a touring destination for big-name comics such as Tig Notaro, Marc Maron and Maria Bamford and as a springboard for local comics who’ve gone on to bigger stages elsewhere. But when Hartswick and Miller, who are married, opened Vermont Comedy Club in downtown Burlington in November 2015, they gave the budding comedy scene something it needed desperately: a home.
“To be perfectly honest, we bit off more than we could chew when we opened this place,” Hartswick told me as I sat down with the couple at the club’s bar last week. “We had to bust our asses for the last decade to make sure it didn’t fail.”
“Any sane person would have closed a hundred times over,” Miller added. “But that just wasn’t an option for us — we weren’t going to turn back or sell the place. So we made it work.”
Today, the duo can look out at a completely transformed comedy scene. Their venue has become an essential part of Burlington’s nightlife and helped launch the careers of nationally touring standups including Tina Friml and Carmen Lagala, as well as Ash Diggs and Catrina Hughes, who joined the famous Second City comedy troupe as faculty members in New York and Chicago, respectively.
Miller and Hartswick estimate that more than 1,000 students have come through the club’s standup, improv and sketch classes and workshops, laying the foundation for a robust scene of standup comics and improv teams. (You can catch several of those standup students at this weekend’s Vermont’s Funniest Comedian contest, Friday and Saturday, November 14 and 15.)
But growth has come at a cost for the couple, physically, emotionally and financially, they said. As they approached the club’s 10-year anniversary, they realized it was time to make changes and plan for the future.
To that end, last week Miller and Hartswick launched Vermont Comedy Arts, a 501c3 nonprofit organization that they hope will allow them to continue growing the Green Mountain comedy scene while also ensuring that Vermont Comedy Club will thrive into the future.
All of the club’s comedy classes, its standup contest, the Big Pond Improv Festival and basically any event other than standup performances will become the responsibility of Vermont Comedy Arts. Operating as a nonprofit will allow the new organization to pay for programming by raising tax-deductible donations, instead of pulling from the for-profit club’s bottom line. Miller and Hartswick are looking for a location in Burlington to house a new 50-seat black box theater and office space that will serve as VCA headquarters. Miller will become the nonprofit’s executive director; Hartswick will run the club.
“This entire time, we’ve been asking ourselves: ‘What’s the best way to totally destroy our marriage?’” Miller joked.
“It does seem wild to open a second space while we’re talking about what a financial burden running the club has been,” Hartswick admitted. “But we think this is the answer to that problem. We’ve been thinking a lot about legacy as well.”
“About a year ago, I got really, really sick,” Miller explained. “I couldn’t work for three months; it was pretty scary. But we realized, not to be too morbid, that we didn’t know what would happen to the club if something happened to us.”
They also thought about what selling the club would look like and quickly realized it wasn’t an option they wanted to explore. As Hartswick pointed out, he and Miller have run the business with a mission — to grow comedy in the area. If new owners came in with more interest in making a profit, the first thing they’d likely do is cut all of the club’s programs and classes, forsaking the local scene to focus on touring headliners.
So the two spent the better part of the past year putting all the pieces into place to create VCA. After extensive meetings with lawyers and accountants, they secured their tax-exempt status and launched the nonprofit in early November, almost 10 years to the week that they opened VCC.
Even as it launches this challenging new endeavor, the club is hosting some big anniversary events. Chief among them is the “Fruits of Our Loins” show on Thursday, November 20. Featuring some of the club’s most successful exports, including Kendall Farrell, Diggs, Max Higgins, Eric Dreiblatt and Richard Bowen, the show is a homecoming for a lot of comics who got their start at Vermont Comedy Club. Then on Friday and Saturday, November 21 and 22, New Jersey standup Chris Gethard headlines the club.
“It’s honestly crazy to me that it’s been a decade,” Hartswick said. “For our younger comics, the club has always been here. It’s just part of the firmament. But we see it like we’re high school football coaches: Every four years, we lose all the best comics as they head for bigger markets. And you rebuild, that’s the trajectory.”
Neither Miller nor Hartswick knows where the club might be a decade from now, but they feel strongly that they’ve positioned it to continue and thrive, with or without them.
“In an ideal world, we’ll buy out our investors and buy the club itself,” Miller said. “That’s sort of our next-decade plan. And hopefully to grow VCA and start to offer grants for local comedians to put together shows or tour other markets.”
They acknowledge that it won’t be easy. But as Hartswick pointed out, neither of them knew a thing about starting a business when they opened a comedy club 10 years ago.
“At the end of the day, the most important thing is that we give a shit,” Miller said. “That’s what has allowed us to build what we have with the club. A lot of people tell us now that they can’t imagine Burlington without us, and that was exactly what we were going for.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Laughing Matters: Vermont Comedy Club Turns 10”
This article appears in The Winter Preview Issue 2025.
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