Comedy Works New Faces Competition Seeks to Crown Denver's Next Top Comic

The Comedy Works New Faces Competition, which seeks to crown Denver's freshest, funniest comedic voice, comes to a close this week, after half a year of whittling down a pool of nearly 200 competitors to a mere dozen. The final twelve face off on Wednesday, November 8, at the downtown club for the three top spots, competing for prizes that range from $500 for third place to $1,500 for the grand prize.

New Faces is the centerpiece of Comedy Works' New Talent program, which has provided aspiring comics with a platform to practice their material and get valuable stage time for decades. New Talent night first began to flourish more than twenty years ago under the leadership of the late, legendary Deacon Gray. "He really got this going to what it is today," explains current coordinator Roger Haak, part of a supervising team that includes fellow comics Janae Burris and Rick Kerns. "When he ended up taking it over, there was maybe a small handful of comedians in Denver trying to get spots regularly. ... Week in, week out, about fifteen to twenty people would show up, and that number kept growing and growing."

Lineups swelled to forty comics a night, and at one point, the club gave out buttons that read "'I survived Mondays at Comedy Works,' because the show was notoriously so long and had so many comics on it," recalls Haak. "It was just one of those badges of honor."

Interest continued to grow, and Gray was faced with an unmanageable number of new comics, and many were green to the point of being crunchy. His response was to develop the current system, which arranges entrants in a tiered system by experience level and provides a path to increased stage time by offering feedback and notes after each performance.

"It's a very unique program that is only here in Denver," Haak says. "You don't really see this in other markets, in other comedy clubs in other parts of the country. This is one of the few programs that goes this detailed in providing an equitable chance to get on stage, and giving feedback and helping people grow as comics. ... The mantra is: 'Everyone gets a two-minute set' to show us what they can do, regardless of any other qualifiers."

Participants who have never performed before start with two minutes on stage, and if they stick it out (rotations to the next performance opportunity can take fifteen to seventeen weeks) and show improvement, they can progress to "C" and "B" status, with three- and four-minute sets. At those higher levels, they're also eligible to enter the New Faces contest, which excludes untried amateurs as well as pros. Along the way, Haak says, they're provided with extensive club-perspective feedback and notes, and even joke and laugh timing averages. The program typically receives 200 to 250 submissions a week, and has been visited on occasion by big names such as Aziz Ansari, Ron White, Dave Chappelle and Emily Panic.

New Faces is similarly sprawling and built from the dense ranks of New Talent's up-and-comers, with 180 entrants in 2023. The contest usually runs from mid-May until early November and consists of two main rounds. The first takes around four months, with weekly shows in which three winners are selected each night from a dozen competitors. Comics who are especially close to third place (within five points or so) may qualify for a Wild Card ticket, which takes place between the two rounds. Throughout all stages of the contest, the scoring remains the same, with randomly selected audience judges picking their top five comics of the night based on several categories, including writing, star power and stage presence. The Wild Card qualifier, which selects a further two comics for the second round, is Haak's favorite night of the year.
"Wild Card is the most underrated show of everything that happens at Comedy Works," he says. "It is so special, and it's a lot of folks who really deserve to move on and were so good, and for whatever reason they were just a couple points away. ... You always feel a cool energy in the room, and it feels like there's a certain chip on people's shoulders, but at the same time, everyone feels really grateful."

After that, it's on to round two, when the semifinalists are separated into groups and given two further nights to show their stuff, with as many as three further comics (a winner from each set as well as potentially one with a high-scoring cumulative) selected from each group to compete at the finals. Two of the finalists this year, Joshua Emerson and Elliot Weber, happen to be from the same production company, Deadroom Comedy.

Emerson, who is Navajo as well as a leader in the growing local Native comedy scene, first picked up comedy in 2018 as a student at Fort Lewis College in Durango. "My friend said, 'Hey, you're funny. I run this open mic; you should come out,'" he recalls.

"I did, and I loved it. My girlfriend broke up with me, so I really threw myself into it," he says with a laugh. "Durango has a nice little scene to be bad at comedy in, because people didn't really know you were bad, you know? They were just excited for live entertainment."

Hooked on laughs, Emerson soon made the jump to the Denver scene; he arrived in 2019 and was promptly "punched in the face by the open-mic scene," as he puts it. Far from discouraging him, "that just reinvigorated my love," he says. He formed Deadroom Comedy with Fort Lewis classmates Elliot Weber and Jacob Jonas, and they were soon joined by esteemed Denver comedy photographer Jeff Stonic. After weathering the pandemic together, the collective came out swinging, claiming the top spot at Denver Fringe Festival's comedy show in 2021 with their one-off presentation Dead Inside. "The premise was to make people laugh about the things that make us cry," says Emerson. This year, they also won Funny Final Four, Comedy Works' other big competition.

"There's a chance that we can win all three of the major comedy competitions," he says proudly. Winning New Faces would be a useful boost for Emerson's next venture, a traveling Native American comedy showcase.

"I'm trying to create opportunities for Native comics," he says. "I'm going to be producing Native shows for the rest of my career, just because I believe in the concept. Native people are funny; it's a part of the culture. As I get better, I'm able to generate better and more opportunities for other Natives to get better quicker, and I want to continue to do that."

Haak says there's no better place in Colorado for promising comedians such as Emerson and his label-mates to get noticed than this week's show.

"Wild Card's my favorite, but the finals of the New Faces contest is the best show [of the year]," he continues. "It's so good. Stakes are high, the energy is palpable, it is addicting. ... With the finals, all of them are incredible comics. There's never gonna be a dip, like, 'Uh, that one sucked!' There's never gonna be any of that. You're gonna sit there and just say, 'I gotta pick? I gotta pick who's the best? This is awful!'"

New Faces Contest Finals, 8 p.m. Wednesday, November 8, Comedy Works Downtown, 1226 15th Street. Tickets are $14 at comedyworks.com.