“I’ll probably just go up there and yell at everyone,” says Warren Snipes, strategizing his approach to hitting the standup mic later that night. We’re sitting in a ramshackle stained-glass gazebo outside Bibblebash (1139 Jefferson Ave.), a speakeasy-style basement comedy club. It’s almost midnight, but somehow still hot out.
Snipes, a raspy old ex-Texan on disability, relates his travels and various divorces in quick succession. Other comics gather around us, outwardly loose enough for Friday night, but each focused on their five-minute fix. Eventually, Laramie Flick, our tousle-haired host of indeterminate age, pops his head out from behind a locked screen door:
“Oh, you guys are here.”
The comedian Mike Dobbins takes the stage (bottom right)
If you live in New York long enough, some weird guy you know might start a comedy club in his basement. Once you get over the transplant politics and spatial limitations, it’s what happens when you’re on some real Cosmo Kramer shit.
I first met Flick 15 years ago when we lived on opposite sides of a warehouse loft in Bed-Stuy. Among many of the eccentric lodgers over in his loft was an elderly rocker who claimed to be a former roadie for Hendrix. Violence from the streets occasionally spilled into the building. At one point, a chihuahua was hospitalized for severe alcohol poisoning. We were just one big crash pad for psychotic New Yorkers in their 20s losing their minds together in Recession Era New York. We had a freight elevator; life was good.
Flick grew up in California and moved to New York in 1999. He worked in publishing for a while and watched the Twin Towers fall from the Flatiron Building. After a while, he decided to drive a pedicab. “I did not like office life, it was absurd… I chose numb feet and dangerous heat.”
One thing the rickshaw life gave him was the opportunity to travel; Flick became a seasoned globetrotter who has been everywhere from Antarctica to Morocco, where he hobbled across a mountain on a broken foot. He became an advocate for the pedicab industry, a scene then and now rife with unlicensed cabbies who operate as trickster pirates, bilking dazed Midtown tourists out of absurdly high amounts of cash. “I ended up not fixing anything,” he told me dryly.
At one point Flick stumbled into a part-time gig as a liberal punching bag for Liz Wheeler, a blond conservative TV raptor who hosted a TV show (“Tipping Point with Liz Wheeler”) on One America News Network.
“I didn’t know what I was getting into… I was exactly what they wanted at first, because I was nervous and wordy.” But once he loosened up, Flick got the coathook for labeling Brett Kavanaugh an “old white male.”
“I was not that aware of the conservative victimhood complex. Don’t know how I missed that,” he remembers.
A few years back, when Laramie was reeling from a bad breakup and trying to get rid of leaks and rats in his cellar, he ended up setting the stage (literally) for a worse infestation: standup comics.
He’d already been dabbling in the scene for a few years, where like many he found “a community of weirdos and outcasts and interesting people from different backgrounds… and a bunch of other people that shouldn’t be doing comedy.”
Seeking to rebuild his social life post-COVID, he began using his newly acquired middle-aged powers to transform the stone-walled space into a comedy speakeasy, constructing a small stage out of repurposed wood from a gutted building nearby, and adding plexiglass and LEDs for a total cost of 30 bucks.
Flick enjoys showing off the space’s custom decor, including the small gazebo out front, built with a motherlode of discarded stained-glass windows he discovered nearby. Downstairs, there’s a chandelier, a vintage portable record player, and a neon ghost that lights up to give comics the bird when their time is up.
Upstairs, in a place that itself could be the subject of a DIY design feature, there’s a disassembled typewriter on the table. “Part of the reason I let people in my house is there’s nothing valuable. It’s just things I find for cheap or free,” he says.
Andy Stuchell, Alex Davenport, Jesse Gloria, and Warren Snipes, onstage at Bibblebash
The first time I showed up at Bibblebash, it was called Merkin Comedy Hole (“I’m basically Gen X, so I’m pro-bush,” Flick says), a name he ditched because “it was not polling well with most people,” including his Tuesday night co-producer, longtime scene fixture Victor Vornado.
A recent midnight open mic featured a mysterious Pete Davidson-esque character called Boone who gave a rambling, otherworldly performance that involved reading passages from a play wedged in his back pocket. He was later ejected. It was like seeing Patton Oswalt’s Dr. Pepper in person. The comedy scene in NYC is thriving; there’s a lot of Dr. Peppers out there.
Fortunately, these days Bibblebash has some actual clout too: thanks to partnerships with Vornado and Rebecca Trent (formerly of LIC’s defunct The Creek and The Cave), their Tuesday night shows have recently drawn comics like Matthew Broussard, Carmen Lynch, Mike Recine, and Adrienne Iapalucci.
Due to a scheduling mix-up, Todd Barry recently showed up on an off night. Mistaking the sarcastic comedy legend on the other end of his peephole for a local ne’er-do-well, Flick found himself reaching for a crowbar he keeps next to his door for home security. Luckily, disaster was averted and Barry was adequately compensated for the mix-up.
At some point, the room caught the attention of Cody Clarke, a local movie director, largely of micro-indies like Ramekin and No Shark, who has incorporated his own comedy and the activity at Bibblebash into his oeuvre. Clarke started showing up to work on his own material and now operates as a kind of house documentarian, offering a recorded set to any up-and-comers who need a reel, “to spread the wealth, so to speak.”
“The sound is really good, the low ceilings and the stone walls really help with the acoustics,” Clarke says. “There are a lot of small rooms in New York, but not a lot of small rooms that can feel big. If there’s thirty people there, it sounds like three hundred. It’s kinda crazy.”
“You can do well there with avant-garde-type stuff, and you can do well with more mainstream-type stuff. I’ve laughed harder and more consistently at open mics there than at anywhere else in New York,” Clarke told me.
A recent Friday night open mic included a tourist from Karachi, Pakistan who dropped by to work on his tight five, and the manic outburst of Snipes, whose set got the best reaction of the night. The club’s Trinidadian neighbors seem curious but unhassled by the club, Flick tells me. For his part, he’s only had to 86 a handful of guests, including “a couple of dudes on ketamine going through my fridge.” But even that’s just a matter of course: “They have actually been back… one of them just goes to sleep and then wakes up for his set.”
Overall, he says, “It is a little community down here.”
“The goal is not money, the goal is just making my life more interesting,” he says.
In the future, Flick can see himself booking art openings or jazz shows— but as long as he gets his time in, that is: “If they just let me sing one old standard, like Tom Waits.”
Brian Jones Kraft is a writer who has been living in Bushwick for over a decade and a half. He has previously written extensively about the legacy of Andrew Cuomo, David Dinkins and that mural on the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Evergreen.
Photos taken by Brian Jones Kraft and Cody Clarke.
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