From door staff to stage door: Comic Austin Carr learned comedy from the outside in

On an evening out with friends, Austin Carr discovered an unusually direct way to not only land a job, but also launch a career. Carr and his friends were at a show at Cobb’s Comedy Club in San Francisco.

“We were having a great time, and I just loved the club. I loved the environment,” Carr said, who recalled excusing himself from the table to go look for the manager.

“I just asked around for a manager, found the guy and said ‘Please give me a job. I need to be here. I love this. How can I be a part of it?’ And he hired me on the spot. I started working security/door staff front of house and just kind of worked my way up from there to a manager at one point. I loved every minute of it,” he said.

From club customer to standup comic, now Carr not only performs in but also produces comedy shows.

He frequently performs in San Francisco, but Peninsula audiences can catch him right in their own neighborhood when he hosts comedy showcases at The Guild Theatre, with the latest taking place June 24.

“This is going to be my fifth show at The Guild and I think this is going to be the best and biggest one yet! Everybody on the lineup has been absolutely crushing their sets locally, across the country and even around the world. We’ve got young comics on a tear, seasoned vets and every comic on the lineup is a headliner, so we’re going to bring the house down,” Carr said.

Along with a set from Carr, the showcase features fellow comedians Marcus Howard, Sureni Weerasekera, Phil Griffiths and Ali Macofsky.

“It all comes to a crescendo with Ali Macofsky, who is one of the brightest rising stars in the comedy scene, tours all over the world, hot off her Just For Laughs debut and one of my absolute favorites to watch,” he added.

Carr was born in the South Bay and grew up largely in the Bay Area, including Milpitas and Burlingame, where he and his parents have for many years lived with and taken care of his grandparents. After some years away in southern California for high school and college, when Carr returned to the Bay Area, he began to focus on working in comedy.

The art form was something that he always loved, Carr said, but didn’t think was accessible to him as a career.

“I’ve always been a lifelong fan. I’ve always loved comedy, always loved comedy movies. It was just something I never really considered as an option. I thought comedians were living somewhere up on Mount Olympus and were anointed as comedians — not something that you could just start pursuing of your own volition. I went through some life changes and I wanted to start taking the chance on me and try something that I’ve always wanted to try and give myself permission to take chances in life,” Carr said.

But a love of comedy and wanting to make people laugh doesn’t always automatically come paired with the outgoing personality one might assume is needed for the job. Carr found his time working at the Cobb’s door helpful in many ways, including simply the opportunity to get more comfortable interacting with people.

“I got to talk to everybody as they were coming in. I’d crack jokes to them a little bit as I would take them to their seats. I was very shy growing up, so I was always nervous about talking to people and saying the right thing. That gave me permission to just kind of say whatever and have fun with people because I was relatively anonymous as the door guy.”

When he later moved on to managing door staff and helping with operations and show-running duties at the club, Carr said the role gave him direct insight into how the business worked, introduced him to numerous comics and gave him a firsthand look into the process of refining an act.

When it comes to his own act, Carr keeps it less about the issues of the day and more on personal matters that people may relate to.

“I think anything can be funny. But I also think that there’s a point to where you know, not everybody wants to go to a 27-year-old to get their political opinions. So I tend to keep things pretty much about me and silly funny concepts,” he said.

The time spent behind the scenes both as door staff and manager eventually inspired Carr to create a show — the first he produced at Cobb’s.

Spending time with comics in the green room, where performers gather before and after going onstage, getting to know comics and hearing audiences’ reactions led Carr to create the “Talking After Sets” live show, which he’s since taken on tour in the U.S.

While working at Cobb’s door, he said he often overheard audience members on their way out of the club talking about how they wanted to see more from a particular performer, or wished that a comedian’s set had been longer.

“And so I came up with this show ‘Talking After Sets,’ where it’s your regular comedy showcase but there’s a table on stage and a panel with table mics and rather than the performer leaving the stage after the set, we all kind of one by one assemble at this table and riff together a little bit in between sets. So that way they get to showcase their material, but then also their personality and get to hang out for the rest of the night,” Carr said.

He’ll be hosting “Talking After Sets” locally next month, with the show taking place July 29 at Tabard Theatre in downtown San Jose.

For a time, Carr also found himself producing a comedy show in a more unusual — and quite well-ventilated — setting, aboard boats from the Red & White Fleet, cruising San Francisco Bay. During the waning days of pandemic public health measures, when restrictions were just starting to lift but many performance spaces were still not fully open, on a visit to Fisherman’s Wharf Carr and fellow comic Nick Scarpino spotted the boats and envisioned a nontraditional, COVID-cautious performance space. In a format that may have been the ultimate outdoor performance, comics performed on the open-air top deck of a Red & White Fleet boat cruising San Francisco Bay on weekend evenings in a show produced by Carr and Scarpino.

“It was a really great way for us to get back into performing and for us to give other very talented comics in the area and some headliners from out of town an opportunity to come back out into the world of comedy and perform. It was so much fun. We did a 90-minute show and cruised all around the bay — around Alcatraz and under the Bay Bridge and by Giants stadium, and it was beautiful,” Carr said.

He released a debut comedy album in 2021. Carr said that the half-hour album, called “Nice to Meet You,” was self-produced and self-distributed and reached number two on the iTunes Billboard Charts for comedy.

Whether it’s on a boat, an album or at a comedy showcase, Carr said that with his shows, he strives for audiences to experience what he frequently witnessed at the club door.

“I would see people come in stressed — maybe they got in a fight with their significant other in the car on the way to the show or they’re worked up about their job — and then just leaving feeling that much lighter. I love that transformative journey that happens in a comedy show. So more than anything, topical or anyone remembering things about my life in particular, it’s mostly I just want them to feel good. I want to bring joy into the world. That’s why we all do this,” Carr said.

Austin Carr hosts a comedy showcase June 24, 7 and 9 p.m. at The Guild Theatre, 949 El Camino Real, Menlo Park. Tickets are $23. guildtheatre.com.