The Tokyo Comedy Store is an English-language comedy show held in central Tokyo, which features stand-up comedians and improvised comedy.
The Tokyo Comedy Store was founded in 1994 as the "Tokyo Comedy Club" by Kevin Burns. Burns gathered together stand up comics and a hypnotist by placing many ads in the "Tokyo Classifieds," (now called "The Metropolis") calling for performers. The first show was held at the Tokyo American Club and, the second at the British Club in Ebisu, Tokyo. Roughly around the same time a separate group called the "Tokyo Cynics" started an all stand up comedy show in the Takadanobaba area at a bar called "The Fiddler".
By or before about 1998, Burns was no longer involved, and from that time up intil the mid-2000s the group was run by first Nick Abrahams, and then Michael Naishtut, who had been independently involved in doing improv comedy in Tokyo, and Chris Wells one of the founding members of TCS. Naishtut also happened to have been hosting the "Tokyo Cynics" shows, and so the two groups were effectively merged. Around the same time, the name was changed to the "Tokyo Comedy Store".
Since then, the "The Tokyo Comedy Store" has held multiple shows every month, at various venues. Venues come and go, and so over the year shows have come and gone, or moved locations, but there are usually between 3 to 6 shows running at any one time. Some shows involve stand up, some involve improv, and some involve both. The cornerstone show is held on the last Friday of every month and features stand up comedians in the first half and the second half consists of entirely improvised comedy by "Spontaneous Confabulation" (known as "Spontaneous Confusion" until 2010), the resident improv-troupe. The show usually ends with musical-based improvisation.
Currently the titular head of the Tokyo Comedy Store is Chris Wells, who also runs the cornerstone show at the Crocodile live-house in Shibuya, attracting audiences of around 100 people, the vast majority being non-Japanese. Other shows around Tokyo are organized by Dave Gutteridge, who since the early 2000s has been a show runner, performer, and administrator of the web site.
At about the same time the Tokyo Comedy Store was first founded, Jun Imai started to teach improvisation classes for Japanese performers and stage improv performances as "in the moment". In 2004, he brought the In The Moment improv troupe to TCS and produced the first ITM + TCS shows, which were based entirely on improvised comedy. These became known as TCSj (Tokyo Comedy Store Japanese), and the group performed twice a month in the same venue as the English version through 2011. TCSj cut down on their shows in 2012, and now perform several times a year at the Crocodile and other venues. Although it features the same type of improvised scenes as the English show does, there are several different show formats with different casts. Currently TCSj has a cast of over 40 improvisors.
Read more about Tokyo Comedy Store: Tokyo Comedy Store (Film)
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—Jean François Lyotard (b. 1924)
“Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
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—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)