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Not funny? New City, which ran the item and had to correct it, wasn’t amused. Neither was Chicago Comedy Festival founder Dan Carlson, who says the comic’s story was “completely fabricated.” A suburban Chicago native and former stand-up comic, Carlson founded his event four years ago after concluding that older festivals in Aspen and Montreal, catering to what they thought the entertainment industry wanted, weren’t using the funniest people. “Having done the road, worked with a great many funny performers, I knew a lot of people were being overlooked,” Carlson says. “I thought the basis of a comedy festival should be to showcase the absolute best talent.” Thanks to great word of mouth, a lot of money, and four years of effort, he says, the Chicago Comedy Festival, running at ten Chicago venues this weekend, is right up there with Aspen and Montreal and is the festival “comics most want to perform at.”
The upstart is the Year-Round Chi-Town Comedy Celebration, created by offended volunteer Carl Kozlowski (an occasional Reader contributor) and fellow comedy producer Cayne Collier. Kozlowski, Aaron Foster, and Dana Kennon run a year-round, “intentionally integrated” weekly showcase, Chicago Comedy Works, at the Beaumont bar on Halsted. Collier’s five-year-old showcase, the Elevated (“Taking humor to a higher level”), plays in the back room at Philosofur’s on Sheffield. Kozlowski doesn’t want to make an issue of last year’s disagreement, though it was the catalyst for his own “celebration.” (He doesn’t want to call it a festival either.) Collier had already decided to pull his show out of the Chicago Comedy Festival when Kozlowski approached him about starting their own. Collier’s main complaint: they raided some of his best performers to showcase elsewhere in the festival, leaving him with only part of a lineup. “I felt like, why not just let us do our show and highlight us? The show that’s been around all these years?” Collier says. “We keep this scene going; if none of these rooms existed, where would the performers go?”
