Zanies Comedy Club: 40 years of being ‘Better Live’

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — There wasn’t really much of a plan in the beginning, according to Brian Dorfman.

Dorfman has been running Zanies Nashville since the late 1990s, along with his brother, Andrew, who for years made a living as a road comic before settling down in the Nashville area.

“There was really no well-thought-out plan,” he said laughing, adding that Zanies’ location in Berry Hill has “worked really well in the long run.”

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Originally founded in 1978 by Rick Uchwat in Chicago, Zanies is the third-oldest comedy club chain in America, after The Improv and The Comedy Store, according to Dorfman, and the plan for the Nashville location, which opened in 1983, wasn’t so much a plan as it was a shot in the dark that ultimately worked out.

“Jimmy Moroney and Rick Uchwat started it here,” he told News 2. “They had a local partner, Charlie Brown, and they were looking to expand.”

Brown attended Vanderbilt and liked the highway now known as 8th Avenue South in Berry Hill, though the 8th and Douglas corner wasn’t the first choice for the club. That was originally going to be where the Exit/In is located, but Dorfman said the lack of parking made it difficult. Then Uchwat found 8th South.

“He liked this location’s proximity to the city and the parking around it,” Dorfman said. “Apparently, in ’83, Rick must have been a fan of crack houses surrounding his comedy club. You’ve got to remember, in this area in 1983, it was not the nicest of locations, but we have survived.”

Dorfman and his brother became involved more than a decade later, when Andrew, wanting to make a change and start a family asked him if he wanted to open a comedy club.

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“One day he goes, ‘Hey, Dorf, you want to start a club?’ And I was like, ‘Sure,'” he said. “Again, another really well thought out plan.”

But that was just the nature of the business in the ’80s and ’90s, he said.

“It really was like, ‘What else are we going to do?'” Dorfman added. “There was no end game other than yeah, this sounded fun. We’re getting into our business lives; let’s try something.”

While Nashville has definitively cornered the market as Music City, the Nashville comedy scene has also exploded over time, which Dorfman attributes to the continual support of Nashvillians. He says there isn’t a single other club in the country that means as much to its city as Zanies Nashville means to Nashville. Even when Opryland shuttered in 1997, or when the economy shrunk in the mid-aughts, the comedy club never had any trouble, because it wasn’t reliant on tourism for its sustainability, Dorfman said.

And the club has been through a lot in 40 years. While the comedy community holds Zanies in high regard these days, it wasn’t always like that. Getting bigger names in town didn’t always work, because different comedy styles didn’t play well in the south.

“Most of the bigger comedians you saw off the TV were from the coasts, and sarcasm didn’t play well down here, so you had the dichotomy of trying to bring in the larger acts and the southern draws,” Dorfman said.

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It took time to find the perfect blend of comedy genres that appealed to the most fans. As more demographics came into play, Dorfman said, the club started to see more and more sellout crowds.

Some of those names include heavy hitters like Jerry Seinfeld, Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Burr, Kevin Hart, D.L. Hughley and many more. The walls inside the 300-seat club are covered with autographed headshots of comedians who have headlined Zanies throughout the decades.

In many cases, those now household names of comedy legends stopped through Music City just before hitting their big breaks, such as Seinfeld. Being even a small part of that journey is one of the more fulfilling parts of his job, Dorfman said.

“Just knowing that you played even a small role in that, in watching someone that you’ve forged a relationship with for years and years and years, to see their success is one of the joys of this business,” Dorfman said.

The late Ralphie May, known for his raunchy and button-pushing jokes, even moved to Nashville because of how great a relationship he and Dorfman formed over the years, he said. May even asked Dorfman to manage him, which Dorfman accepted briefly, before saying he wanted to just be his friend.

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“I told him, ‘I still want to be your friend. I’ll get you a manager,'” Dorfman said laughing, noting his brother managed May for a while.

The longevity comes from how much he and those he works with care about comedy and the comedians themselves. “I think that’s important,” he said.

That importance has been the comedy scene in Nashville growing exponentially, with more and more comedians choosing Nashville to call home versus other comedy hot spots like Los Angeles or New York City. Dorfman said he felt it happening a little bit before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, but it also happened through the pandemic.

While many people were focused on TV or film, live comedy also experienced a surge in popularity, as comedians found better pay for hitting the road versus taking a short role in a film or TV project. The quality of life and proximity of Nashville to other comedy hubs also played a role, he said.

“I know we’re the south, but we’re still the midwest in terms of a comedian traveling all over the place and where they need to get to,” he said. “It’s better to be in the middle instead of going back and forth all the time. I think we’re going to be one of the bigger comedy cities in the years to come.”

Anticipating that growth also means some changes for Zanies Nashville, though not any major changes. Instead, Dorfman said he’s currently renovating the space next door to him to be a second, smaller space for different shows.

“It gives us the ability to do some of the weirder, odder shows,” he said.

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The main stage at Zanies is not for newer—also called “green”—comedians, but the newer space may be able to accommodate them. He also has plans for some podcast studios inside, as well as a 90-seat club with a bar inside.

“I think just by having a bar for people to hang out at and a stage for people to perform on, I think that’s all we need,” he said. “I think it’s going to be more of a flexible room, so it’ll be more curtained off inside there.”

But like the original plan to run Zanies Nashville, Dorfman said he doesn’t really have a grand plan for the new space, either.

“Kind of like how this wasn’t even planned to begin with, I don’t know if you can plan something, but when you’re dealing with some of the great minds of a generation—I know people just think they’re funny, but comedians are truly geniuses—something good will come out of it that we haven’t even thought of,” Dorfman said. “We were the dark horse that absolutely paid off.”

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