Luna Lounge NYC: Eating It and the Birth of NY Alt Comedy

Luna Lounge was a bar and music club at 171 Ludlow Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, open from 1995 to 2005. On most nights it put on free rock shows; on Mondays it hosted Eating It, a weekly stand-up show devised by Janeane Garofalo and Marc Maron that became the New York home of 1990s alternative comedy. Sarah Silverman, Todd Barry, Louis C.K., Greg Giraldo and dozens more worked out material there that the comedy clubs of the day wouldn't have tolerated.

It was the East Coast twin of Un-Cabaret in Los Angeles: a non-comedy venue, a crowd that came for something different, and comedians allowed to be strange. This is the room's story.

The venue

Rob Sacher and Dianne Galliano opened Luna Lounge in 1995, when Ludlow Street was still cheap and slightly rough. The front was a bar with a foosball table; the back was a small, dark performance room. Music was always free, and the room became one of the incubators of the early-2000s New York rock revival. Interpol, the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the National and Nada Surf all played there early in their careers, and Elliott Smith spent time there while working on XO.

That context is the point. Luna was not a comedy club. There was no host warming up tourists, no headliner, no expectation that every comic would deliver the same tight, punchline-heavy set. The audience was mostly downtown people who would have been at the bar anyway, plus comedians who came to watch each other.

Eating It

Eating It ran on Monday nights. Garofalo and Maron, both stand-ups who had come up in the late-1980s comedy boom, wanted a room where comics could do material that didn't fit the clubs: long stories, half-formed ideas, angry digressions, jokes about the act of telling jokes. The title itself is comedian slang for bombing. Admission was cheap (a few dollars, with a drink included), and the line-up changed every week.

The clubs of mid-1990s New York, rooms like the Comic Strip, Caroline's and Stand Up NY, were built around reliability. A comic did a tight set designed to get laughs from anyone who walked in. Eating It inverted that. The audience wanted to see what the comics were working on, and the comics could fail without losing a booking. It became one of the places where the idea of "alternative" stand-up took root in New York, in parallel with what Un-Cabaret and Largo were doing in Los Angeles.

The Eating It style

You can hear what the room encouraged in the hosts' own acts. Garofalo was known for performing from scraps of paper and notebooks, thinking aloud about whatever was bothering her rather than delivering polished bits; to club audiences that looked unprofessional, and to the Luna crowd it looked honest. Maron was already doing the anxious, confessional, self-lacerating material that would later define his podcast, more interested in following a thought than in landing a tag. Silverman's deadpan, sweetly delivered provocations were the opposite of a club comic's pushiness.

What united them was a shift in where the comedy lived. In a club set the joke is the unit. At Eating It, the persona and the process were part of the show: the comic's doubt, the false starts, the commentary on whether a bit was working. That idea, that the audience could enjoy watching a comedian think, is one of the defining traits of alternative comedy on both coasts.

Monday mattered too. It was the dead night for the clubs, which meant working comics were free, and it gave the scene a fixed point in the week. Comedians who never shared a club bill ended up at the same bar every Monday, watching each other and talking shop afterwards. Rooms like that are how a scene becomes a scene, a process we look at more closely in our essay on how comedy communities form.

Who played there

Over its decade the show drew a who's who of New York stand-up and visiting alternative comics. Performers associated with Eating It include:

Janeane Garofalo and Marc Maron, its creators and frequent hosts
Sarah Silverman, who also appears in footage of the bar in the 1997 indie film Who's the Caboose?
Todd Barry, H. Jon Benjamin and Greg Giraldo
Patrice O'Neal, Jim Norton and Ted Alexandro, comics better known for the club and radio world, which shows how porous the scene was
Louis C.K., whose later career was upended by his 2017 admission of sexual misconduct
Visiting comics including Mitch Hedberg, Patton Oswalt and Dave Chappelle

That mix matters. Eating It wasn't a closed clique of "alt" comedians. It was a room where comics from very different traditions came on the same night to do something looser than their club sets. The stylistic line between alternative and mainstream in New York was always blurrier than in LA.

The wider 1990s downtown scene

Luna Lounge was the best known of a cluster of downtown rooms where stand-up mixed with performance art, music and storytelling. Performance spaces on the Lower East Side and East Village, small theatres and bar back rooms all ran comedy nights. In the early 2000s the energy moved partly to Rififi in the East Village, home of Invite Them Up, the show hosted by Eugene Mirman and Bobby Tisdale whose recordings were released as a box set by Comedy Central Records.

Meanwhile, a different model was arriving. The Upright Citizens Brigade, a Chicago-trained improv group, opened its Chelsea theatre in 1999. Over the next decade the centre of gravity in New York alternative comedy moved from stand-up in bars toward UCB's improv and sketch school (our UCB history tells that story). The two scenes overlapped, and many comedians played both, but they had very different cultures.

The closing (2005)

By the 2000s, the Lower East Side was changing fast. The landlord sold Luna's small building to a developer planning a larger residential project. Luna Lounge closed for the last time in the early hours of June 12, 2005, and the building was demolished in late July. At the end it was, by its owners' account, the last Lower East Side venue offering nightly rock shows with no cover.

Sacher opened a new Luna Lounge in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in January 2007, but it was a music venue in a different era and sold its lease to the Knitting Factory in 2008. The Ludlow Street room and its Monday comedy night were gone. Sacher later wrote a memoir about the club, Wake Me When It's Over (2012).

Where Eating It lives on

The clearest descendant is Marc Maron's podcast WTF, launched in 2009. Its long, frank conversations with comedians about craft and failure carry the spirit of the Luna Lounge green room, and many of its early guests were people Maron had shared bills with in the 1990s. Garofalo and Maron both moved into radio in the 2000s too, as early hosts on the progressive network Air America.

The format lives on too. Brooklyn and Manhattan are full of free or cheap comedy nights in bars, back rooms and music venues, where comedians try new material for audiences who want to see something unfinished. The post-UCB years have made that model more important again. We cover that trend in our piece on micro-venues and DIY comedy, and the wider decade in alt comedy in the 1990s.

Frequently asked questions

What was Luna Lounge?

Luna Lounge was a bar and music club at 171 Ludlow Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, open from 1995 to 2005. It hosted free rock shows most nights and, on Mondays, the alternative stand-up show Eating It.

Who started Eating It at Luna Lounge?

The weekly show was devised by Janeane Garofalo and Marc Maron, two stand-ups frustrated with the New York club scene. It became one of the main rooms for alternative stand-up in the city.

Which comedians performed at Eating It?

Regular and occasional performers included Sarah Silverman, Louis C.K., Todd Barry, H. Jon Benjamin, Greg Giraldo, Patrice O'Neal, Mitch Hedberg, Patton Oswalt and Dave Chappelle, alongside Garofalo and Maron.

Why did Luna Lounge close?

The landlord sold the small building to a developer, and Luna Lounge closed on June 12, 2005. The building was torn down that July to make way for a larger residential development. A Brooklyn version opened in 2007 but did not last.