Forty-two years ago, Caroline Hirsch saw the future, and it wasn’t at Gimbels, the department store where she worked. When friends suggested she put her name on a small cabaret club, she leapt at the chance. Two years later, she focused Caroline’s on comedy, and she’s been the Queen of that scene ever since. After celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Caroline’s—by then in its third location in Times Square—with a show at Carnegie Hall starring the likes of Richard Belzer, Lewis Black, Gilbert Gottfried, David Alan Grier, Dennis Leary, Colin Quinn, and Jon Stewart, she and Andrew Fox, her partner in business and life, launched the New York Comedy Festival.
Though she closed her club after one last laugh on New Year’s Eve 2022, and the couple now spends about half the year at their second home in Palm Beach, the festival continues. And this year, it is celebrating its own 20th Anniversary. From November 7th to 17th, in venues as small as East Village comedy clubs and as large as Town Hall and the Beacon and Apollo Theaters, the couple will produce between 250 and 300 shows across five boroughs, featuring comics from unknowns to headliners, making New York the world’s capital of laughter for 10 gut-busting days and nights.
Caroline Hirsch and Jerry Seinfeld.
This year’s lineup opens with Dead Funny, an all-star tribute to the late Joan Rivers, a close friend of the couple. It features Judd Apatow, Bill Maher, Tracy Morgan, and a cast of hundreds more in programs ranging from stand-up and improv to panel discussions, screenings, and podcast tapings.
What links fashion Caroline to comedy Caroline? “Knowing what sells,” she says, pointing to her continuous success nurturing “two generations of comedic talent.” When she started, Fox says, there were no headliner comedy clubs like Caroline’s featuring star attractions doing sets of up to an hour. Only showcase clubs where performers did six minutes onstage. “She helped build comedians’ brands.”
A couple for 32 years, Fox, a Miami native and former entertainment lawyer, helped build the business, allowing Hirsch to focus on the creative side of the operation. “It’s a good partnership,” she says. “He does all the dirty work.”
Conan O’Brien, Hirsch, and Paul Reubens.
After their Carnegie Hall success, “we saw the business getting bigger,” Fox says, “and we wanted to continue to work with people who were growing out of clubs and into theaters.” In 2006, they produced two sold-out shows starring the stand-up and social-media star Dane Cook at Madison Square Garden, affirming their judgment that comedy belongs in “bucket-list venues,” says Fox. “The Garden is the pinnacle.”
After running clubs for decades in what Hirsch deems the “toughest town in the world to be successful,” and raising over $100 million for causes like supporting wounded veterans and the Food Bank for New York, closing their club didn’t signal retirement.
“No, not at all,” they almost shout in unison.
“After forty years, we just expanded the four walls of Caroline’s,” Hirsch concludes.