Raw States

Nashville Comedy Festival

Nashville, TN · Arts & Culture

When

April 9–18, 2027

Where

Ryman Auditorium, 116 5th Ave N (multi-venue) · Nashville · TN

Cost

Not confirmed

Status

Approximate: based on past editions, not announced yet

A city-wide, multi-venue stand-up comedy festival founded in 2014 as the Wild West Comedy Festival with Vince Vaughn as a founding partner. Now in its twelfth year, it books national headliners across venues including the Ryman Auditorium and Bridgestone Arena.

The history within reach

• Nashville Comedy Festivalsame spot

  A city-wide, multi-venue stand-up comedy festival founded in 2014 as the Wild West Comedy Festival with Vince Vaughn as a founding partner.

• Earl Scruggs joins Bill Monroe and bluegrass beginssame spot

  Monroe hired a 21-year-old banjo player from North Carolina who picked with three fingers instead of strumming, and the Blue Grass Boys lineup that walked onto the Ryman stage that December, Monroe, Scruggs, Lester Flatt, Chubby Wise and Cedric Rainwater, is the one people mean when they say a genre was invented on a particular night..

• The Ryman, the Mother Church of country musicsame spot

  A riverboat captain converted at a tent revival built this as a gospel tabernacle, and its curved pews and hard maple stage turned out to have some of the best natural acoustics in the country.

• Tootsie's and the Lower Broadway honky-tonkssame spot

  Hattie Louise Bess painted the place orchid purple by accident and kept it.

• Ernest Tubb's Midnite Jamboree0.1 mi

  Tubb opened a record shop and began broadcasting a show from it straight after the Opry went off the air, so the crowd walked down the street and kept going.