photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Festival producer Richard Renner poses outside The Grenada on Jan. 16, 2025.

It’s a classic setup, one that’s more than 15 years old — Busker Festival organizer Richard Renner finds a bunch of weird and wacky folks and brings them to perform in downtown Lawrence for a few days.

But the punchline is that this time, they’re not street performers — they’re stand-up comics with a host of specials, late-night TV spots and podcasts under their belts.

Renner will be putting on the first-ever Lawrence Comedy Festival next month, with a slate of 11 comics doing seven shows over three days at Maceli’s Banquet Hall, Abe & Jake’s Landing and The Granada. It’s a project he says he’s had on his mind for more than a decade.

“The Busker Festival has gotten so well-rehearsed, and we kind of got our act together after 17 years that it’s a lot easier to manage,” Renner said. “So I thought, well, I can take on something else now. I love stand-up comedy, and thought to bring that in the middle of winter, when everyone’s just about had enough of winter, would be an excellent thing to do.”

It’s only natural, because busking and comedy often go hand in hand. Comedians have indeed performed at the Busker Festival in the past, and Renner worked with a busker, Phil LeConte of the Silly People, to help him line up artists for the festival.

The Lawrence comedy scene is rather sparse right now, Renner said, consisting mostly of open mic nights. But if the local music scene is any indicator, he said there’s potentially a big untapped market for it. The goal for February’s festival is to show off some rising talent — from as close as Kansas City and as far away as California and Canada — and take the pulse of that market.

“We’re looking for … really hard-working comics who are out there,” Renner said. “They’re on Comedy Central, they’re doing late-night shows, they’re traveling across the country doing festivals, this is their full-time job. That’s what we really wanted to get here.”

The performers have all kinds of experience with TV, online formats, albums and tours, and Renner said that “There’s probably going to be a couple — how can I say this — edgy moments.”

“They’re going to talk about (topics) that you’re not quite prepared to to hear about. But when things like that are given with humor, it’s always easier to take and and I just look forward to people laughing, you know, just just really letting go.

“Because it’s been a — it’s been an uptight year, man,” he said. “We need to let go a little bit.”

• • •

Mark DeBonis

Traveling around and scratching audiences’ itch for stand-up is nothing new for Canadian Mark DeBonis, but his only stay in Kansas to date nearly left him scratching another itch instead.

“We stayed in a hotel,” he said. “And I will, or will not, confirm that it was the only hotel that had bedbugs, and I remember that was possibly, or not possibly, a very traumatic experience.”

Fortunately, he checked the beds first and was able to change rooms, and he says he’s “not one to make all my judgements off of first impressions.” But he expects his second impression will be much better. When he flies in from Toronto next month, he’s looking forward to joining an eclectic group of comics in a new environment.

“I hope that everyone is just there to have a good time and kind of take it for what it is,” he said. “You know, it’s comedy. It’s not like we’re not trying to do anything but just bring joy into people’s lives for those couple hours.”

According to the festival website, DeBonis won a Canadian Comedy award for best newcomer in 2010 and the grand prize at “The Great Canadian Laugh Off,” and he’s been featured on multiple Canadian Broadcasting Corporation shows. But he’s also gotten attention outside of Canada at international events.

That maybe-traumatic, maybe-not experience in Kansas happened while DeBonis was driving across the continent, from Toronto to Los Angeles. DeBonis said that in comparison to Canada, he loved the variety of the United States. In Canada, he said, traveling from province to province can be monotonous, and it can take as much as 16 hours to get from one to another. But in the U.S., he said, there’s local color and new experiences all along the way.

“It’s kind of cool seeing a lot of history and the little towns, you know, like every couple hours you’re in a new place with the new license plate, new rules, new laws,” DeBonis said.

• • •

photo by: Ashley Staggs

Jamie Campbell performs stand-up comedy.

Much closer to home is Jamie Campbell, a comedian who lives in the Kansas City area and has even performed in Lawrence before. Once, he did a show at the Bottleneck and was able to invite his wife, a University of Kansas alumna, backstage.

“It was a fun moment for her, because that’s where she went and saw so many bands that she loved back when she was in college,” Campbell said. “She was like, ‘I feel like I’m hanging out with a celebrity right now!'”

Campbell’s won awards here in the KC area, including the “Best Stand-Up Comic” award in The Pitch, but he’s also had success all over the country in his 15 years as a comic and screen actor. He’s been featured on several TV shows, including the NBC drama “Chicago Fire”; won comedy awards in Atlanta, Tucson, San Antonio and Washington, D.C.; and recorded an album, “Tell Me You’re Proud of Me,” that debuted at No. 1 on Amazon’s comedy chart, according to the festival website.

Being located in KC, he says, is sort of the best of both worlds: easy to fly out of when he’s on tour, but also home to a thriving cultural scene of its own.

“This part of the country when I toured through, I really loved that there was this small-town kindness and sense of community, but also the accessibility that you want from a large city’s art scene,” Campbell said.

When he’s in KC, he does shows at local clubs like The Bird Comedy Theater, and he’s also been doing some screenwriting, which he got into during the COVID pandemic as “kind of my creative outlet when everything on stage and on screen just kind of started to dry up.” He’s currently developing a slapstick comedy show that he calls “Gingerbread Men,” which he says is “sort of like ‘Big’ meets ‘Home Alone’ meets ‘Elf.'”

One thing he hopes to bring to Lawrence is a more happy and less cynical style of comedy than you often see in stand-up. He said that in middle age, he’s looked back at the comedy he used to do and realized that he needed to change.

“When life kind of started going well for me, I met this woman, I fell in love. We have a nice home, and life is good for us,” he said. “And I realized I was still doing a lot of angry, cynical comedy, and I kind of needed to change that to reflect how my life was.

“I was happy, but my comedy wasn’t,” he said.

That new approach is exemplified in his special, titled “Big Dad Energy,” streaming on Amazon Prime and on YouTube. His style doesn’t shy away from “dad jokes,” even though Campbell isn’t a dad himself — “No, no kids for us, but I’m a great uncle,” he laughed.

But he said audiences could still expect fresh looks at pop culture and plenty of hot takes.

“A lot of what I do really resonates with a lot of Gen X audiences and millennials, anyone that grew up in the ’80s or ’90s,” he said.

He also expects that he — and the other comics on the schedule — will be playing just their biggest hits, because unlike a regular show on a tour where a comic might perform for an hour, comics at the festival will only have about 20 minutes to make an impression.

“If you’re a comedy fan that wants to sample a bunch of great comedy in one evening, you’re going to see the best offerings that a bunch of different comedians have,” Campbell said.

And, if someone’s style isn’t working for you, it’s only a few minutes before someone new is up on stage.

• • •

The Lawrence Comedy Festival will open Feb. 20 with a Comedy Gala Party at Maceli’s, 1031 New Hampshire St., and the next two nights will feature shows at Abe & Jake’s, Maceli’s and The Granada. You can buy tickets to each individual show, or a weekend pass that will get you into all of the shows, at lawrencecomedyfest.com; single-show tickets are buy one, get one free through the end of January.