Downtown’s 280-seat Comedy Works club is again asserting its national dominance following regular drop-ins from stand-up giants such as Dave Chappelle, who most recently visited the club with surprise shows on Oct. 11.
On Tuesday, the club announced it would host the national kick-off for Sarah Silverman’s latest comedy tour, “Grow Some Lips!,” with four performances on Jan. 20 and 21. The tour is playing much bigger venues in subsequent cities, including the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall in Washington, D.C.; Atlanta Symphony Hall; the Chicago Theatre, Seattle’s Paramount Theatre and New York’s Beacon Theatre.
Tickets, $50 apiece, are on sale to the public starting at 10 a.m. on Friday, Dec. 9. All four shows — at 7:30 and 9:45 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 20, and Saturday, Jan 21 — will take place at Comedy Works’ Larimer Square location, 1226 15th St. in Denver.
Silverman follows Chappelle but also comic Ali Wong, another acclaimed stand-up who has regularly headlined theaters around the country, in playing Comedy Works’ modest stage. Comedy Works owner Wende Curtis has long cultivated close relationships with mega-comics, including Chappelle, the late Joan Rivers and George Lopez, and her club enjoys a sterling reputation in the industry.
“I prefer an intimate crowd,” Silverman told The Denver Post in 2014, shortly before playing Red Rocks Amphitheatre as part of the Oddball Comedy Tour.
Silverman, the Emmy-winning veteran of TV shows such as “Crashing,” “Masters of Sex,” “Mr. Show with Bob & David” and her own “Sarah Silverman Program,” has lately been taking on her former, loose-lipped persona that tried to dismantle taboos about race, sex and other topics with self-consciously shocking language.
An avowed liberal, she has also expressed alarm at online cancel culture, as she called it, while trying to “make right” past offenses such as on her Comedy Central series.
