Overview Traverse City Comedy Fest is a three-day stand-up and improv festival held every April in downtown Traverse City, Michigan. Organizers started it to give the town a spring arts weekend and pull visitors north before summer. Shows run Thursday night through Saturday across downtown venues a short walk apart, from the Victorian City Opera House to brewpubs and hotel ballrooms. Part of the proceeds goes to the Women's Resource Center, a local shelter for survivors of domestic violence. On site A typical festival runs about 20 ticketed shows. National headliners play the City Opera House, the Park Place Hotel and the Traverse City Comedy Club, while smaller shows fill The Alluvion, Right Brain Brewery and the Little Fleet. The program covers clean and dirty shows, a roast battle, the Comedy Rumble (ninety-second sets judged live), improv troupes and a murder mystery show. Free daytime workshops for comics run at Hotel Indigo, the official hotel, and Workshop Brewing hosts open mics and late-night comedy karaoke. Sponsors and comics meet at an opening night welcome party. Audience Comedy fans from Northern Michigan plus a travelling crowd: about a quarter of ticket buyers come from Chicago, Milwaukee and Detroit and stay the weekend. Tickets run from free open mics to $35 club shows and $95 VIP headliner seats, so locals on a night out sit next to couples and friend groups on a spring getaway. Between shows, they eat and drink downtown. Most make a weekend of it. Talent and Influencers The festival books more than 100 comics a year, with national names at the top of the bill. Recent headliners include Gary Gulman, Roy Wood Jr., Saturday Night Live's Sarah Sherman, Hacks star Meg Stalter and Joe DeVito. Earlier lineups brought Marc Maron, Maria Bamford, Tom Papa, Jay Pharoah, Natasha Leggero, Josh Blue, Ismo and Rory Scovel. Below them sits a deep bench of touring and Michigan comics, plus improv companies such as Full Tilt and Good on Paper. The team are comics too, among them CEO Ann Duke and CMO Bob Phillips, a touring headliner heard on SiriusXM. Track record Headliners sell out. The festival has sold around 5,000 tickets a year, and at the most recent edition every headliner show was gone before opening night. Press coverage comes from MLive, 9and10 News, Northern Express, The Ticker, MyNorth and Hour Detroit, and Traverse City Tourism promotes festival lodging packages to its visitor audience. Brand presence Traverse City Tourism is the presenting sponsor and Hotel Indigo the official hotel, with Short's Brewing, Jimmy John's, Traverse City Light and Power Fiber, Golden Swan Management and Thomas and Milliken Millwork also on board. Partners get headliner ticket blocks, logos on ads, signage and the program book (cover placement and program ads at the top levels), dedicated social posts, sampling at shows and a meet-and-greet with headliners.