Comic of the Week: Ethan Simmons-Patterson Goes Back to Iowa City
He started telling jokes in a college town, moved to Brooklyn, and became the Comedy Cellar regular Netflix and Vulture both noticed this year. Next week he plays the town that started it.
By the Heckle Desk · · 3 min read
There's a kind of comedian who walks out and seems to have already been talking to you for a while. You missed the beginning, but he's not upset about it. That's Ethan Simmons-Patterson. Vulture put him on its list of the comedians you should and will know in 2026 and called his delivery conversational and his smile sly, which is the sort of praise you only earn by not trying to earn it.
He's from Waukegan, Illinois, a city on Lake Michigan that's given the world Jack Benny, Ray Bradbury and now a comic who talks about it on stage like he's still trying to figure out what happened there. He started doing stand-up in Iowa City while he was in college, which is a brave place to begin. College towns are full of people who are funny at parties, and every one of them is in the audience at the open mic waiting to tell you so afterward. He graduated in 2015 and moved to New York, which is the next bravest thing a person can do, and the most expensive.
New York worked the way it works for the ones who stay: slowly, and then all at once if you're lucky. He's now based in Brooklyn and performs regularly at the Comedy Cellar, The Stand and New York Comedy Club, which is the comedy equivalent of a man saying he's on a first-name basis with the bank, the courthouse and the bar. He taped a set for Comedy Central's This Week at the Comedy Cellar, has sets up with Don't Tell Comedy, and was a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. This year Netflix Is a Joke picked him as one of ten comics for its Short List showcase, and his set from it is up on Netflix's Tudum.
What makes the act work is that it doesn't look like it's working. His own site calls it laid-back and observational, and the clubs that book him describe material about everyday life, social rules, race and gender, much of it carried back from Waukegan like a suitcase he keeps meaning to unpack. He's not a shouter. He's the fellow at the table who waits until everyone else has finished being loud and then says the one thing that makes the whole table put their drinks down. That's a harder job than it sounds. Volume can fake confidence. Quiet can't.
You can see what all the fuss is about in his own clips. There's one on his YouTube channel called I Used to Rob Houses, which is either the most honest title in comedy or the best misdirect, and I won't spoil which.
Here's the part I like best. On Thursday, November 19, he's playing Club Hancher at the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City, the town where he started. That's the dream for a comic: you leave a college town with a notebook and a bus ticket, and you come back with a Netflix credit and a professional venue, and somebody who sat through your first open mic is now paying for parking. Before that, on November 13, he's on a New York Comedy Festival bill of New York's funniest stand-ups at The Stand. Check the club's page before you go; lineups move.
Every Monday we pick one of our Comics to Watch and tell you why. This week it's an easy call. Some comics make you laugh because they're trying very hard. Ethan Simmons-Patterson makes you laugh because he isn't, and that, as any farmer in Iowa will tell you, is the difference between weather and a show.