Laugh After Dark ComedyFest 2026: Nine Shows, 40 Films and a 20% Cut in Las Vegas

The Laugh After Dark ComedyFest ran Monday, October 26 through Wednesday, October 28 in Las Vegas, its fifth year. The stand-up happened at the L.A. Comedy Club inside The STRAT, the tall hotel at the north end of the Strip, and the films played at THIRD Street in the Arts District. Holding a comedy festival on a Monday in Las Vegas takes nerve. That's the night the town quietly counts what it took off everybody over the weekend.

The festival promised nine live stand-up shows, more than forty comedy film screenings, workshops, live productions, parties and a red carpet. That is a lot of carpet for three days. In my experience, the more a festival talks about its red carpet, the more likely the carpet belongs to the hotel and the festival is renting it by the hour.

The headline feature was the camera. According to the festival, every ComedyFest show was filmed live, and the audience was warned it might end up in a comedy special. A festival that films everything is the opposite of Vegas's famous promise. Here what happens in the room stays on a hard drive and turns up later on the internet, which, now that I write it down, describes most of my twenties.

The footage feeds LADTV, the streaming service that presents the festival. Every pass came with three free months of LADTV Premium, and the online film festival kept streaming through November 5, a week after the last live show. That makes it the only thing in Las Vegas that keeps going after you've left, apart from the charges on your card.

What I can't tell you is who was any good, because the festival never published a lineup. Its site names no comics, no films and no award winners. The one name I could pin down came from a comic's own website: Sandra Risser listed a Laugh After Dark set at the L.A. Comedy Club for 6 p.m. on Wednesday the 28th. I found no reviews, in the Las Vegas press or anywhere else, so I won't tell you who killed and who died. Anyone who does is guessing, and in Las Vegas they'll want a stake on it.

For comics, the submission terms are the real story, and they're printed plainly. You sent a five-to-seven-minute clip shot in the last eighteen months through Comedy Finder. The fee climbed from $29 early bird to $39 standard and then $49 for the extended and last-chance windows, with a June 30 deadline and acceptances emailed July 17. Films went through FilmFreeway on their own track.

If you got in, you signed the festival's participant terms and an image release, and you were filmed. Here is the clever part. If LADTV or YouTube releases your full set, you get 20 percent of the revenue from it. Clips, reels and short edits pay nothing, and nobody promises your set will be released. The submissions page mentions no performance fee. So a comic pays $49, flies to Las Vegas, performs for free, signs away the pictures, and maybe gets a fifth of whatever a video makes. That is a better deal than the slot machines offer, but not by as much as you'd like.

To be fair to them, a royalty is more than most showcase festivals ever put in writing, and somebody at Laugh After Dark deserves credit for printing a percentage at all. The festival also notes that being picked one year counts for nothing the next: every ComedyFest is a new event, and you pay the fee again. For next year it suggests building a free profile on Comedy Finder, and it hasn't announced 2027 dates or a deadline yet.

Heckle's verdict: if you're a working comic who needs tape, an edited, professionally shot set from a real club is worth something, and $49 is cheaper than hiring a crew. If you want an audience of bookers, a review, or a paycheck, there's no sign of any of those. Read the terms before you pay, and keep your own copy of the set.

There is an old rule in the desert, and it holds for comedy too. When the house offers you a cut, find out first what it's taking.