Brian Gendron: From Comedy Clubs to Community Impact and Lasting Legacy

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Houston, Texas. It’s time for Houston Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Trisha Stetzel: Hello, Houston. Trisha Stetzel here bringing you another episode of Houston Business Radio. Today I am joined by Brian Gendron, an award winning entrepreneur, community leader and founder and CEO of Riot Comedy Entertainment, which operates comedy clubs in Houston, San Antonio and Conroe. Brian’s growing hospitality portfolio also includes the Library Cocktail Lounge in San Antonio and the Riot Cafe and Bar in Houston, a coffee shop by day and bar and comedy destination by night. He’s also the founder of the annual Riot Comedy Festival and Barbecue cookoff, bringing together comedy, food And community. Beyond entertainment, Brian is passionate about entrepreneurship, education, and giving back. He’s taught through the University of Houston Small Business Development Center, mentored students at the Wolf Center for entrepreneurship, and founded Haha for Hope, an initiative empowering children through comedy. His honors include Houston Business Journal 40 under 40 and entrepreneurs organization. Excuse me. Entrepreneurs. Organization. Houston’s Josh Berry Award. Today, we’re going to explore the business behind the laughter, what it takes to build an entertainment company, and why Brian believes comedy can be a powerful tool for developing confidence, communication and connection. Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian Gendron: Thanks for having me, Trisha. Happy to be here.

Trisha Stetzel: Holy cow. I’m so excited to have you. And I think we’re going to have a really good conversation. But before we jump in to the meat and potatoes. Uh, what else do we need to know about you?

Brian Gendron: Yeah, the big things that weren’t present in the bio. I suppose would be my family. So I’ve got my wife, Elena, who I’ve been married to for 14 years. My two boys, Thomas and Joseph there, and eight. Interestingly enough, my wife is a chiropractor and also an entrepreneur. So family of entrepreneurs.

Trisha Stetzel: Wow. Okay, that makes for a very interesting dinner conversation, I might say. Awesome. Well, I’m so glad to have you. And, um, I’d really. Why don’t we just dive into the hard stuff first? So, um, you’re a working stand up comedian, you’re a writer, but you’ve also built riot comedy entertainment into a business operating across multiple cities. So how did your journey from comedy into entrepreneurship unfold?

Brian Gendron: So as a working comedian, when you’re first starting out, it’s all about getting stage time. And to be honest, when I started this business, it wasn’t a business venture. It was just about age time. I wanted to work on the weekends, and I wasn’t able to get weekend spots because to be honest, I wasn’t good enough as a comedian for those spots. So it becomes like a currency. You go out, you find your own comedy room, and now you can exchange spots with other producers that run comedy rooms to get stage time on their shows. So it ultimately just started about me trying to get on stage and then fast forward like six months, I was like, wait a minute, we might actually have a real business opportunity.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay. What surprised you the most about the business side of comedy?

Brian Gendron: I was a little concerned that the comedians were going to be difficult to work with and potentially might not show up. Miss those types of things that could really harm the business if we don’t have reliable entertainment, but was shocked to find quite the contrary. Even though a lot of comedians lives may be a mess in almost every other area of their life. This is the one thing that they would show up for. And so they’re actually maybe the most reliable workforce I’ve ever had.

Trisha Stetzel: Wow. That is very interesting. So, um, I’m curious, what made you think that going into being a business owner, was there an experience that you had?

Brian Gendron: Yeah. I mean, just over years of working, I spent a lot of time working in corporate and just watching folks not be motivated to come to work and just drawing from that experience. You know, what’s really interesting is not just for the comedians who are performing, but also the entire production staff that put on these shows. Absolutely love the work. And so they’re incredibly reliable and. And so it’s very contrary to like every other work experience I’ve had outside of comedy.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay, so maybe it is true. If you get to do what you love, then you actually show up and do what you love. That’s amazing and very interesting because I, I guess I would see comedians as maybe, uh, not being on time or not having it all together because they’re, you know, artistic and they just kind of go with the flow. Okay. All the comedians out there don’t throw tomatoes at me, please. Oh, I love that. That’s so much fun. So tell me more about the, um, the comedy clubs that you have and remind us again of what cities they’re in.

Brian Gendron: Sure. So the initial club, our flagship club was in Houston, Texas. It was a partnership with the bar we were in and were able to grow our comedy brand for about six years, really up until this summer when we moved into our own space in Houston opened about 75 days ago. As of recording this podcast, our flagship has since moved and grown, and since then we’ve been able to add two other locations. Uh, crazily enough, opened within two months of each other. Uh, the first one was in San Antonio. We have a location in the basement of a hotel, the historic Maverick building, downtown San Antonio, right next to the Riverwalk, the Riverwalk, and then in, uh. December 31st of 2025 the year we had our first show at Riot Control location in partnership with Guadalajara Bar and Grill, downtown Historic Monroe. And, uh, that’s been going well as is. You know what’s really interesting? I’m just as I’m saying this out loud, all three of our projects are in historic buildings because our one in Houston is as well, 100 year old building on Washington Avenue.

Trisha Stetzel: Wow, that is really cool. So it sounds like that was not on purpose. It’s just the way it happened.

Brian Gendron: It’s a really hard part of starting a comedy club is finding the right space. We’re looking at for things that are a little different than traditional bar and restaurant, in that we like things we desire, things that are generally undesirable for these types of concepts. By that I mean we want low light, so we want less windows. Usually bars want lots of windows. We want low ceilings for for intimacy in the comedy room. So we’re looking for low light low ceilings. And the last one low obstruction. So we don’t want big pillars and things that are going to be in the way of people’s views to the stage. So it’s surprisingly really hard to find those three things plus parking. So somehow they’ve all become historic buildings that have given us those elements that we need to start comedy clubs.

Trisha Stetzel: Wow, that is a ton of fun. All right, so the location in Houston, you said is off of Washington. Give us an address so we know where it’s at.

Brian Gendron: Of course, 1925 Washington Avenue. We share a building with julep, which is a very popular cocktail lounge here in Houston. We share parking with them. Okay. Really cool neighbors.

Trisha Stetzel: Fantastic. All right, so all my Houston peeps. All my, uh, San Antonio peeps and everyone who’s in Conroe. You guys have a place to go, and I’m assuming that riot is on all of the signs so they can find it, right? Brian?

Brian Gendron: Yes. So in Houston, in San Antonio, we have comedy shows seven nights a week. We have two at least two shows every night at both of those locations on Saturday, Friday, Saturday. We’ve got at least three shows in Houston because we have a breakfast cafe that goes into lunch. We actually are doing our brunch shows, which means on Saturday we’re not going to have four shows, including our brunch show at 1 p.m. then we’ll have the same brunch show on Sunday at 1 p.m., which starts October 24th, which is exciting.

Trisha Stetzel: Wow. That’s super exciting. Okay. So I want to talk about scaling a business because this is really, I feel like moved very quickly for you. You’re in three cities that are kind of far apart. It’s not like you can hurry up and get there. So what have you learned about scaling a business where human experience is such an important part of the product?

Brian Gendron: So when I started the other two clubs, within two months of each other, I realized our systems were not set up for scale. And I knew right away that what the processes we had set up, we had separate software for tickets, separate software for booking comedians, separate software for paying comedians. So there are all these silos that needed to be brought together. And so we evaluated some different vendors and we found one. It’s called stand up tix that was able to put everything under one hood. And so that was a kind of a tough but necessary transition to set us up for scale and really just kind of grab a hold of what we built and manage it appropriately. And now that we’ve kind of taken those hard steps, the next end of next location becomes so much easier. And so that was a huge learning process. And then consolidating services like to consolidate my payroll all under one umbrella so we can control payroll. And so there’s a kind of tough summer just cleaning up all the different messes that we created in these different markets into one sort of shared service. And now, yeah, going into the next market almost feels too easy now that we’ve set all that up.

Trisha Stetzel: Wow. Congratulations. So what I’m hearing is the comedian turned business owner, who’s still a comedian, still has lessons to learn about business, as do we. All right, as we’re moving through the process.

Brian Gendron: Oh my gosh, for sure. So let me actually show you, share with you sort of the process and journey we’ve gone through and what I’ve learned through that process. The first one was a partnership with the bar. A lot of learning to do around like how that works. That’s an interesting dynamic and there’s a lot of challenges there. Those are first and the second stop doing a build out of a of a new space. So we hadn’t done that yet. We just we worked off somebody else’s space. This one was already more or less kind of set up for us. So it wasn’t too bad. We had to do some electrical, some plumbing. We do all the permitting. So kind of learning that process, a kind of a build out light. Houston was a renovation project. It was a bar that we had to renovate and change into what would be a comedy club. And so going through the process of revising existing plans, permitting through that permitting in a historic, historic building has its own challenges. We learned a bunch there, and now there’s another project that I’m working on in another market where it’s a dark shell, which means it’s, uh, it’s just an empty space. They give you power, connections, water connections, and you just start from the ground up. And so each one becomes a little bit harder, which for me as an entrepreneur is exciting because it’s like, let’s build on what we learned and what comes next becomes owning the dirt. So actually owning the real estate, right? So that’s, that’s kind of the progression of, of how I get there and how I use learning throughout that process to get to the next step.

Trisha Stetzel: That’s so exciting. All right, I want to, I want you to tell tell me who you serve. And then I’m going to ask you for your contact information. So I realized sitting on the other side of this microphone, that you want patrons to come to the club, but I’m assuming that you probably serve comedians and others inside of your organization as well. So tell me about that.

Brian Gendron: Yeah. So if you talk to anybody that works for me and you ask them, what do we do? The, the their answer should be one one a and one B and one A is take care of the audience or take one B is take care of the comedian. So you’re right. We do. We serve both of them. And then one C would be we take care of each other. But but yeah, so we serve from the comedy audience side for guests that come in almost ubiquitously. Everybody loves comedy. If you ask them, almost everybody needs to laugh. It’s just the truth of it, a straw poll, especially when we were starting, we bootstrapped. This started with $0. And here we are, you know, millions of dollars in tickets now later, but like annually. But like, um, asking people on Instagram, just trying to like find people to come to our comedy club in the beginning, just, I would just bait them with like, hey, do you love stand up comedy? Thousands of times. I asked that and answers always yes. Sometimes the caveat would be like yes, but it has to be clean. Okay. Okay. Yeah. You know, but but so it’s really for the masses. Now our comedy, we usually don’t have a content restriction on our shows, generally speaking. So we do ask that everybody be 21 up. Also, because we serve alcohol, there’s some liability with letting in people under 21. So 21 and up. I tell you who our best customers are there at both ends of this. There, there are couples, right? So it’s mostly a date night. So our best customers are like new dating. We call them dual income. No, kids don’t have don’t have kids. So they can come a lot.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay.

Brian Gendron: Then they go on to life. They they get engaged, they get married. They’re still coming. They’re still coming. Then the kid comes and now we don’t see them as much. They still love us. We’re still part of the story. It’s just babysitting night. It’s a hassle. So maybe we’ll see them twice a year. Yeah. Fast forward 20 years. Kids are out of the house now. They’re back again. And that’s our next. That’s our next demo is sort of older dating, you know, empty nesters.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, I love that. That’s so much fun. Uh, all right, give us your contact information. What is the best way for anyone who’s listening today that either wants to know more about what you’re doing, Brian, or more about, uh, riot comedy.

Brian Gendron: Yeah. You know, I try to be generous with my time, especially if it’s around entrepreneurship, business, comedy. Those things are my passion. So if you wanted to reach out to me directly, you can reach out to me at Brian BRIAN at the riot ht.com, so THERITHT dot email address, reach out to me there. That URL is also our Houston location, the riot.com. And then, you know, Riot Conroe conroe.com is where you can find tickets and information for that location. San Antonio is at Riverwalk.

Trisha Stetzel: Fantastic. All right, so back to it. Um, when you and I had our first conversation a few weeks back, we talked about how comedy and improv can develop skills that, uh, have nothing to do with becoming a comedian. So what do people actually learn when they put themselves in that kind of environment?

Brian Gendron: So I’ve got a comedy class that I’m teaching right now. We do it twice a year. We cap it at 16 people, and about half of the people that are coming to that class are there for development. Just sort of they they work. They want to try something fun. This is a good way to develop their skills. What kind of skills are they looking to develop public speaking? It’s probably one of the hardest forms of public speaking, stand up comedy, improv I teach, I don’t I’ve not taught adults improv, but I teach to kids in our for Hope program. I. I teach them improv, so that’s teamwork. In both cases, confidence is huge. And then just learning how to express yourself and, and, uh, a lot of times it can also be a way to discover your identity, if that makes sense. You’re putting yourself out there. If it’s done well, and there’s a lot of learning about yourself through that process. Uh, so there’s, I mean, gosh, the benefits are, there’s so many benefits to performing and writing is a creative outlet. It’s just a nice place for, for me. I’ve got a very busy lifestyle and things, and it’s just one place where I can go to get out those, those, those, those feelings and have a creative outlet that I can, I can work on. So, uh, there’s a lot of benefits.

Trisha Stetzel: Absolutely. So what is it? What is it about comedy that I don’t know? I’m standing on the outside looking in because I’ve not I’ve never taken a comedy class. I got kicked out of a couple of comedy clubs because I laughed too loud. But I’ve never taken a class, and I’m curious why that that process of standing on stage and making people laugh feels nicer and easier as a professional than standing up and presenting a, I don’t know, a slide deck on the screen.

Brian Gendron: I don’t know if one is easier than the other. I, you know, I would say if if it’s done, if you put the time in and you’ve written jokes and they’re, they’re in your voice and they’re true to your character, it’s just more enjoyable than, than, you know, presenting something on any given topic. From my experience, I’ve done both. I’ve, I came from a, from a IT consulting background, and I’ve done a lot of those types of Presentations versus this live stand up. And yes, I would take live stand up every day. Week. And I and I do this is what I chose. And here we are.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, I love that. So the example of standing on stage and presenting something that that makes sense. It’s pretty straightforward. What about the translation? Back to communication and teamwork and even being a better leader in the workplace, how do you see comedy playing a role in that space as well, or at least learning?

Brian Gendron: Yes. For anybody who’s looking to improve their business communication skills, I think one of the main things is just being able to say things clearly and communicate clearly is overlooked and underappreciated. Skill that we just don’t think about. And so a lot of like, when it comes down to comedy writing, it’s about trying to say something in as few words as possible because you’re trying to get to jokes as quickly as possible. And so it’s all about tightening and tightening up your material just for that purpose, elicit that response. And so I think, yeah, just being able to speak, you’ve been in a situation where somebody’s talking to you and then just go on. You can’t get a word. And hopefully I don’t sound like this on the on this podcast, but you know what I’m saying? Like just it cuts that out and it’s just, you know, so it just helps you with overall communication, whether it’s in business or in your personal life. Yeah.

Trisha Stetzel: And it might be a little fun too.

Brian Gendron: Oh yeah. Yeah. And it’s a language. It’s like its own language. If you, if you, if you write comedy for long enough and you do it, if you’re, if you’re writing every day and you’re really working on it, you just learn how to speak that way. It becomes its own part of the English language. You think? Yeah.

Trisha Stetzel: It’s fun. All right, I’m gonna do a shout out to Mike. He’s a friend of mine who is also a professional coach who sent me his stand up comedy the first time he told this lovely set of jokes. So shout out to him for, you know, kind of stepping out on the ledge and doing something that made him feel comfortable, more comfortable standing on stage, which I think is really amazing. Uh, I want to talk about ha ha for Hope. I mentioned it in your introduction and you mentioned it a few minutes ago as well. Uh, tell me more about that program.

Brian Gendron: Yeah, it’s definitely near and dear to my heart. It’s actually one of the it’s the first public comedy show ever produced before the riot even existed. I started running the program. And really, it comes from a background of being on nonprofit boards, running nonprofit galas. It was where I was most comfortable in producing. And so I just took all those skills and contacts and put this into a comedy show. And it was very successful from the start. And and it’s evolved. So what was originally let’s go out. Let’s tell some jokes as a part of the programing. Let’s raise some money and we’re going to donate it to a nonprofit. That’s what it was. It was a bit of a pass through organization. It’s got high for kids arts company Big Brothers, Big Sisters. So those are some of the organizations where there’s always children related causes. And that was just me being my belief is like the, the working with kids and can really improve the trajectory. I think you have the most impact when working with kids if. Well, right. Um, but my aha moment, we pandemic kind of canceled all that on us and put it on pause. And we were, we were doing some like we were going to, um, we were doing commitments to where like, hey, we’re going to, we opened it up and we were getting submissions and that, that was kind of the, what the format was.

Brian Gendron: But then when the pandemic kind of killed all that, I changed my thought process and said, look, let me build some comedy clubs or some resources. Meaning I’ll have places for for people to perform or for kids to perform. Uh, I have more staff so we can execute and we have, we can give more back. And so it’s been a couple of years building. And my aha moment was my own son Joseph was on stage. We were just messing around at the comedy club and he like got on the microphone and was being silly. And I was like, wait a minute. We could teach kids comedy as our own programing, as opposed to giving this to organizations that are running their, you know, to support their program. And that’s when we started the 501 C three, and that was the end of 24. And since then, we’ve been working with local schools, uh, other programs, after school programs and those types of things to teach comedy. So we’ve been doing that for since 24. Yeah.

Trisha Stetzel: Wow. What does that journey look like for these kiddos that are in the program?

Brian Gendron: Yeah, we’ve had a Xavier Academy was, was our kind of pilot school and they. They were the. Most of them that participated in the first year came back to do it again. The second year. The first year they did improv, which they. They weren’t necessarily comfortable being up there individually, which is what stand up is. So that made it more comfortable to do it as a team. Well, in year two, the progression was they got to perform. They wanted to come up and perform stand up. They were comfortable being all by themselves and they did a great job. So that’s what we’ve seen. I think this isn’t official yet, but our festival, we might have an opportunity where they can perform at an arena, which is just an insane idea for somebody at that age to perform for thousands of people. So that may I think that’s going to be the progression for that Xavier Academy group of kids and little middle school at this point. So things like that. Yeah.

Trisha Stetzel: So exciting. Oh my goodness. What a great opportunity to get get out of your own way and learn something in such a at a young age to be able to stand in front of a group of people and make them laugh.

Brian Gendron: I mean, it’s a this is actually designed to scale beyond what we can do with the comedy clubs and that we can. This is getting packaged to go into other markets, to be run by comedians in that market, help them provide the curriculum, help them set up a show at a local comedy club. And so that that has a whole plan to scale beyond just what we’re doing here in Houston, which is it’s hard to find the time and the day to do everything. So we’re we’ve got a board that’s working through all that now and we’ll get that done. But to me, this whole. And we want to get that into where we can provide scholarships for kids going into the arts and, you know, bigger big picture. But for me, what this is, is my legacy in comedy. So like, one of the main reasons that I want to do this is because I didn’t start comedy until I was 34, because nobody told me I could do that. And so if somebody would have told me when I was like 15, when I was watching, you know, Richard Pryor and George Carlin and Eddie Murphy, and I love it. I didn’t know it was an option. But if I can reach a kid earlier now, we can create comedians earlier that can that can get on and entertain people. And I think that’s more important right now within the world of AI and all all this, all the things that’s going on, or it’s about human connection, it’s about emotional intelligence. And we can get kids into jobs that will still be around in five, ten years in the arts.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. I’m glad that you brought up the whole topic of AI and, um, you know, because as business owners, many of us as entrepreneurs are talking mostly about technology and AI and what can help us save more time. And we’re moving further and further away from humans, where your business is actually bringing humans together and creating this entire experience. And that’s beautiful and amazing. Congratulations on so many other great things that you’re bringing to the table. I love this idea of the aha for hope and what you’re doing there, and how much bigger that can be. So congratulations on all of the things that you’ve been working on so far, and I can’t wait to hear what’s next. So speaking of that, as we get to the back end of our conversation today, what’s next for Brian and what’s next for riot comedy?

Brian Gendron: Yeah. So the biggest thing, I suppose that we, we have on our calendar is the fifth festival with Riot Comedy Festival we’ve had in the Houston markets every spring. So this one will be April 7th through the 10th. And that that’s what kids will perform at that as part of hover. So those are all related. That has evolved into not just a comedy festival, but it’s a food celebrate. We have our barbecue cook off. So think about Houston is a major food city. So this is really comedy and culinary combined is really what the DNA of this this festival is moving forward. And interestingly enough, I learned that from Moontower in Austin. I go to that festival every year. It’s a great comedy festival in Austin, and they’ve done a great job of what they do in their city, which is music and comedy. And so that was somewhat inspired by like, let’s, let’s, let’s make it a little more than comedy. Let’s make this community event. And ideally, if done well, this will be our third year with the barbecue cook off. Now we’re taking kind of two different, you know, the food foodies and the comedy fans, and we’re kind of merging those together into one event. That’s pretty exciting. Uh, and then we’ve got, and as I mentioned earlier, I’ve got another project I’m working on where we’re working with a completely dark shell that’ll bring a forward, the Riot Comedy Club.

Brian Gendron: The way that works is, well, we’ll continue to enter new markets now that we’re set up for scale, where we always have our secret. I call it our secret weapon, which is our speakeasy style comedy club. You know, in the back, low ceiling, low light, low obstruction, and in the front side of the business gives you whatever that market gives you. And by that, I mean in, you know, in Houston, the concept we have is our we have a coffee shop and a cafe and it’s open, you know, from 7 a.m. into the comedy shows, into the evening, every day. That’s what we had in that space. You know, this, this next space might deliver something completely different. And we’ve got a project we’re about to sign off on, which will be our next location very soon, so can’t say much more about that. But that is the strategy, right? So we can literally, if we find the right markets and we do plan on getting outside of Texas, there’s a few other markets we want to get into. This thing scales.

Trisha Stetzel: Oh okay. Well congratulations. I can’t wait to hear and see what’s coming next. It sounds very exciting. I really enjoyed our conversation today and I’m glad that you spent the time with me.

Brian Gendron: Thanks, Trisha. Nice to spend time with you.

Trisha Stetzel: All right. Brian. Okay, you guys, that’s all the time we have for today. If you found value in this conversation that Brian and I had, please share it with a fellow entrepreneur, a veteran or Houston leader ready to grow or somebody who’s interested in comedy for all of the reasons we talked about today. So be sure to follow, rate and review the show. It helps us reach more bold business minds just like yours and your business. Your leadership and your legacy are built one intentional step at a time. So stay inspired, stay focused, and keep building the business and the life you deserve.