If you visit Moe’s Penny Bar on a Wednesday night, you’ll find what you’d probably expect.
Patrons sitting around the bar, enjoying drinks with their friends. Wings with celery, carrots and ranch being delivered to tables. Music filling the bar with life.
But at 8 p.m., something happens at Moe’s Penny Bar that you won’t be able to find anywhere else in Oxford.
At 8 p.m., Ayric Bradley walks up to the standalone mic in the corner of the venue and starts his now Wednesday night routine.
“It’s Open Mic Night at Moe’s Penny Bar,” Bradley says. “Give yourselves a round of applause!”
After cheers from the crowd, Bradley begins cracking his own jokes and soon after playing his role as host for the night, welcoming other comedians to the stage.
Open Mic Nights at Moe’s Penny Bar are just a small part of the stand-up comedy scene in Oxford, a scene that in recent years has done nothing but pick up steam.
Much of the growth in Oxford’s comedy scene is due to the work of Connor King.
King, a Jackson native, came to Oxford to study for his undergraduate degree at UM.
Although he had always been interested in improvisation, sketch comedy and comedy in general, King said he didn’t see many opportunities in Oxford until his senior year.
“I learned about an open mic night that happened over at the Blind Pig,” King said. “I went to go check it out, like a typical person finding stand-up comedy, and after watching it a couple of times, mustered up the courage to get on stage. I did okay enough that I thought it’d be fun to keep trying it.”
After his first open mic night in 2013, King continued to immerse himself in the comedy scene, doing more stand-up and joining the local improvisation group Laff Co.
Although comedy has remained a side gig in his life, King works full-time as a systems analyst for a tech company. In 2016, he started the Oxford Comedy Instagram (@oxfordmscomedy), which has grown to become the go-to account for all information about comedy in Oxford.
“Oxford Comedy is basically a social media vehicle that I use to get the word out about shows,” King said.
The shows promoted on Oxford Comedy include open mic nights and more organized shows booked by others and King himself. King first dipped into the business of booking shows when he traveled to Memphis with Laff Co. in his earlier comedy days.
“I work with comics that I really trust, and I have a sort of network of comedians that I work with generally in the southeast,” King said. “Also, many people actually reach out to me about finding these shows.”
King said that Oxford is a spot where many comedians on tour hitting bigger cities such as Atlanta, Nashville and Memphis can stop in between.
“If you’re touring and gas ain’t cheap, you probably want to fill in a couple more cool spots,” King said. “So I have people that would just message me about doing shows. It’s sort of a self-sustaining ecosystem of different comedian networks.”
One of the recent shows that King booked was on Sept. 19 at Proud Larry’s. The show featured Delisia Nicholas from Pensacola, Fla., and Jawa Horn from Memphis.
Although Horn has a long-time connection with King, Nicholas was a newer comic on King’s scene who drove all the way from Pensacola for the Oxford show.
Nicholas, who was inspired to try comedy after seeing the show “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” had no expectations for the Oxford show but was enthusiastic to get up on the stage and perform.
And that she did. Together Horn and Nicholas kept the crowd engaged and laughing. Horn’s pop culture references to “Star Wars” and “Euphoria” and jokes about life as a dad kept the audience on their toes and laughing.
Nicholas offered up fresh content, jokes that women in the crowd could connect to and a unique delivery.
The show at Proud Larry’s ended with the host, Tucker Lawson, inviting audience members to try their hands at stand-up in an open mic.
The combination open mic and booked show style is something that is becoming a regular for comedy shows in Oxford.
King has made an effort to incorporate that style into the Open Mic Nights at Moe’s Penny Bar, with a secret open mic at the end of the month. On those nights, a booked comedian comes in to perform for the crowd in addition to those for the open mic.
The idea for secret open mics was inspired by the Secret Comedy Club in Oxford, which started in 2019 but was shut down by the pandemic along with most other comedy events in Oxford.
“I’m not expecting nor do I hope that people that want to see good comedy subject themselves to open mic comedy every single Wednesday night, although we would love to have them there,” King said. “But we want to incentivize people to come, so we do a secret open mic at the end of the month. Basically, I just bring in a comedian that I’ve worked with before.”
Bradley was the first guest comedian and expressed enthusiasm about the secret open mics.
“The first one was me, and the second one was Jeffrey Eggleston,” Bradley said. “Oxford has a great little base to show so many different comedians.”
Although organizing shows, booking venues and connecting with comedians are all important parts of comedy in Oxford, the love for comedy and enthusiasm of everyone involved really are what has kept the scene growing.
Lawson, originally from Greenville, S.C., and now a law student at the University of Mississippi, chose to come to school in Oxford partly for its comedy scene.
“It’s cool to come here and get to exercise a bunch of the chops that I’ve been picking up,” Lawson said. “Being around friends both in comedy and out of comedy, and just having that natural feel, I think it loosens me up and makes me think in different ways.”
Bradley, originally from Washington D.C., started standup in Oxford three years ago and has been able to watch the scene grow.
“I started about three years ago, and I’ll tell you it might have been like five, six or seven comedians. Now we’re steadily having 15ish,” Bradley said. “Everyone could only do like three minutes. I can see that (the open mic is) growing, but the Oxford comedy scene is also growing.”
The audience support for comedy in Oxford is growing as well. Patrick Hudgins and Julia Peters, who attended the open mic on Oct. 5, expressed this support and said that they would return to open mic nights in the future.
“Each performer is different. You kind of don’t know what you’re going to get,” Hudgins said. “We had a great time.”
On the subject of growth, King noted that not only is standup growing, but all types of comedy in Oxford are growing. King is a part of an improvisation comedy group that recently started up and meets monthly at The Growler.
“I’m very excited about watching them grow and getting to witness cool new performers and comedy in a way that we haven’t seen in Oxford for too long,” King said.
To keep growth going, King, Lawson and Bradley encouraged people to try their hand at comedy.
“The cool thing about open mics is that you have every single level of comedy there,” Lawson said. “You have someone like me who’s been doing it for seven years, you have guys and girls, people that are coming off the street, and it’s the first three minutes of comedy that they’re ever doing. It’s really, really cool.”
King ended with a piece of advice.
“I know it’s scary to think about what could happen when it goes bad. I would say to come to watch and just observe. You’re going to see good comedy, and you’re going to be excited about that.”
