Inside the Smallest ‘Anti-Woke’ Comedy Club in Canada
In today’s hyper-sensitive comedy culture, everybody’s a critic — and everybody’s a club owner, too, so long as everybody can tape trash bags over their bedroom windows.
Look, the comedy industry is absolutely brutal toward its bottom rung, and despite the democratization of contemporary comedy platforms due to social media, getting any sort of comedy career off of the ground in 2025, either as a performer or a producer, requires a shameless ability to hustle and self-promote. Getting big in comedy requires one to make moves that are well-past what online haters who have never risked anything to achieve their dreams would consider cringe, and, as such, when an artist or aspiring comedy mogul over-markets themselves on the internet, it’s easy to mock them, criticize their business strategy and leave a one-star review on Google calling the weird bedroom open mic you paid $50 to watch a “complete scam.”
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But when such an aspiring mogul goes on the offensive against bad reviews and accuses unamused audience members of being jealous competitors looking to destroy him with “spam fake accounts” — well, then he’s just asking to get dunked on. This week, one humor fan deep-dove into Key’s Stand-up Comedy Club Toronto Improv Bar and Grill, the hottest Joe Rogan and Tony Hinchliffe-inspired apartment bar/barber shop in the Great White North:
It’s unclear how, exactly, the Twitter user going by the name of Peter Bogdanovic’s character Brooks Otterlake in the posthumous Orson Welles film The Other Side of the Wind determined that Key’s Stand-up Comedy Club Toronto Improv Bar and Grill is an explicitly “anti-woke” establishment, especially considering how apparently devoted the “Bar and Grill” is to the Stop Asian Hate movement. Perhaps Mr. Otterlake came to that conclusion based on how the club’s owner describes his bedroom bar as hosting “globally recognized comedians” who have “graced esteemed stages like Joe Rogan’s Comedy Club” and made “regular appearances on the renowned podcast Kill Tony.”
It’s also unclear which Key’s regulars have performed either at the Comedy Mothership or on Kill Tony — Googling the names on the club’s last three lineups didn’t return any Rogan clips.
The Key’s Stand-up Comedy Club owner — or, more likely, renter — Kivork Kidanian goes by the stage name KeyEpic, and he describes himself as a “STAND UP COMEDY LEGEND!!,” on his YouTube channel where he appears to be a formerly successful Prank YouTuber who amassed millions of views in the mid-2010s on videos with titles like, ”HOW TO PICK UP CHICKS IN TORONTO" and “PRANK ON BOYFRIEND | PRANK VS PRANK | PRANK VIDEO | PRANK WARS | PRANK CALL AUDIO | Voices to Use.”
While the views on Kidanian’s videos have petered out in the decade since the peak of the KeyEpic YouTube channel, his use of SEO buzzwords certainly hasn’t — he recently posted a stand-up video with the title, "KeyEpic: Stand-Up Comedy (CANCELED) WOKE Crowd Work Special." The “special” runs a hair past five minutes.
This kind of clickbait-y self-promotion is commonplace on online platforms, but that strategy clearly doesn’t always work out in the real world, and running a “Comedy Club Toronto Improv Bar and Grill” and a soon-to-be-opened barbershop out of a small room in an apartment leads to some nasty reviews that will provoke equally nasty responses from Kidanian. However, the one-star experiences aren’t the only responses, as plenty of reviewers reported having a good time at Key’s Stand-up Comedy Club Toronto Improv Bar and Grill, even if the room was tiny and hard to reach, the comics weren’t international superstars, the bar was just a guy handing out Heinekens and the “grill” is about as real as the brick wall backdrop.
From what I can tell, Key’s Stand-up Comedy Club Toronto Improv Bar and Grill looks like a small room in someone’s apartment where local Torontonian open-micers hang out with their friends and try out new material, and there’s nothing wrong with running a space like that — every comedy scene in the world needs people like Kidanian who are willing to host shows where up-and-comers can get their reps. The problem lies in the hilariously sensationalized marketing, as, no matter how many hashtags Kidanian puts in his YouTube videos, or how many times he name-drops Joe Rogan, or how many disgruntled guests he accuses of being rival club-owners, search engine optimizing is no replacement for an actual, legal, unexaggerated liquor license.
