Sea Tea Comedy Theater is the Hidden Gem of the Connecticut Comedy Scene

Greg Ehrhardt, OnStage Blog Editorial Staff

City Steam. Comix Roadhouse. Funny Bone. Stress Factory. These are all places most Connecticut stand-up comedy fans know well.

Sea Tea Comedy Club should be on that list.

Located on 15 Asylum Street in Hartford, you could blink while walking down the street and miss it entirely, that’s how minimal its footprint is. But if you blink, you will miss an entirely unique comedy venue that would make you smile from start to finish.

Sea Tea Comedy Theatre is an intimate venue to say the least: they describe it as an 80 seat venue on their website, but it feels half that size. At just $10 a ticket without any drink minimums whatsoever, you are getting value that you wouldn’t get anywhere else in CT considering its location. (They do serve beer and snacks, and the prices were very reasonable, like what you would expect at a local drive-in theater.)

The comedy itself? Sea Tea Comedy specializes in improv comedy nights, so the show we saw was a series of 2-person improv teams doing an improv exercise called “Montages”, where they make up, on the spot, 5-6 quick scenes that all deal with a randomly shouted word from the audience.

The performers on this night were all young, I would say younger than 25 , and some were more polished than others. Was this a great improv comedy night that tickled my funny bone throughout? Of the 4 teams, 2 of them had me laughing throughout their set, and the other two teams were more slow paced, hesitant, like they were trying to figure out in real time what type of jokes worked best for them (I say this knowing that all of the performers were better at improv than I would be, so this is just me assessing this with 20 years of watching “Whose Line is it Anyways” under my belt).

If I had to grade the overall experience from a pure “How hard did I laugh throughout”, I would give it a solid B. However, I realized in walking out of the theatre I was glad to see this instead of checking out the traditional stand-up comedy nights in the Hartford area. Why? There’s an earnestness involved in the improv comedy displayed at Sea Tea that just made me smile throughout regardless of how little or how much I laughed.

Improv comedy is ridiculously hard. Not only do you have to come up with a scene and dialogue that makes sense on the fly, but you must make it funny, and, you have to perform. Performing even with a script you have practiced a hundred times is really hard. Performing with words you literally just made up in your head is that much harder.

I enjoy good stand-up as much as anybody; with stand-up the jokes are often loud, brash, and vulgar. There are times when that’s what you want to laugh to. At Sea Tea Comedy Theater, performers found ways to make the audience laugh with a little wiggle, a silly imitation of a mouse king, and of course, making each other laugh when stumbling through a quickly made up scene about a cat café.

Because in life, it is often the little things in life that make you laugh the hardest.

Sea Tea Theatre gets that, and it is worth a visit if you are in the CT area. Check them out at https://seateaimprov.com/.