Hartbeat company pumps up underrepresented comic talent

“Look at this office daytime show, scouting at the worst hours possible!” Vinny Fasline jokes. “I feel like I’m giving the best man speech at a wedding that got canceled. These guys stayed just to see if they could get some cake.”

The diverse crowd of around 50 laughs. Lounging in green velvet club chairs next to a glistening marble bar, they relax and connect with co-workers at day’s end over a complimentary cocktail hour and live comedy show at comedian Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat studios in West Hollywood. Chicken skewers, flat breads, red-velvet confections, unlimited specialty drinks are included.

“Doing stand-up in this environment is very strange,” host J.D. Witherspoon confirms back onstage. The digital sign behind him reads “Hartbeat Presents: LOL Live.” “This room is mad cozy,” Witherspoon says. “You can’t be cozy and watch comedy while you’re getting fed shrimp.”

The Hartbeat entertainment company’s content, branding and distribution divisions are here, plus executives, industry collaborators, invited talent, and Hartbeat friends of all stripes. One full wall holds framed black-and-white shots of stand-up greats Richard Pryor, Moms Mabley, Redd Foxx, Bernie Mac, and Wanda Sykes performing live.

Normally an “all hands” area with casual seating for meetings, president and chief content officer Bryan Smiley describes the de facto bar/venue as “an area where we host some cool internal programming.” Last October, Hart, chairman of Hartbeat and recent recipient of the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, tested new material onstage, dutifully recording each joke as a winner or a dud.

With three divisions and juggernaut brands including the LOL! Network, Hartbeat has become a global creative space for diverse, traditionally underrepresented comedy talent to hone authentic voices and artist-forward collaborations.

“Comedy comes from many different points of view,” Smiley said. From Hartbeat’s launch, “It was a lot of conversation around gatekeeping and access and diversity and media. And we recognize our ability to really change the conversation.”

In 2022, Hartbeat studios merged with Laugh Out Loud and raised $100 million in capital, prompting them to move their offices last year from Encino to Oprah Winfrey’s former 38,000-square-foot OWN studio off Formosa Avenue in West Hollywood. Smiley cited the need to be more centrally located to comedy clubs.

Hartbeat studios recently moved from Encino to West Hollywood.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Today writers like Chris Spencer pop in and out through the week. There’s fancy conference-room art, a new podcasting area, and screening room for everything from dailies to elite events.

Following roughly two dozen comedy releases in 2023, 2024 highlights include March’s BET revival of “Comic View” with host Mike Epps, and DC Young Fly winning a NAACP Virtual Image Award as outstanding host of VH1’s “Celebrity Squares.” The “Comedy in Color” franchise features more than 300 comics from 30 countries; Women Write Now, a comedic screenwriting fellowship for Black women, is in its third cycle of funding, mentoring, and connects three shorts to Sundance premiere and Peacock distribution. SiriusXM channel LOL Radio launches monthly stand-up series “Hot Mic” as of this Friday, recorded live at the Hollywood Improv with host Comedian CP, Ken Flores, Cipha Sounds, Kanisha Buss, and Ron Taylor.

Chief content officer Bryan Smiley of Hartbeat. “We do movies, TV, all that stuff, but there’s something still deeply special about performing in front of actual people,” he says.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Smiley described stand-up comedy as being in Harbeat’s DNA. “We do movies, TV, all that stuff, but there’s something still deeply special about performing in front of actual people: that real-time feedback and actually getting to touch the audience in a way that you can only through live events,” he said.

Building an experiential component around stand-up, in July 2023 Hartbeat Weekend returned to Resorts World in Las Vegas for four days surrounding Hart’s birthday. The comedian performed alongside Ludacris, T.I., and J Cole. A pool party, “Comic View” filming, Hartbeat podcast tapings with live audiences, and plenty of parties sought to create a mini-festival vibe. A next edition is planned for September.

Punkie Johnson and co-host Dicey’s “Love Thang” podcast at Hartbeat Weekend 2023 included the “Saturday Night Live” cast member marrying a couple live on SiriusXM’s LOL Radio. The relationship series had originally been in development prior to Johnson landing “Saturday Night Live.” After finally debuting three long years later, this past March “Love Thang” won a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation.

“Surrounded by a team of people who find you valuable, want to support you, and provide you with the platform to display talent without changing a single thing about yourself,” Johnson said of Hartbeat, “that means everything for an artist.”

Johnson recalled being encouraged, “We need you to be you. They call you brash? Great, go be brash. They call you blunt? Great, go be blunt. They call you too gay? They call you too Black? They say you’re not feminine enough? Fantastic, we’ll take all of that.”

Comedian Vinny Fasline doing stand-up at Hartbeat studios in West Hollywood.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

In the process of crafting a “smaller, tighter” podcast series out later this year, she highlighted continuing to learn production, direction, and “how take an idea and see your project through to the end.”

May 11 at L.A.’s Netflix Is a Joke comedy festival, Hartbeat continued a burgeoning tradition of holding a Saturday comedians’ brunch. Hart, fresh from hosting Netflix’s record-breaking Roast of Tom Brady, welcomed talent like Craig Robinson, Bert Kreischer, Sam Jay, Janelle James, Jay Pharoah, Atsuko Okatsuka, and Fortune Feimster.

“The vibe of the Hartbeat brunch was, I hate to say it because it’s so cliché, but Black excellence,” said London Hughes. “Everybody who’s talented and of melanated skin, all in one place.”

Hughes originally developed her stand-up special “To Catch a D—” at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe festival, where she was the first British Black woman nominated for best show at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards. Hartbeat produced her 2020 global Netflix stand-up release with Hart as executive producer.

The crowd inside Hartbeat studios.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

“There’s a lot of people that want you to be something you’re not, or try and mold you into what they think would be more mainstream, more palatable,” Hughes said. With Hartbeat, “They were like, ‘You have it as you are.’ ”

With Neil Patrick Harris, Tig Notaro, Women Write Now veteran Nicole Byer and others, Hughes appeared in Hartbeat’s “Group Therapy” mental-health documentary, which premiered June 6 at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Hughes calls comedy in Britain, “for lack of better words, sexist and institutionally racist.” In the film, she recalls, “I watched all my white male friends start off in the comedy scene with me and then go on to be really successful.” Hughes is currently developing a Hartbeat scripted series in addition to multiple audio properties.

“You recognize the talent very early,” Smiley said of the company’s mission. “How do we actually create not just a pipeline program or a diversity program, but how do we really do something that creates real impact and leads to actual results, which is people working?”

Said Johnson, “In this business where somebody just has your back like that, that’s the win right there. When you’re just not out here wandering by yourself, that’s the win.”