Chaos Comedy Club

Back rooms in the south-west

The Chaos Comedy Club was a promotion long before it was a programme. Mathias Haze, then a communication-design student, began running the night with the comedian Jochen Prang in November 2018, building a circuit of shows and open mics across Karlsruhe, Mannheim and Saarbrücken. The model was the mixed bill rather than the solo tour: several acts a night, a compère, a rotating cast drawn from whoever was working the German-language circuit at the time.

That geography matters to how the thing sounds. The south-west is not where German television comedy is commissioned, and the club grew up in rooms that were built for bands and drinking rather than for punchlines — among them the Alte Hackerei in Karlsruhe, a small venue that became the club's effective home stage and is still in its diary. The club's own description of its material has stayed consistent since: rawness, honesty and humour outside the mainstream, with up to five stand-up acts a show covering everything from sharp everyday observation to darker or plainly silly writing.

Fun's Not Dead, and a camera

The step that took the club beyond its own postcode was filming it. Haze raised €1,500 through the crowdfunding platform Startnext for equipment and a small crew, and the first recordings were made in January 2020 at the Alte Hackerei. The resulting format, Fun's Not Dead, went out from 9 August 2020 as six clips of roughly ten to twenty minutes each — full sets rather than punchline compilations. The project began life as Haze's university thesis in communication design, which explains both its look and its economics.

The first run put Berlin-based Thomas Kornmaier, Toby Käp and Marvin Spencer in front of the cameras. Haze was explicit at the time about the reference points: the American comedian Mark Normand and the Berlin comedian Shahak Shapira, both of whom had shown that a performer could shoot and release their own material without waiting for a broadcaster. The stated plan was modest — one show a year turned into clips, with anything longer dependent on time and budget. That plan did not survive contact with what happened next.

The broadcast years

By late 2024 the club was a ZDF property with a substantial back catalogue in the broadcaster's Mediathek. ZDF listings show sets published in batches through December 2024 — on the 5th, 12th and 19th — each comedian getting their own item of roughly six to ten minutes, followed by a 31-minute Best of Chaos Comedy Club on 24 December 2024 that was framed as the highlights of three seasons. Around 25 items were available in that stretch alone.

The names in that run read as a census of the working German circuit rather than a shortlist of television regulars: Vanessa Ebert, Thomas Ewald, Sandra Schmidt, Mathias Albus, Lukas Diestel, Tobias Born, Martin Niemeyer, Kristina Bogansky and Berni Wagner, with Haze and Prang taking sets themselves.

The club has kept control of its own presentation inside the broadcast deal. The third season's title sequence was art-directed by Haze, illustrated by Anett Bauer and turned into 3D animation by Jaron Freiesleben, built around the symbolic destruction of comedy's old gods to clear space for the new, with an egg as the central image. It is a small detail, but it is the difference between a club being filmed and a club being packaged.

Berlin, February 2026

The most recent television block was recorded in Berlin over three consecutive nights, 23 to 25 February 2026, promoted under the title Funny 'cause it's new! and staged as a paying public show rather than a closed studio taping. Gian Alba hosted all three evenings. The bills were much longer than a normal club night — eight acts on the 23rd, including Yannick de la Pêche, Simon Mann and Philip Wefel; seven on the 24th, among them Anna Bomhard, Berni Wagner and Johannes Steuding; eight on the 25th, including Björn von Morgenstern, Lisa Frischemeier and Die Affirmative. Ticket holders had to accept that the recording might obstruct sightlines and that they were consenting to be filmed.

The material surfaced in ZDF's Mediathek that spring. Gian Alba's own twelve-minute set, on whipping egg foam, ADHD and a state premier, was published on 30 April 2026 alongside a set from Matilde Keizer. Johannes Steuding, Xenia Brandt and Sara Karas followed on 7 May 2026, and Die Affirmative and Lena Loster on 14 May 2026. Several of the acts and the host on those broadcasts are the same people who were on stage in Berlin in February, which is the shape the club now works to: a short, dense recording block once a year, released as individual sets over a few weeks.

The touring diary

None of the television work has replaced the club nights, which remain the bulk of the operation. The listings run across the country and across venue types — a two-hour slot at the Kulturwohnzimmer RheinBühne in Bonn on 5 September 2026, a berth on the Theaterschiff Lübeck on 13 August 2026 at 7pm with tickets at €25, regular dates at the Unterhaus in Mainz, and the original Karlsruhe home room. The Lübeck ship is not wheelchair accessible, a consequence of its construction that the promoters flag in advance.

The diary already extends well past the current run: the Theaterschiff alone has the club back on 13 January, 3 March, 28 April and 7 July 2027. Lübeck's August 2026 show was hosted by Jonas Imam, a stand-up, television writer and podcaster with more than a decade on the circuit, with Marie-Claire Penser, Sophia Spitzenberg, Karina Epova and Philipp Schlüter on the bill. The organiser Matthias Breitnauer described the evening as pairing the ship's atmosphere on the Trave with a line-up bringing together different perspectives, tones and forms of contemporary stand-up — which is, more or less, the club's standing brief written out.

The club's own site currently fronts Martin Niemeyer, Gino Christofaro and Mathias Haze, and describes the circuit it plays as pubs, clubs and cellar vaults where jokes are built and punchlines tested month after month.

Selling what it learned

There is a third arm, and it is the clearest sign of what the last few years have actually taught the operation. The club now offers production services to other comedians: recording a solo or semi-solo programme to broadcast standard, on the basis of expertise it says it has accumulated over the past five years. Bookings go through an email address rather than an agency.

That is a direct descendant of the €1,500 Startnext camera fund from 2020. A club that could not get a broadcaster to film it learned to film itself, was then commissioned by ZDF, and has turned the intervening know-how into a service for the same circuit it books. For acts on that circuit, the club is now three things at once: a paid gig, a route onto national streaming, and a place to get a special shot.