The Connection

Allan Sidley, who recalls growing up “on the mean streets of Vienna, Virginia” has always had a knack for making people laugh. The 2007 graduate of George C. Marshall High School first set foot onstage just last year. However, the young comedian today regularly hosts, produces and performs in a variety of stand-up comedy shows.

On Nov. 20, Sidley will host The Sublime Stand-up Comedy series, which he also produced, featuring three comedians at the Hill Center in Washington D.C. As the Master of Ceremony, Sidley will be able to grace the audience with a few jokes of his own. And, as the producer, he handpicked the performers for the Sublime Stand Up.

“I’m really excited for this show,” Sidley said. “These comics are absolutely brilliant and will blow people away.”

THESE DAYS, Sidley is no longer a stranger to the stage, now performing between four and six nights a week around the D.C.-metropolitan area, either as a comic, improviser, or both. His journey to center stage, however, actually began less than two years ago, when he took two improv classes with the D.C. Improv Comedy Club.

Sidley said that this training and performing with his own improv team, Laffrican Americans, is what gave him the initial confidence and foundation to start a solo career.

“In improv, you have your people out there with you, playing around in front of a live audience. There is no planning or scripting involved – it’s all thinking on your feet and reacting to what your scene partners do.”

While Sidley does remain highly involved with Laffrican Americans, his main priority is producing, hosting, and performing Stand-up. It was in late 2014 that Sidley decided to take a crack at his own material.

“It took me a year to achieve a mental breakthrough where I finally felt ready to tell jokes alone on the stage,” Sidley recalled. “It started one day when I was working from home, and instead of doing any work, I started messing around with that. All day, I wrote jokes. Looking back at it, what I came up with was terrible, but it was fun. Writing jokes was just so fun for me.”

Sidley’s first solo act was at a show at Arlington’s RiRa Irish Pub last year, where he performed amongst a lineup of well-established comedians and admitted that his edgy jokes fell flat and all his lines lacked punch.

“At this time, in 2014, RiRa was where established people went to perform,” Sidley explained. “I, on the other hand, only had three minutes on a stage smaller than a table, and I pretty much got up there and cursed a million times. I wanted to make people uncomfortable and laugh at the same time, but nobody laughed.”

It takes those humbling moments to weed out the weak and to encourage the hungry. Well, Sidley was one of the hungry, driven ones. It has taken him humility and swallowing nerves, but since his disappointing performance at RiRa, has since performed on a wide variety of stages, from “depressing” dive bars in D.C. to Comedy Clubs in New York.

Today, when Sidley is performing, audiences can enjoy his provoking punchlines for sets that range from eight minutes to thirty. And with his already respectably diverse comic resume, Sidley is ready to show his audience a good time at the Sublime Stand-up Series on the 20th.

Robert Andrew, one of the comics performing on the 20th, recalled performing at a show with Sidley at Union Jack’s in Bethesda earlier this year.

“The first time I saw Allan, the crowd had kind of thinned out, and it's easy to lose an audience when there are so few left,” Andrew explained. “But he engaged them and had them laughing. And he's only gotten better in a short amount of time. He's very quick-witted and that serves him well onstage.”

Andrew said locals will most certainly experience the Sidley wizardry if they attend the Sublime Stand-up Comedy series.

“The audience can expect to see in Allan a guy who's maybe a little crazy, but knows how to get a laugh,” Andre said. “And he's put together a great lineup of comics for the night.”

Sidley appreciates and acknowledges all the positive reinforcement and his rapid rise to the top of the game. He attributes these triumphs to trusting his instincts whenever he’s on stage.

“I’ve gained a lot of positive momentum that it’s been a bit of a snowball effect,” he said. “Now I can be seen as a highlight in shows. It happened out of nowhere. It was all of a sudden. In this game, I’ve learned that’s how it works. I’m beginning to fully trust myself in front of every audience.”

AS A PART-TIME COMEDIAN, Sidley admits that he’s not in it for the money yet, joking that “I think in total I’ve made a few hundred dollars,” but that one day he would like for it to be his livelihood. While he enjoys his corporate job, he said that comedy is undoubtedly his calling.

“I think I’ve found myself when I’m onstage,” Sidley said.