What surprised me most was how haptic the club sounded: spatial audio, real-time feedback, and the feeling of being in a room together. A lightly edited version of the interview is below. Take a tour of the Unknown Theater on YouTube here. |
Source: The Unknown Theater.
The Jokebook: How did you get into VR comedy in the first place?
Rodney: I’ve always been a tech person. I grew up in the eighties with video games, then the nineties VR hype and The Matrix idea of being “inside” a game. When the early Oculus/Vive era hit, I sold my Xbox and bought a computer, taught myself the basics, and started experimenting, first with filming stand-up in 360°, then messing with avatar apps and sketch tools.
During the pandemic I hosted shows as a character in VR environments that could pull in Zoom guests. After that, a friend told me there were actual VR comedy clubs. I went to one and it felt like what I’d been imagining for years: people at tables, comic on stage, real room energy. That’s when I went all-in on building the Unknown Theater.
The Jokebook: One of the big lessons from Zoom comedy was how brutal comedy is without feedback or laughter. In VR, can the performer actually hear the audience? Do you get hecklers? What happens if someone disrupts?
Rodney: Yeah, VR is spatial. The audio moves like real life, and we don’t turn the crowd down because you need the laughter. So it feels like you’re actually in a room with distance, a stage, and people reacting around you.
And yes, you get hecklers, so we built moderation into the world. In our first venue we had a jail and this sword, Excalibur, that shot lasers. If you messed around, you got thrown in jail where everyone could see you and shame you. When people figured out how to escape, we added the 'torture room': yellow walls, dicks everywhere, and a Baby Shark running at insane speed. It’s basically a real club with dream-level moderation tools.
The Jokebook: My bias is the crowd is just going to be younger dudes. Who actually comes to these shows?
Rodney: Social VR isn’t a Call of Duty lobby, it’s people hanging out, meeting each other, building communities. We always have women in the crowd. And VR is also a place where people experiment with identity. Trans folks, people who feel outside the mainstream. There’s less judgment.
Now, it is the internet, and there are alt-right rooms where you’ll hear stuff you’d never tolerate in an IRL club. A lot of VR clubs don’t advertise because of that. But we run this like an IRL room with IRL rules: if you want to do that kind of material, you’re not coming back.
The Jokebook: Do you vet comedians? Has it happened where someone gets on stage and starts saying insane stuff?
Rodney: The first thing you see when you walk in are two big 'gold commandments', the rules, clearly posted. In our Meta days we had tons of issues: kids, trolls, people rushing the stage, so we had to build tools like the jail.
In VRChat it’s more adults, and you can age-verify too. We also record everything. Our hosts are IRL comics who know the standard. If someone crosses the line, we review the tape and either ban them or message them. Sometimes it’s a learning moment: I had a guy doing misogynist/racist stuff because he came up in those alt-right rooms and thought that was normal. I laid out the rules, gave him a timeout, and he actually thanked me for not just banning him without explanation.
The Jokebook: What can VR comedy do that in-person can’t? And what doesn’t translate?
Rodney: The big one is “instances.” You can run multiple copies of the same club world at once, basically infinite rooms. We’ve done shows with two full rooms simultaneously and comics hopping between them. We even called it the “Multiverse show.”
Creatively, VR lets you do things stand-up can’t: instant props, changing backgrounds, scaling yourself huge, transforming into characters mid-bit. You can literally be a live cartoon.
But identity can also break certain jokes. If your act relies on your physical reality, like a comic whose material is about being a big guy, and you’re onstage as Nicolas Cage Superman, the audience isn’t seeing what your jokes are built around. The avatar changes the context.
VR also opens comedy up to people who can’t really do it in real life. I’ve got a woman in my class who’s super funny, but she’s afraid to leave the house, so this is how she does comedy. There’s a kid from Memphis, a funny Black kid, and I keep telling him he should get into an IRL club, and he’s like, “There are gang members all over my neighborhood. It’s dangerous. I’m only going to do comedy in VR.”
And then there’s the identity stuff. The trans comics I have love VR because they can identify however they want. You can be whoever you want in there, and people don’t judge you the same way.
The Jokebook: What do you say to critics online who might be skeptical of VR comedy?
Rodney: I always say it’ll never replace IRL, but people confuse it with Zoom. Zoom is dead because there’s no room energy. This is different: spatial audio, crowd feedback, a shared environment.
And my first question is always: have you done it? Most critics haven’t. Meanwhile, you’ve got comics whose nearest open mic is an hour away, or people with safety or mobility constraints who can finally practice and perform. With sponsors, we can even pay comics to do comedy from home. For them, it absolutely counts.