It's a sad day for L.A. comedy fanatics. 

The city's most popular weekly stand-up show, The Meltdown With Jonah and Kumail, is coming to a close in mid-October. Every Wednesday since 2010, Nerdist podcast co-host Jonah Ray and Silicon Valley's Kumail Nanjiani have invited fervent audiences into NerdMelt Showroom at Meltdown Comics for a night of predictably great stand-up, with frequent celeb comedian drop-ins. Over the years, the show accumulated die-hard fans, including one who had the entry handstamp tattooed onto his inner wrist.

Why end the show? In short, as they state in their joint announcement, “Everything has to come to an end at some point.” 

Their full announcement is below, replete with more nuanced explanation. The last show is on Oct. 19.

After six years of putting our blood, sweat and urine into a live show every Wednesday, we have decided that it’s time to hang up our spurs on The Meltdown With Jonah and Kumail. When we started this thing in 2010, we only wanted a fun place to do comedy and hang out with our friends.

And things were so different — the tech area was in the middle of the room! There was even less air conditioning than now!

We never imagined how much we’d get out of this experience — we’ve gotten ridiculous memories, we’ve gotten three seasons of a TV show on Comedy Central, and we’ve gotten the best damn audience on the planet. Putting on a weekly show for your wonderful faces has been an honor, and we love you all indefinitely. We love the regulars, we love the newbies, we love the people who bring their parents. Comedians around the country speak of our audience with awe and admiration. We have been spoiled by you. We know it.

So while we are sad to end the show after six years, it just feels like the right time for us. We know we’re going to feel absolutely awful that first Wednesday that we aren’t high-fiving you into the room, but everything has to come to an end at some point.

Our final show will be on Oct. 19, and that show will start earlier, at 7:30 p.m. rather than 8:30 p.m., and it will be a barn burner. Up until then it’s business as usual.

Thank you to the hundreds of comedians that have graced our stage over the years; thank you to Meltdown Comics, our home and second family; thank you to our staff, on loan from NerdMelt, who work incredibly hard and remind us why this is so fucking fun to do; thank you to Mike Rosenstein and Lance Bangs, who saw a TV show in us when we didn’t see one in ourselves; thank you to our Comedy Central family for letting us put this on TV; thank you to Dave Kloc, being your muse has meant so much to us; thank you to Tyler Ross, who knew before we did how important it was to document what was happening here; thank you to anyone who’s written a nice thing or a not nice thing about our show; thank you for coming to the show once or a hundred times; and thank you to anyone who has had the guts to get up onstage and talk into a microphone. We are enamored with stand-up comedy — we were when we started, and we still are. We’re excited to see what will come next and make us look like irrelevant dinosaurs.

Don’t stop coming to the shows before they’re over, please. And don’t stop being the positive badass beautiful creative motherfuckers you have been for all these years.

Love,
Jonah, Kumail, Emily and Ed

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