Does Denver need another comedy festival? Rise says yes, and here’s why.

Rise Comedy is launching its first stand-up, improv and sketch festival this month at its Ballpark neighborhood theater, bulking up a Colorado comedy circuit already bursting with events.

But this one’s different, said Christie Buchele, a nationally touring comic and Rise’s director of stand-up. Most of these other gatherings — Denver’s High Plains Comedy Festival, Trinidad’s Chief Comedy Festival, and upstarts such as the Vail and Boulder comedy fests — are curated, not submission-based.

That makes it nearly impossible for people without existing connections to break in, Buchele said. Furthermore, there are no Colorado comedy fests that feature stand-up, improv and sketch comedy all on the same bill. Rise Comedy Festival, running from Thursday, July 7 to Saturday, July 9, and then again July 14-16, is hoping to change that.

“I designed it for people who are newer here in Denver or who haven’t been here before,” Buchele, the festival’s producer, said this week. “It’s a chance to get their foot in the door and get seen in front of judges like Karen Wachtel.”

Wachtel is executive producer of the High Plains Festival, which was founded by Denver comic Adam Cayton-Holland, and a nationally known comedy booker. Despite welcoming acclaimed headliners such as Maria Bamford, David Cross, Anthony Jeselnik, and Marc Maron, High Plains and Trinidad’s Chief fest, for example, have more of a “friends get-together feel,” Buchele said.

In other words: Festivals like that are essentially brick walls for younger and less experienced, but still-talented, comics and improvisers.

“They put on great shows,” Buchele said of the other fests, most of which she has performed at. “But none of them are competition-based. It’s been my constant battle in this role to bridge the gap between improv and stand-up and sketch, because there’s never been an across-the-aisle culture.”

But does Denver need another comedy festival? Yes, say Denver comics and bookers interviewed for this story, provided it treats performers and audiences right.

Comic Marks Masters’ first-year, sold-out Vail Comedy Festival, which ran May 27-29, welcomed dozens of national and local stand-up headliners along with industry types from HBO, Netflix and New York’s famed Comedy Cellar.

“The more (festivals) the better, but they have to have quality stage time, a quality hang — how enjoyable is it for comics? — and industry,” he said. “If the booker for ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ is there, that’s a gold star for scouting talent. But do they pay for things like lodging for the artists? It needs to be a net positive for the comedy community.”

Guests in Rise Comedy Fest’s first year include “Amber Ruffin Show” writer and stand-up headliner Patrick Rowland, Comedy Central’s senior talent and development executive, Ryan Moran (doing a panel for attendees only), and lots of local and national sketch and improv groups — Big Kids Table, Hot Nap, Basement Doctors, Orange Tuxedo and Denver’s own, long-running Hit & Run Musical Improv, among dozens more. Stand-ups hail from across North America, and up and down the Front Range. The overwhelming majority of names would likely be unfamiliar to general audiences.

Submissions cost between $20 to $30, based on when comics applied, and Armstrong estimated about 300 or so submissions in this first year. Around 30% of them, or 100 performers, were admitted.

The programming mix is unusual for most events, but it’s familiar to patrons of the Denver Improv Festival, which ran for more than a dozen years before dissolving during the pandemic. The board members there decided to let Rise — which in 2020 took over the former Voodoo Comedy Playhouse, at 1266 22nd St. — have a go at it with a renamed, reconfigured event.