Patrick Strait presents Home Club in conversation with Louis Lee

The inside story of how a softspoken Chinese immigrant survived staggering failures and achieved hard-won successes in turning a small, struggling Minneapolis comedy club into a landmark that has launched careers and made headlines.

Before the sold-out crowds, world-famous performers, and national prestige, Acme Comedy Company was in trouble. Too much debt and too few customers. A product no one wanted in an economy where everyone struggled. Then it all changed.

Home Club is the tale of Acme and Louis Lee, who came from China to Minnesota as a teenager and worked his way from busboy to club owner— only to watch it all come crashing down. Acme Comedy Company was his chance to redeem himself, and he spent years hustling, negotiating, and sometimes cutting corners just to keep it afloat.

Today, Acme is an iconic comedy venue in Minnesota, and one of the most respected in the country. It has launched the careers of some of Minnesota’s biggest comedians, including Mitch Hedberg, Maria Bamford, and Nick Swardson. But it has also courted controversy by unapologetically booking comics who weren’t always considered “safe.”

Home Club is about failure and redemption, the tension between art and business, and the incredible story of how a three-hundred-seat club in a Minneapolis basement became a home for a new generation of comics and fans.

Patrick Strait has been a comedy-beat reporter for City Pages, The Growler, and Thrillist. He is the author of Funny Thing about Minnesota . . . : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of the Twin Cities Comedy Scene. He lives in Minneapolis.

After immigrating to America from Hong Kong in the late 1970s, Louis Lee was a young man looking for a home. For Lee, that home would come in the form of Acme Comedy Company, one of the most highly respected comedy clubs anywhere in the world for over 30 years.

Since the day he opened back in 1991, Lee has strived to provide a creative haven for comedians, while working tirelessly to impact the art of standup comedy in Minnesota and beyond. An innovator, disruptor, dreamer, and free-thinker, Lee has played a role in comics like Nick Swardson, Chad Daniels, Maria Bamford and more getting their start and finding their path to comedy stardom.

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