The first thing you notice when you walk into the Jukebox Comedy Club on Farmington Road in Peoria is the smell. A room that has absorbed decades of late nights. Stale beer. Old wood. Like if mildew quit smoking 15 years ago.
The drop ceiling is black — painted that way to give the room the feel of a proper comedy club — but in places, it sags from water damage, and on a rainy night it will drip onto the stage mid-show. The comics perform anyway. They always have.
Behind the bar, in old jeans, a hoodie and a baseball cap — usually Cubs — is Dan Conlin. He owns the place. He also runs it, manages it, books it, tends bar, keeps the books and fixes the sound system and toilets when they break.
He's been doing all of this, in various combinations, since May 10, 2000, the day he borrowed enough money to buy the business and decided it was going to be the only thing he had. In 2007, he started buying the building itself.
On a nice night after the last patron has packed up and the parking lot has mostly cleared, he'll take out a frisbee and throw it around under the lights with whoever's left.
Then COVID hit
Conlin said he does not drink, smoke or gamble, and that he's never taken money out of the Jukebox for anything other than keeping the Jukebox going. He said the money from the previous week's shows pays for the next one. For the first two decades that he owned the club, that was enough. Shows, bills, another week, another show.
"Perhaps that's not the best business model in the world," he said. "I understand. But that's how I did it for this long."
Then the pandemic hit.
He thought about what a comedy club actually is: low ceilings, a packed room, a hundred people laughing and breathing the same air. He thought of all the sickness and death he might be responsible for.
For most business owners, that kind of thinking leads to a spreadsheet. For Conlin, it led somewhere else entirely.
It led to Spock.
"Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," he said. "1982. Spock goes into the engineering room — flooded with radiation, ship about to explode. He knows he won't survive. But he does it anyway. And he says to Kirk, through the glass — 'The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.'"
His voice dropped, and his eyes welled at the words.
"There are very few times in your life that you actually get to put something like that into action," he said. "I thought, this is one of them."
He closed the Jukebox in March 2020. When COVID transmission rates spiked again that fall he closed Nov. 1 and stayed shut until July 2021 — waiting for the vaccine, waiting until he could bring people back into a small room and feel like he wasn't putting them at risk. Eleven months total. No income.
"I tried to stay closed as long as I could, even though it was completely crushing me financially," he said. "It was unbearable. But when I'm on my deathbed, I'm going to have a pretty good conscience about what I did."
Trey Mowder has been doing comedy at the Jukebox for 18 years. He doesn't mince words about where things stand.
"I don't think he has recovered since COVID," he said. "He's been playing catch-up ever since. He's definitely not making money. That's for sure."
The grant that never came
Conlin heard about the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant [SVOG] in 2021 — $16.1 billion set aside by the federal government specifically for performing arts venues that went dark during COVID. He spent two to three weeks pulling together more than 40 documents: financial records, stage photographs, hand-drawn maps of the floor plan and proof of all the shows he had ever promoted. He calculated he was owed around $112,000.
He submitted everything himself and waited.
According to NPR, the application portal crashed when it first went live. Venue owners across the country were erroneously placed on "do not pay" lists, hit with paperwork errors they had no way to fix and left waiting with no updates for weeks on end.
Out of more than 13,000 applications received, only 31 grants had been awarded as of early June 2021.
The dysfunction didn't stop there. The Small Business Administration's inspector general found more than $6 billion was paid out without doing enough to verify that recipients actually qualified. The Government Accountability Office later reported as much as $10 billion from SVOG funds may have been improperly distributed.
And for the money that did go out, NPR reported that prominent musicians used the program to fund lifestyles that had very little to do with keeping a small venue alive. Lil Wayne received an $8.9 million grant and allegedly spent $1.3 million of it on private jets, over $460,000 on designer clothing and $88,000 on a concert he never showed up to. Alice in Chains received $6.3 million. DJ Marshmello and Chris Brown also were among the recipients.
Conlin got nothing.
When he finally reached someone at the SBA in early 2022, a woman on the phone told him the agency had no record of receiving anything from him. He told her he had everything saved; he could resubmit right then. She told him the money was already gone.
"All $16.1 billion is already gone? ... One of the most depressing phone calls of my life," Conlin said. "I went out of my way to care about other people. I stayed closed months longer than I had to. And I thought — at least this is going to pay off."
He has been playing catch-up ever since.
"I wish I'd had a grant writer — somebody who would have made sure I submitted it correctly," he said. "Asking for help is the one thing I would have done even more of."
He didn't ask then. He's asking now.
The reputation
Dan Conlin is known in Peoria as much for his temper as for his club. It’s even mentioned on his Gofundme page where he discussed the negative comments coming in from social media. His intolerance for hecklers is no secret — and by his own admission, he sometimes took it too far.
According to comedian Manny Garza, his wife has not been back to the club since she and Conlin got into a fight over show tickets. Users on Reddit have called him pretentious about comedy and generally rude.
What he'll tell you if you ask, is that three family members died in his first 15 years of owning the club.
"There were times when I was so depressed — surrounding the illnesses, surrounding my brother and dad and mom," he said. "But I would have to come in and open up the club and be the happy-go-lucky owner of the comedy club, always smiling and stuff. And inside I was, like, so angry."
Most nights he managed it. Some nights he didn't.
"I can be so mean sometimes," he acknowledged. "Not because I don't have love in my heart. But I've had super low tolerance for people wanting to interrupt the show. And I was just too harsh about it sometimes. To take it to the extreme I took it — it was just absurd. But as I've gotten older, I've done way better."
He paused, then said, "Sometimes you don't get a second chance with a customer after they tell 100 people."
Garza, a comedian for the last three years, said the reputation is accurate but complicated.
"He's not a bad guy," he said. "But it's definitely a contributing factor."
Rowan Hanold, who has only known Conlin for the past year, comes at it differently.
"What I've seen is a guy who has given me so many opportunities to perform. In any other scene, in any other situation, I would not have gotten the stage time I got in my first year. All of that was because of Dan."
Hillary Lewis, a customer of three years, has a simpler read on Conlin. She has watched him feed unhoused people who wander in off Farmington Road.
"He will give them something to eat," she said. "But not just give them something to eat. He listens. He gives them time. He treats them like human beings."
She said if there's leftover food at the end of the night, he puts it out for the stray cats.
Heath Thorton put it most bluntly.
"If the Jukebox closed, there would be no replacing it," he said. "Dan comes from a comedy school which doesn't exist anymore. Any modern replacement would be a different tone, a different delivery system. No one tolerates such buffoonery."
The building
Last April, a third of the roof caved in.
The damage was not to the comedy club side of the building, and Conlin will tell you it borders on miraculous. The building he has been buying since 2007 is one structure, but it houses more than the club. The side that collapsed was the adjacent business space, right up to the shared wall with the comedy room.
When it came down, the wall held. The stage and the bar were still standing. A few more feet and the Jukebox Comedy Club might have gone with it.
"It imploded," Conlin said. "Bad construction and several years of water leaking in."
He spent the next three to four months tearing it apart himself. Forty hours a week. Every day. Piece by piece. In old jeans, a hoodie and baseball cap, the same way he does everything around here.
He has been buying the building on a contract with the previous owner, who is now an 83-year-old widow. Over 20 years, he has made 219 payments out of 240. Even given everything that has happened, he has no plans to walk away.
Things got bad enough last fall that Conlin lost his ability to sell liquor — he said he couldn't scrape together the roughly $6,000 needed to renew the insurance and state and local licenses. He still hasn't been able to get them back.
The Jukebox Comedy Club, a bar and comedy venue for more than 25 years, is currently serving ice cream shakes and soda.
"How many clubs can say they operate without selling alcohol?" he said. "None. Nobody. Unless you're in Utah. Maybe."
What the Jukebox built
And yet, people keep coming.
They drive from Springfield, Bloomington, Champaign, the Quad Cities — sometimes two hours each way — to watch live comedy and order a milkshake.
The comics show up on rainy nights when they perform for one customer, on humid summer nights, and even during tornado watches. They keep coming because the Jukebox is, for a lot of people, the place that made them.
Peoria is not, by most measures, a comedy town. It is a midsize Midwestern city of roughly 115,000 people with a complicated relationship with its own identity — proud, sometimes defensive, occasionally surprised by what it produces.
Richard Pryor is from here. A benefit show at the Civic Center once raised money to get a bronze statue of him made and displayed downtown.
Emmy Award nominee Ava Coleman, who plays principal Janelle James in the hit show Abbott Elementary, started her comedy career at the Jukebox.
What the Jukebox has provided, for 25 years, is infrastructure — a place where someone who wants to try comedy on a Wednesday night can just show up and do it.
Garza has been developing his act here for three years.
"There's no other way to become a better comic. You got to get up. And the Jukebox really, really provided that for us."
Mowder sees the magic in performing comedy.
"If you've ever been on stage and gotten a laugh — even one — it's addicting," he said, adding he's watched the room change over nearly two decades.
"I've seen killers on that stage and a packed house," he said. "And now we're fighting to get 30 on a weekend. You're like — what? It's baffling."
Hanold was born and raised in Peoria and sees the club as a mirror of the city itself.
"There's a grittiness to this city," he said. "A chip on our shoulder. I feel the same way about this club. It's been through so much. It's a really good representation of what a lot of people have experienced in Peoria. The harshness of living in the Midwest. And it still has beauty in it."
Lewis, the longtime customer, comes for the laughs.
"There's a lot of crap going on in the world," she said, "and there is nothing wrong with coming in and getting your laugh on. And I think that's important that we keep it."
The question hanging over all of it — over the milkshakes, the roof leaks, the two-hour drives and the stray cats — is not whether people love this place. They clearly do. The question is whether love is enough to keep the lights on.
