At the Luna Lounge, the performance is free, the comics are paid nothing (as opposed to the $10 to $75 they make at regular clubs), and even when a performance does not elicit a single laugh, it is not always considered a failure. That's why the night was originally called "Eating It" (comedy slang for bombing) when it began at another small site, the Rebar in Chelsea, a year and a half ago.

Testing the Audience

Performing at the Luna Lounge is "the most challenging thing I do," said Marc Maron, a favorite there who delivers ideas as much as jokes. "I can take more risks emotionally in an alternative room. It indulges us. There are people who think differently or lead different lives, and part of the Luna trip is that those people are going to be embraced for that."

At alternative nights, comedy is freed from the tyranny of the punch line. There are comics like David Wain, a member of the sketch-comedy group the State, who had never performed stand-up before the Luna Lounge. His sense of humor comes from the fact that he is pointedly not funny. Instead, he slowly unravels the layers of deception involved in putting a joke over on an audience. As Barry Sobel commented during his own performance at the Luna Lounge, making fun of its anti-comedy stance, "This is my first attempt at alternative comedy, and by the quiet lulls, I think I'm doing well."

The Luna Lounge's precedents are not just in the glory days before the comedy boom (the times of Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and Andy Kaufman), when audiences had fewer expectations and performers, in most cases, had more social relevance. Its origins are also in theater workshops, performance art, coffeehouse culture and poetry readings.

"For all of us, the show was born out of maybe a selfish need to see comedy that felt new and different and exciting," said Amanda Schatz, a talent scout at MTV who organizes the night along with Michael O'Brien, an entertainment publicity agent, and Dave Becky, who manages many of comedy's most exciting younger performers, including Mr. Maron, Dave Attell, Todd Barry and Louis C. K. "We would go to clubs every night and see the comics doing the same bits over and over again. We could do their act for them, if we wanted to. That was like comedy for civilians. We wanted to create comedy for people who loved it. We wanted to do comedy that was cool, and prove that all that television didn't kill it."

The Luna Lounge is not just a place where seasoned comics can work out new material and attempt the performances they really want to do. It is also a spawning ground for new comics. One of the funniest characters performing in Manhattan today is Ross Brockley, a carpenter and house painter by day who delivers his jokes with a deep monotone and all the poise of the Kramer character on "Seinfeld." He can be seen almost nowhere else except in three-minute bursts at the Luna Lounge.