My two-week binge at the Annoyance Theater, the first comedy theater in Brooklyn, ended in a pool of sewage.

Or at least that’s what the inch-deep soup looked like at the bottom of the stairs outside the front door of the basement space. As I splashed my way past a comic trying to fix the problem with a plunger, I heard him say he didn’t think it was waste. Maybe so, but the down and dirty comedy at the Annoyance often aims for juvenile pleasures, including jokes about characters soaked in urine and excrement. So after seven shows, getting my boots a little dirty felt like life imitating art, not to mention the theater’s proudly living up to its name.

Long a staple of the improv-dense Chicago scene, the Annoyance has been a home for comics like Andy Richter and Aidy Bryant. While it’s not as well known as Second City, the Annoyance has recently expanded its profile with a new base in Chicago and an outpost near the elevated subway tracks (maybe it reminds them of their origins) in Williamsburg in December.

A tunnel of a space with brick walls and a bar in the back, the Annoyance joins the most significant new genre of live performance spaces in New York of the past two decades: the comedy theater. The Upright Citizens Brigade, the Pit, Magnet — all in Manhattan — represent this new entertainment sphere. Each of these theaters generally features admirably cheap tickets, a bustling school, cheap labor (like the Upright Citizens Brigade, the Annoyance does not pay artists) and the kind of young fan base that other New York live arts institutions have failed to attract.