Scott Aukerman has been building this particular room — not any physical room, but the shared mental space where an improvised fake talk show can sustain genuine absurdist conviction — since he first staged what he called Comedy Death-Ray at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Hollywood. That experiment became a radio show on Los Angeles station Indie 103.1 on May 1, 2009; the show moved to the Earwolf podcasting network in 2010 and was rechristened Comedy Bang! Bang! in May 2011. What followed is more than a decade of one of the most acclaimed and durable comedy podcasts in American media. On Thursday, September 10, 2026, Aukerman brings the live version — Comedy Bang! Bang! Live! — to the stage of San Antonio’s Aztec Theatre, the Ground Beefing Tour’s Southwest leg rolling through Texas before turning west toward Los Angeles.
About Comedy Bang! Bang! Live!
The live version works differently than the podcast that feeds it, and Aukerman has been explicit about the distinction. “When we do it live, we only have the strange characters on the show,” he said in a press interview — the celebrity interview segment that anchors the audio version is set aside entirely, replaced by character-driven improvised comedy built from the ground up each night. “We’re always trying to get up out of the stools and physicalize what we’re talking about,” he added, and that instinct toward the physical is what makes the touring show its own thing rather than a staged podcast taping.
Paul F. Tompkins joins Aukerman on every date of the Ground Beefing Tour, which spans two legs: an initial run through Canada and the northeastern United States in May and June, and a second taking in the UK and Ireland before swinging back through the West Coast and Southwest. The San Antonio date arrives after Dallas and ahead of Austin — three Texas stops in a run that ends in Los Angeles. The full Comedy Bang! Bang! All-Stars, a rotating cast of comedians whose composition shifts from night to night, complete the lineup. All Ground Beefing Tour shows are recorded and released the next day on the Ground Beefing Tour podcast feed, available exclusively to Maximus subscribers.
About the Aztec Theatre
The Aztec Theatre opened June 4, 1926, designed by the firm Meyer and Holler — the same architects responsible for Grauman’s Egyptian and Chinese Theatres in Los Angeles — as one of the most ornate movie palaces in the country. The Meso-American architectural theme was not decorative afterthought but an articulated vision: vibrantly colored columns, sculptures, murals, and furnishings, many of them authentic reproductions of Meso-American artifacts. The two-ton chandelier installed in 1929 — the largest in Texas at the time — was hung on the same day the stock market crashed, a historical coincidence that feels, in retrospect, like something a Comedy Bang! Bang! character would invent but that the record confirms.
The theater ran as a three-screen cinema from the 1970s through 1989, sat dormant for years, and reopened as a live entertainment venue in 2009. Live Nation acquired it in 2015. The Aztec celebrates its centennial in 2026, making this fall an apt season to be sitting inside one of San Antonio‘s most historically resonant rooms watching something that would have baffled its original 1926 audience in the best possible way. The venue is located at 104 N St. Mary’s St in downtown San Antonio.
Tickets & Show Info
Comedy Bang! Bang! Live! plays the Aztec Theatre on Thursday, September 10, 2026 at 8:00 PM. Tickets are available through the link below.