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Business & Tech

Glass of Laughs Closes

Club was featured in inaugural One Tank Trip column.

, which opened in O’Fallon the last week of August 2010, has closed.

As of Jan. 4, the tables, chairs and light fixtures were removed and the power was shut off, according to Al Canal, who helped the club with bookings and promotion. 

“One of the owners said that was it,” Canal said.

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There was no answer to repeated phone calls made to the club.

The www.glassoflaughs.com Web site is down, and goes to a Go Daddy page that indicates the domain name is available. As of Monday, Jan. 24, the only link that still worked, www.glassoflaughs.tix.com, had a message reading “There are no events on sale at this time. Please check back again.”

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The last shows, featuring headliner Jessie Taylor, were Dec. 31 and Jan. 1. Taylor's shows were featured on Wentzville Patch in the .

While the 200-capacity room was not sold out, it was “a good crowd,” Canal said.

Canal has been in the comedy business 30 years, and has worked as a comic and a club manager, produced shows and done booking and promotion.  This is the third nightclub to fail in that location – 991 Waterbury Falls Drive – in recent history, he said.

“In a nutshell, there was no doubt the location was going to be a struggle from the beginning,” Canal said.

Part of the problem was the building didn’t have a classic comedy club layout.

“It was one big open room, with no lobby,” Canal said. “That’s a problem for a comedy club if you’re going to do more than one show a night.”

The club was adjacent to a subdivision, which meant there were zoning restrictions. In the 4 ½ months the club was open, Canal said there was more than one noise complaint.

“They couldn’t do any type of live music,” he said. “That really limited what you could do there.”

There was also what Canal called a “Field of Dreams” mentality that wasn’t realistic.

“The owner of the place thought it was going to be a slam dunk, where he would open up the doors and people would flock to it,” he said. “With this economy, that’s not the case.”

In addition, Canal said, very little advertising was done.

“They thought Facebook was the answer to it,” he said. “That’s not realistic these days.”

Canal hopes to see another club come to the area.

“I would love to find a place that wants to bring in nationally known comics to St. Charles and the surrounding area,” he said. “But whoever does it has to be willing to put forth the proper effort. You can’t open up a comedy club and think if you put a sign on the door that says ‘comedy’ that people will automatically show up. I see that a lot in this business.”

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