When Ethan Williams went to do stand-up for the residents of Brookdale Bloomington, an assisted living facility in Bloomington, he expected to be out of his comfort zone. The 24-year-old YouTuber from Bedford, Indiana, is aware that he isn’t a professional comedian. Even with that, Williams couldn’t have guessed just how bad the stand-up performance would go.
“During the set of that stand up it was one of the most uncomfortable and awkward experiences of my life,” Williams said. “I bombed for about 30 minutes, no laughs from a single soul in that nursing home.”
Williams said he was met with an overwhelming lack of laughs from his Brookdale audience. He had some previous success at two other nursing homes before performing at Brookdale. He posted those two performances on his YouTube account. However, after watching back at the footage he had recorded at Brookdale, he said it was easier to save himself from “the embarrassment of having gotten zero laughs” and decided not post the video.
Williams started his self-named channel in April 2024. He started the channel as a way to get out of his shell more and talk to people that he may not have met otherwise. Currently, he has nearly 5,000 subscribers. Most of his videos consist of street interviews, allowing him to talk to a wide variety of people.
“It's a lot of just connecting with people that you never normally meet in your day-to-day life, unless you go out and try and do something that is strange and weird,” Williams said. “It’s just about asking somebody a question they would not normally expect to be asked.”
He uploaded his first attempt at performing stand-up comedy in front of an audience at the Brown County Health and Living Community in Nashville, Indiana, in June 2024.
During his first try with the nursing home related comedy, titled “Performing Stand Up Comedy To The Elderly,” Williams admitted that he had never done stand up before.
“Some of the best comedians had to start somewhere and I decided for my first ever performance I was going to try and make the senior citizens of America get a laugh,” Williams wrote in the video’s description.
This was followed up with another show at Spring Valley Meadows, a nursing home in French Lick, Indiana. The success of both these videos encouraged Williams to try that third performance at Brookdale, when it did not work out, he realized he wanted to do something to make it up to those residents.
Determined not to give up and he came up with a new idea that brought him and his camera to IU’s Sample Gates during a couple different days in February. Williams was trying to find talent for a new performance. This process primarily involved him going up to strangers and asking them a few questions to gauge their interest in performing stand-up. The goal was to find hopeful, new comedians looking to try out some jokes with an older audience.
“A little while later it dawned on me how to make up for that poor performance and to that audience,” Williams said. “By seeing if complete strangers with the same zero experience I had would put themselves in a difficult position and try to perform stand-up comedy.”
Williams – who isn’t a Bloomington resident – chose Sample Gates, and Bloomington as a whole, due to the heavy foot traffic and wide variety of people the town has to offer. He said around eight of the people he asked agreed to do the performance.
Currently, his plan is still to go back and do stand up for the older adults at Brookdale. But Williams’ biggest challenge has been figuring out when he can get everyone together to perform. Though an official date hasn’t been set up yet, he hopes that he can get something figured out and the video done soon.
