20
years telling jokes out loud
The story
Two decades in, and the room is finally his.
Stroy Moyd is an Oakland comic with two decades of stand-up and, by his own count, still short of 40. He has opened for Dave Chappelle, the Wayans Brothers, Daniel Tosh, and Sarah Silverman. Hannibal Buress keeps him on the Handsome Rambler podcast. After a weekend opening at Cobb’s Comedy Club, Tracy Morgan invited him onto an international tour. The run stopped when Morgan was in the car accident that made national news. Morgan and his crew recovered.
“I literally auditioned to play myself. If I didn’t get the part… was STARZ going to hire someone else to play me?”
The audition was for Blindspotting. It came right after back-to-back spots on ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Nightly News with Lester Holt, both chasing Rideshare the Love — the dating game he ran in the back of his Uber. The clip hit Worldstar, then a production deal, then an MTV pilot. On STARZ he played Stroy Moyd, on purpose.
The club took longer. Eighteen years of planning, three years of looking, 98 venues. In 2024 he opened The Function at 1414 Market St with Johnny Hayes and Ludo Racinet: a seven-night comedy club and cocktail lounge, and the Bay Area’s first Black-owned full-time comedy room. #HellaFunny, the company that had been stuffing shows into bars across the Bay, finally had one roof. His grandfather had owned Oakland’s Continental Club. Stroy told the Standard it was in his blood to run a venue.
When the road is quiet, he is on that stage most nights. The jokes, in his words, have some ratchet in them. The room is built for comics to be comics.
