From hotel clerk to clever coupon entrepreneur to relentless comedy booker, Jackson Brown has been around and hopes to have a laugh or two before he’s through, while helping the CSRA do the same.
Most weeknights and weekends, Brown can be found hitting local night spots, from Edgar’s Above Broad and Fox’s Lair at the Olde Town Inn downtown to Jackson’s Bluff at the top of the Crowne Plaza Hotel in North Augusta. He’s often as likely to be just out on the town enjoying himself as he is to be scouting locations or talent for the Best Medicine Comedy Club.
Brown isn’t a comedian himself, just a Garden City bon vivant with a few ideas, a passion for stand-up comedy as a viable local business and enough experience to know it might be crazy enough to work. He traces his current venture in entertainment back to when had made a decent living for himself selling elaborate coupon displays at hotels.
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“Property management companies, liquor stores, beachwear stores, anywhere that would let me put one in,” said Brown. “I had them in over 600 locations. I could go to a club owner, and I’d say, ‘look, I’m going to guarantee you see more of this coupon than anything else you see.”
Brown had been working at the Beverly Hotel in Myrtle Beach, S.C. in the 1980s when that unique enterprise occurred to him. Each spring, street teams of young women working for local night clubs would stop by the lobby to give away coupons for entry fee discounts. Whereas most clerks would toss the coupons away in a drawer to be forgotten about, Brown thought to put the coupon in glaring, noticeable displays.
“Every hotel had one of those drawers,” he said. “You open a drawer and it would just be all these coupons from all these different clubs, and they were never used. I just gave them away for them to display them in the lobbies =, and people could readily pick them up and use them.”
Brown would have coupons made of bright, neon-colored astrobright paper in hotel lobbies all over, initially for clubs and then eventually all sorts of businesses, as the displays started generating plenty of revenue. One of Brown’s star clients was Benjamin’s Calabash Seafood restaurant, which he says itself bought enough in coupon displays to “pay him for the next seven years.”
In 1995, Brown was canvassing the area in Hilton Head, S.C. for more hotel locations when he happened upon Skip Sanders, the owner of the Coconuts Comedy Club, and the performer that night, a comedian named Randy Lubas.
“I had never been to a comedy club in my life,” said Brown. “But I was really impressed with the numbers I was able to produce for my coupon display.”
Lubas and Brown would become friends and decide to partner in on a Coconuts location in Myrtle Beach, running it for about three years.
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“Unfortunately, we were in someone else’s building,” Brown said. “They only saw us walking out of there with a big wad of cash every night, and they figured they could carry that cash as well as we could.”
The owners would eventually kick the partners out and try running the comedy club for themselves, only to falter after eight weeks, Brown says.
Brown has remembered how lucrative the comedy club proved ever since, and has been striving to see the same success in Augusta. He moved back in 2013 to help care for his disabled younger brother, but has been seeking to find that same accomplishment from Coconuts as the local comedy scene grows.
Brown launched Best Medicine Comedy Club in 2021 at the Elks’ Lodge off Furys Ferry, which has become something of a flagship location. Brown usually taps touring comedians, often from the cruise ship circuit, to headline, and often books local comics to open. His next show will be Friday night Fox’s Lair at Olde Town Inn, and the following night at the Elk’s Lodge.
“Comedians talk about how they can feed off the crowd if the crowd is responsive to what they’re saying,” said Brown. “I used to get the same feeling when we would be doing shows, even though I wasn’t performing. Have a room full of people, 100 or 150, responding in such a way it just gives you a feeling of accomplishment you put all this together.”
For more information on the Best Medicine’s upcoming shows, visit its Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/TheBestMedicineComedy.
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter covering education in Columbia County and business-related topics for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
