Hop For Pop
Press Kit
Stand-up · Character Comedy · Producer
Chloe Matonis
A stand-up who plays a drill sergeant sent back from 2075 to end the loneliness epidemic — by making an audience of strangers flirt with each other, on command.
Based
San Francisco, California
Works in
Stand-up · Interactive character comedy · Show production
Known for
Boot Camp for Lonely People
Also
Co-founder of Blankets and Wine Comedy, running weekly since 2020
Interview
42 min · Hop For Pop · 2026
“The room is designed to make them feel cozy — the ceilings are a little bit low, and it’s dark, so people can laugh without feeling judged.”
Chloe Matonis — Hop For Pop
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Biography
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Chloe Matonis is a San Francisco stand-up, character comedian and producer. She dates her first real laugh to the age of eight, filming parody videos with her siblings — specifically to watching her parents’ adult friends laugh at one of them genuinely, and being able to tell the difference between that and the polite noise adults make at something a child did.
Her first joke to properly land came out of a dog-friendly tech startup where two colleagues owned badly behaved dogs that shared her name, so she spent her working days hearing people shout “Chloe, stop eating the garbage.” The pandemic then taught her to write: she treated a stand-up hour like a college thesis, produced 45 to 50 minutes of new material over eight months, and tested it on nine friends in her living room. She also co-founded Blankets and Wine Comedy, a free Saturday-afternoon show in Golden Gate Park that has run every week since 2020.
Her 2026 Edinburgh show, Boot Camp for Lonely People, casts her as Lieutenant Love Doctor Hottie McTottie, a soldier sent back from a 2075 in which social contact has been criminalised for public safety. She drills the audience in small talk, winking and speed dating — a militant character preaching connection. She has run the show at the Boston and Atlanta Fringes and in Las Vegas; Edinburgh was 26 consecutive nights, her longest run.
The part other press kits leave out
What you should know before you book her
Chloe Matonis works in the space between stand-up and interactive theatre, and she is unusually literate about the mechanics underneath both — including why the room itself is doing half the work.
The audience is the show
She brings people on stage, runs them through drills and sends them on speed dates. Not a set with crowd work bolted on — the interaction is the structure.
She knows what a comedy room does
Low ceilings, darkness, proximity — her account of why club rooms work is a producer’s, and it came from having to perform without any of it in a public park.
Outdoors, in daylight, for years
Blankets and Wine ran Saturday afternoons in Golden Gate Park against kids’ football games and open sky. Hard mode, and she has done hundreds of them.
She writes like a researcher
A liberal-arts research-paper process applied to an hour: treat it as a thesis, sit at the desk, generate 50 minutes, then find out from a room how much of it is actually funny.
Two brains at once
She produces her own nights for the stage time, and is candid about the cost — counting seats and drink sales one minute, going on loose and funny the next.
It is not a linear climb
Her caution to new comics: getting better is not a smooth upward line. She has been booked for 30 minutes unprepared and bombed the whole way through it.
For press · cleared for use with attribution
Quotable
01
“I remember watching the adult friends laughing at it in a genuine way — not just oh, this is a cute thing a kid did. I could tell the difference.”02
“It’s a wonderful environment, unless you share the same name as two of the dogs in the office.”03
“It feels good enough to make you forget all of the times you bombed.”04
“It feels very masochistic. You walk off thinking: why do I do this to myself?”05
“When you get off stage and they were with you and they were laughing, you feel like a rock star.”06
“It’s not just linear. It’s not like with time you’re just going to get better and better.”07
“The lockdown was kind of a gift — it forced me to learn what my writing process was.”08
“I thought of it almost like a thesis, like an essay I was preparing.”09
“I wrote 45 to 50 minutes of new material over eight months. Then I found out a lot of it wasn’t funny, because you need the audience to tell you.”10
“The room is designed to make them feel cozy — the ceilings are a little bit low, and it’s dark, so people can laugh without feeling judged.”11
“Social contact has been criminalised for public safety, and I come back to train the audience to talk to each other, to flirt, to not be scared of each other.”12
“I’m playing this militant character that’s very commanding — but also preaching this message of love and connection.”13
“Watching someone address a heavy topic and find a way to twist it and make it light-hearted — that has the biggest payoff.”14
“If you can book the venue, name the show, market it, fill the seats and create the environment, that’s a lot of power — as opposed to relying on other people to book you.”15
“There’s the producer brain going: people are late, we didn’t fill as many seats as we wanted. And then I have to run on stage and be loose and fun.”16
“Because you’re doing it night after night, it really helps that learning curve.”
Attribution: Chloe Matonis, speaking to Hop For Pop, 2026.
Career
Selected credits
Live
- Boot Camp for Lonely People — 50-minute interactive character show; Edinburgh Fringe 2026, 26 consecutive nights
- Previously staged at the Boston Fringe, the Atlanta Fringe and in Las Vegas
- Stand-up across San Francisco and the United States
Producing
- Blankets and Wine Comedy — free weekly outdoor show in Golden Gate Park, founded 2020 and still running
- Self-produced club nights in San Francisco
Also
Works in SaaS sales. Began performing as a child making parody videos with her siblings.
This kit was produced by Hop For Pop. The interview and quotes are drawn from Hop For Pop × Chloe Matonis, recorded 2026. Chloe Matonis and their representatives are free to use any part of this document — the biography, the quotes — for booking, press and promotion, with credit to Hop For Pop for the interview material.
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