The Comedy Club at the End of the Metaverse

It’s Sunday, and I'm onstage at the Soapstone Comedy Club in the metaverse. My VR avatar is clad in a black suit, tie, sunglasses, and an unfortunate fedora I've selected from the pool of free clothes for your virtual dolls in Meta’s Horizon Worlds. After the show, a guy whose username is Large Phenis pops up in the bar next to me. “Hey there, Blues Brothers,” he cackles—tough crowd.

Soapstone’s adults-only digital comedy club has been around since nearly the beginning of Meta's Horizon Worlds. It has hosted more than 5,000 events, from improv and stand-up to trivia nights and open-mic singing. It’s had partnerships with famous comedians like Natasha Leggero, Ron Funches, and Pete Holmes. It has also served as a hub for ragtag regulars who seem to really like the place.

Last week, Meta announced it would shut down Horizon Worlds in VR to focus on its mobile version; it pivoted the next day after community blowback to keep it running indefinitely. Now, the service is on life support. Come June 15, Meta plans to cut creation features in VR and stop allowing users to build updates or new content on the platform—no more new worlds or seasonal updates, except on mobile.

“Soapstone is a world built by a third-party creator and is currently available as both a mobile world and a VR world,” wrote a Meta representative in an email to WIRED. “The VR version was built on Horizon Unity Runtime (HUR), and all HUR worlds will live in VR for the foreseeable future as our CTO, Andrew Bosworth, said in his AMA.”

For the past year and a half, Soapstone user Miss Del Rey has hosted these Sunday improv shows. She is from Sweden, and her avatar sports bright red hair, a red dress and cap, and knee-high gold boots.

“It came as a shock that they were shutting this down so soon,” Miss Del Rey says about the initial VR news. “It's been this massive production, and now it's just disappearing.”

At the first Soapstone Sunday improv show since Meta's shutdown whiplash, folks here to joke around with their brightly colored avatars aren’t sure what comes next. Soapstone says it will continue into the mobile era, but it’s not clear whether the users will follow.

“People are just terrified of the uncertainty,” Del Rey says. “This might not be profitable to do on VR, but I don't think Meta understands how important this place is to so many people. I don't know what my life would have been like today without Soapstone.”

For the next hour, Del Rey and her cohost Millsbertc run volunteers through classic improv games—pulling scenes from a hat or asking a group to tell a story one word at a time that quickly delves into debauchery. (“My anacondas are small and dirty,” the group decides.)

The show is about as silly and occasionally cringey as you'd expect a comedy open-mic night to be, but there’s an extra sheen of uncanny weirdness that comes from being VR avatars who can’t make eye contact. Sometimes the jokes don't land, are delayed by lag, or don't arrive at all because users are muted or have stepped away from their headsets.

Still, everybody seems to be having a good time. And the show gets a good turnout. Nearly two dozen people show up throughout, which is a lot for one of these Horizon Spaces.

It's not nearly enough to help Meta find much of a return on its roughly $80 billion investment into its Reality Labs division and Quest VR headsets, including the development of Horizon Worlds. An unmistakable tension permeates the night. The people here are anxious that this might all be going away, and they’re not sure where they'll go next.

“When they announced they were killing it for good, I just broke down in tears,” Millsbertc says, the cohost with a blue-skinned avatar in a nice suit. Millsbertc has been performing at Soapstone regularly for the past 10 months. “This is my home.”