The National Comedy Center once again brought in some of the brightest stars in comedy for this year’s Lucille Ball Comedy Festival.

Jon Stewart’s appearance comes at a time of immense cultural relevance for the longtime stand-up comedian, film star and part-time host of The Daily Show – a platform that Stewart took to new heights. Bill Murray is a comedy film legend who brought his band to the festival to perform at the Northwest Ice Arena. He was preceded to the stage by Andy Huggins,a longtime comedian who entered the business with greats like Rodney Dangerfield and Woody Allen and has continued entertaining audiences well into his 70s. Saturday Night Live, Murray’s old stomping grounds, was represented by Streeter Seidel, the show’s head writer, and current star James Austin Johnson. There’s a good chance to catch a rising star at one of the festival’s Comedy Late Night shows.

For a week, comedy is a huge deal in Jamestown. But now that the laughs have died down from the 35th iteration of the Lucille Ball Comedy Festival, the question becomes how to keep the laughs coming the other 51 weeks of the year. Just as importantly, how do we spread the laughs – and ideally the wealth – throughout the rest of downtown?

As we noted earlier this year, unscheduled events like Gabriel Iglesias bringing his VW Bus to be part of the National Comedy Center’s collection help when it comes to making comedy relevant to Jamestown. But recommendations from AECOM in 2015 came with several recommendations that could help bring more people downtown for a good laugh and to spend a buck or two. While some short-term recommendations from AECOM’s Downtown Jamestown Economic Development Strategy have happened – a downtown brewery is open again, traffic calming has taken place thanks to the state Transportation Department’s reconstruction of Washington Street, and streetscape and wayfinding work took place – other recommendations have yet to be followed.

A lot of work has taken place along the Chadakoin River, but we have a feeling AECOM officials would say the area is still underprogrammed. AECOM suggested an antique mart in the Furniture Mart to bring an additional niche shopping venue to visitors downtown. Activation of the riverfront area included additional programs for the park area to draw people into the comedy center’s back door more often. In addition to opening up the comedy center, AECOM called for a mechanism for frequent, regularly scheduled downtown programs. That’s been a struggle, to say the least.

Our community’s view of the National Comedy Center has always been too simplistic. The idea that if you build it, they will come works great for baseball fields in an Iowa cornfield in a movie. The National Comedy Center has been built, and some people are coming. But to really capitalize on the center Jamestown needs to jump in with both feet. If we’re asking the Comedy Center to up its game with more events and programs, then the rest of us need to up our game as well by coming up with the type of branding, complementary events and experience that keep visitors here for both fun and, we hope, to spend their money.

Can comedy rule here for more than a week or two each year? This isn’t a Comedy Center question, it’s a Jamestown question. And we think the answer is yes, we can do more economically with comedy. But we need to get everyone on the same page and truly build out both our physical spaces and downtown programs to focus on the funny.