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Letterman, Leno, Robin Williams, Andy Kaufman, Richard Lewis, Garry Shandling, and many other soon-to-be-stars were once young, broke, and funny in 1970s L.A. They were also friends...until one event changed everything. I'm Dying Up Here chronicles the collective coming of age of the standup comedians who defined American humor during the past three decades. Born early in the Baby Boom, they grew up watching The Tonight Show, went to school during Viet Nam and Watergate, migrated en masse to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s and created an artistic community unlike any before or since. They were arguably the funniest people of their generation, living in a late-night world of sex, drugs, dreams and laughter. For one brief shining moment, standup comics were as revered as rock stars. It was Comedy Camelot but, of course, it couldn't last. In the late 1970s William Knoedelseder was a cub reporter assigned to cover the burgeoning local comedy scene for the Los Angeles Times. He wrote the first major newspaper profiles of Leno, Letterman, Andy Kaufman, and others. He got to know many of them well. And so he covered the scene too when the comedians-who were not paid for performing at the career-making-or-breaking venue called The Comedy Store-tried to change an exploitative system and incidentally tore apart their own close-knit community. Now Knoedelseder has gone back to interview the major participants to tell the whole story of that golden age and of the strike that ended it. Full of revealing portraits of many of the best-known comedic talents of our age, I'm Dying Up Here is also a poignant tale of the price of success and the terrible cost of failure-professional and moral.
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About the Author:
William Knoedelseder has been a journalist with the Los Angeles Times, executive producer of Fox Entertainment News and of the Philadelphia Inquirer's hour-long nightly television news program ''Inquirer News Tonight,'' and Vice President of News at USA Broadcasting. He is the author of Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, The Music Business, and the Mafia, and In Eddie's Name: One Family's Triumph Over Tragedy. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he now lives near Los Angeles with his wife and two children.
From The Washington Post:
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Stephen Reiss In April 1972, a moderately successful comic named Sammy Shore opened a small club in Los Angeles called the Comedy Store. Fellow comics would hang out, perform -- unpaid -- and often drink free. At the end of the year, Shore left for several months to perform in Las Vegas and asked his wife, Mitzi, to run the club. Soon after he returned to L.A., though, the couple divorced and Mitzi got the Store. Over the next few years, her previously unrecognized talents as a businesswoman and impresario transformed it from what had been a hobby into one of the most important showcases for stand-up comedy in the country. One thing she didn't change was the club's policy of not paying its comics. The Comedy Store was billed as a workshop, a place for experimenting and trying out new material. Shore's practice of putting on scores of acts over the course of a week provided lots of opportunity for both established names and newbies who wanted to test themselves on a real stage before a paying audience. (There's a taste of this onstage mixology in the new Adam Sandler movie, "Funny People.") The roster of comics that Mitzi Shore helped develop is an impressive one by any measure: Jay Leno, David Letterman, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, Richard Lewis, Andy Kaufman, Elayne Boosler. (To be fair, we also have to lay Gallagher and his fruit-smashing act at her door, as well as her son, Pauly, of which nothing more shall be said.) The Store's growing reputation attracted crowds -- both the public and industry insiders scouting for the next breakout star. Shore was making a bundle. The waitresses, the bartenders and the delivery guys were earning a living, too. The only people not getting paid were the comics. And eventually, they got fed up with starving for their art. This conflict forms the core of "I'm Dying Up Here." The author, William Knoedelseder, was a young reporter covering the comedy scene for the Los Angeles Times when all this was going on, and his book, forthcoming at the end of the month, is full of dishy, I-was-there detail about people who went on to become famous -- and occasionally rich -- being funny on TV. (Budd Friedman, the owner of the Improv, hired Les Moonves, now president and CEO of CBS, as his first bartender! Letterman played power forward on a Comedy Store basketball team along with Jimmie Walker and Tim Reid!) His account of a ragtag bunch of socially maladjusted comics trying to coordinate a labor action against a mother figure in the industry has an interesting resonance in today's world of unpaid bloggers who are desperate for the limelight and often willing to work free to get a share of it. Eventually, the comics were successful -- sort of. They got paid, but not as much as they had hoped. Friendships were sundered. And the petty reality of organized labor's jurisdictional issues wound up suffocating their fledgling organization. As everyone in this dysfunctional family learned, money can buy breakfast, but not love. Unfortunately, Knoedelseder is so besotted with his front-row view that he misses the center of his own story. Mitzi Shore is a world-class piece of work, and the comics were both deeply indebted to her and dismayed that she wouldn't see the world the way they did. Recounting Shore's refusal to grant the comics' first bashful request for payment, Marsha Warfield ("Night Court") says, "It's like your mother told you she wasn't going to feed you anymore. You can't quite believe it, so you go back and ask again." But the Shore of this recounting is a cardboard villain who snorts lines of cocaine with her no-talent cronies while innocent comic geniuses starve. It's comic-book characterization that isn't helped by the author's weakness for clunky language. ("They were brothers in comedy, embarked on a kamikaze mission to make it in show business and never look back.") Equally distressing is his reluctance to explore some of the larger questions he raises. He notes Johnny Carson's refusal to book female comics on "The Tonight Show," for many years the premier showcase for stand-up, but barely touches on the differences between male and female comedy. We find out in tremendous detail how Shore booked nights at her club, but almost nothing about how a comedian workshops new material. The focus on this one club and a labor dispute that even the author notes "didn't exactly rock the country" gives a distorted view of comedy at the time. "Saturday Night Live" is dismissed as a forum for improvisational acting, as opposed to stand-up. Bill Cosby appears only as a foil for Richard Pryor. Woody Allen, Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin get only the most passing of mentions. Instead, we return again and again to the sad story of Steve Lubetkin (Who? Exactly.) and his failure to make it in stand-up. Shore had a placard in her office that read, "It's a sin to encourage mediocre talent." It was very brave of the author to include that anecdote.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherReadhowyouwant
- Publication date2010
- ISBN 10 1458759253
- ISBN 13 9781458759252
- BindingPerfect Paperback
- Number of pages440
- Rating
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