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Book Reviews
A readable and well-told tale filled with color, sensitivity, humor and plenty of research.
—Midwest Book Review
The birth of stand-up
I’M DYING UP HERE:
Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy’s Golden Era
By William Knoedelseder
304 pp. PublicAffairs $24.95
Reviewed by Doris Pavlichek
Flip to any cable channel on any given night and chances are good that you’ll see an up-and-coming stand-up comic eliciting laughter from an audience that is ready to be entertained. Stand-up comedy has become so enmeshed in our culture that it is hard to remember a time when it was not so ubiquitous. When a large group of comedians went on strike in 1978, however, a gig on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson was still the brass ring.
In the 1970s, stand-up comedy was just coming into its own, but those few who could make “a roomful of drunks laugh their asses off” were never paid for their acts at places like The Improv and The Comedy Store, the breeding grounds for new comedic talent. In fact, they often “didn’t have five bucks to buy breakfast” afterward. Some comedians worked second or third jobs, lived in squalor, and depended on their families for support while they tried to launch their comedy careers with the hope of achieving that dream of being in the spotlight with Johnny.
Mitzi Shore, the owner of The Comedy Store, is placed front and center in I’m Dying Up Here, Knoedelseder’s exposé of the events behind the 1978 strike. Shore won the club in her divorce and is the woman responsible for building it up from a small venue to a birthing ground for many of today’s big names in comedy such as Jay Leno, David Letterman, Richard Lewis, and Robin Williams. While patrons of the club paid a cover charge and had a two-drink minimum, Shore never paid the comedians a dime of the club’s take and is depicted as the epitome of the greed and self-absorption of the ’70s by the author.
Club owners like Shore and Budd Friedman of The Improv grew rich while some of their entertainers lived off of “the buffet” of bar condiments, or by crawling around on the club floor the next morning to find loose change with which to buy food. It was a group of headliners—comedians who were realizing those dreams of being on Johnny’s show—who discussed the situation one night after the club closed and decided that something should be done. Though the strike ultimately resulted from the tensions between Shore and her starving artists, it is ironic that the comedians already earning a living were the ones who had the courage and motivation to start the battle against the unfair practice.
Shore stood her ground against the Comedians for Compensation (CFC), as the group was called, claiming that her club was a “workshop” and not a true nightclub. Through her use of such semantics, she justified not paying the talent who entertained her patrons each night. The way she saw it, “If you’re working here, you don’t have a career.” The comedians saw it differently. While some were loyal to Shore, saying she had helped them and nurtured their careers, others saw her as nothing more than another plantation owner getting wealthy off of their backs. Comedienne Marsha Warfield said, “This is sharecropping, and I just don’t understand how so many smart people can fail to see the extent to which they are being exploited.”
In I’m Dying Up Here, Knoedelseder describes what he saw from the front lines of the strike as a young journalist. He focuses on the early struggles of some of today’s most famous comedians and their lesser-known fellows to survive poverty, self-consciousness, depression, and sometimes even the pressure of fame itself.
While the book is enlightening about this pivotal event in the history of American comedy and fair labor practices, Knoedelseder is sometimes myopic in his coverage. Perhaps because of his relationship to some of the comedians, he focuses more heavily on the toll the strike and Shore’s policies took on one unknown—Steve Lubetkin—and less on the changes in the industry that came about because of the strike.
If you are looking for a peek into the beginnings of stand-up comedy as we know it today, or if you want a behind-the-scenes look into the strike itself, you may enjoy this book. I’m Dying Up Here is at times informative, funny, and sad, but the conclusion of the book, much like the conclusion of the strike, was abrupt and unsatisfying, leaving me wondering if the strike ended because both sides had reached a satisfactory compromise or if it ended because of one sacrificial lamb.
Doris E. Pavlichek holds a degree in communications and is a technical writer by trade. She’s published two books on network engineering, poetry in the StrokeNet Newsletter, and historical non-fiction in Constellation magazine. She resides in the mountains of North Carolina with her partner, Denise, their two dogs, two horses, and a barn cat.
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