ON A RECENT trip to New York, I picked up a copy of I’m Dying Up Here by William Knoedelseder.
Subtitled Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-up Comedy’s Golden Era, it tells the story of the beginning of the Los Angeles stand-up scene in the mid-’70s, and the long-forgotten comedians’ strike at its centre.
What the book is really about is the tragic death of comic Steve Lubetkin. Hardly a household name, Lubetkin was the comic who jumped from the roof of the Hyatt House, a casualty of the bitter strike between the comedians and Mitzi Shore.
Telling the story from Lubetkin’s point of view may seem an odd choice, but it works. Knoedelseder starts his story with the comedy scene in New York at the beginning of the 1970s.
At the time, the city was the epicentre of all things comedic in the U.S. But then, two things happened that tipped the scales to the West Coast.
The first was the move of the Tonight Show to Los Angeles in 1972. The other event was the opening of the Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip.
Sammy Shore was a mid-range comic, not well-known, but good enough to have established a Beverly Hills lifestyle for himself and his wife Mitzi. Together they took over a nightclub and turned it into a casual drop-in for performers.
It was a modest success, but after Sammy came back from a tour, he found that his wife had turned it into a showcase for the comics that were teeming in L.A. for all the new work. Soon after, Mitzi served him with divorce papers, and she got the club in the settlement.
The Comedy Store became the most important comedy venue in the country. This is where everyone got their start: Leno, Letterman and many more.Dropins from stars such as Pryor and Carlin were commonplace.
Nobody was paid, but the idea was that you experimented onstage, and talent scouts in the audience hired you for “real” gigs on TV and in Vegas.
A group of comedy elders appealed to Mitzi to pay a stipend to the acts, but she declined. Both sides became intransigent, and the unthinkable happened: the comics picketed the Comedy Store.
Mitzi still had enough loyalist comedians to stay open, but the story went national, and a lot of damage was done to her reputation. A compromise of sorts was reached, and business resumed as usual.
Except it wasn’t quite the same. Now that she was the “employer,” she gave the coveted spots to the very best. And that left a lot of middling acts out in the cold. Comics like Steve Lubetkin.
Knoedelseder takes great pains in describing Lubetkin’s struggle. It’s clear that the comic was suffering from emotional problems, and his lack of success only exacerbated them. When he couldn’t get his much-needed spots after the strike, he snapped, and jumped off the roof of the hotel next to the Comedy Store.
It’s a tragedy that I thought was lost to the ages, but I’m thrilled that Knoedelseder has resurrected it and Lubetkin’s memory. It’s a tribute to a man and an era, as well as a reminder that show business is a game in which not everyone emerges a winner.