Comedy at the Edge Excerpt

For the stand-up comics who had spent years giving away their jokes for free at Mitzi Shore’s Comedy Store, the Norma Rae moment came late one night at Canter’s Deli. A few of the Store regulars were lingering in a booth when Jay Leno walked in and cried, “What is this bullshit?”

The line had had a long setup. Ever since getting custody of the Comedy Store in 1974, Mitzi Shore had stuck to her policy against paying the comedians who put customers in the seats. In this she was no different from her counterparts in New York, Budd Friedman and Rick Newman. They regarded their establishments not as ordinary nightclubs but as workshops, where comedians could try out new material, hone their acts, and be seen by people in the industry. The comics were getting as much out of the clubs as the clubs were getting out of them; besides, the owners claimed, paying all the acts — a dozen or more a night — would have been financially prohibitive. But for Mitzi, the issue of whether to pay the talent was more personal. She saw her club as a college of comedy, an “artists’ colony,” and it wasn’t just her bottom line that would suffer if that talent were to earn a few bucks for their effort. It was the very integrity of the art form.

The comedians may not have bought into this, but for most of the ’70s they tolerated it. They worked for no pay at the Comedy Store because that’s how they got seen by the agents and bookers and producers who could be their ticket to the real paying jobs — a TV guest shot, a club gig out of town, maybe even a part in a sitcom or movie. Landing good time slots at the Comedy Store was too important to risk alienating the club owner who put together the nightly lineups.

But by early 1979 the comics were growing restive. For one thing, Mitzi Shore’s little artists’ colony was the center of a growing comedy empire. Along with her two clubs in the L.A. area and another one down the coast in La Jolla, she had started a college concert tour featuring comics from the Comedy Store and signed a creative-consultant deal with ABC to develop TV projects. She had expanded her original club as well, opening a second showroom, dubbed the Main Room, where she intended to feature (and pay for) top comics from Vegas and TV.

But many of the big-name comics she tried to hire for the Main Room turned her down, and the ones who did work there weren’t doing much business. “Mitzi was just crestfallen,” says Argus Hamilton, the young comic from Oklahoma who was her errand boy and confidant at the time. “She had built that room for Buddy Hackett, Don Rickles, Shecky Greene, Bob Newhart — all those guys, her ex-husband’s generation, who were ruling the roost in Vegas at the time. They refused to play the Main Room because they thought it would hurt their Las Vegas draw.” Hamilton and another comic, Biff Maynard, suggested that Mitzi instead try to fill the room with a bill of her Comedy Store regulars. So she put together a squad of her best acts — among them David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Robin Williams — and crowds packed the place. Even better, at least for Mitzi, because they were her very own “showcase” comics, who worked for free in the Original Room, she didn’t feel the need to pay them. And that’s what ticked off Leno and his pals. If hot young comics from the Original Room were good enough to fill the house in the Main Room, they reasoned, why shouldn’t they get paid just like the Vegas headliners?

A labor movement was born. Tom Dreesen, who had been in the Teamsters Union when he worked on the loading docks in Chicago, became the comedians’ chief organizer and spokesman. A former G.I. who was a few years older than most of the youngsters at the Comedy Store, Dreesen had little affection for the college kids who had protested the Vietnam War, but he provided an articulate voice for their working stiffs’ complaints. He tried to appeal to Mitzi’s sense of fair play. “I told Mitzi, you pay the waiters, you pay the waitresses, you pay the guy who cleans the toilets. Why don’t you at least pay the comedians?” Many of the struggling kids who were helping her clubs thrive, he argued, couldn’t even afford to buy groceries. On New Year’s Eve he had run into one of them, on a high after finishing a set at the Westwood Comedy Store. “He said, it was fantastic, I killed ’em, had the best show I ever had. And then he said, ‘Tom, can you loan me five dollars for breakfast?’ I told Mitzi that story and she said, ‘Well, he should get a goddamn job.’ I said, ‘Mitzi, he has a job. He worked for you on New Year’s Eve.’ ”

The comics formed a quasi-union, the Comedians for Compensation, and held meetings. The first one was mass chaos, says Dreesen, “Everybody’s talking at the same time. Gallagher’s yelling, ‘Why don’t we burn the fucking place down!’ It was insanity.” David Letterman was there, along with his good friend George Miller, who was particularly outraged because his mother used to work as a bookkeeper for Mitzi Shore — and thus knew how much money she was socking away. Leno came too, though Letterman thought he made something of a spectacle of himself. “Jay, bless his heart, couldn’t sit still,” he says. “He was behaving like a hyperactive child. Jumping up and down, being funny and distracting, to the point where everybody sort of thought, well, maybe we shouldn’t tell Jay about the next meeting.” Dreesen eventually took over the meetings, running them according to the Robert’s Rules of Order he had learned when he used to chair meetings of the Jaycees.

Mitzi was willing to relent on the comedians’ most reasonable demand, the one that had sparked the whole uprising, agreeing to pay the comics who performed in the Main Room one half of the cover charges. But while that was fine for the top tier of comics big enough to play the Main Room, it meant the vast majority of lesser names would still be working for nothing in the Original Room. So the comics turned it down and dug in for a fight.

Dreesen went back to Mitzi and tried to negotiate a plan for paying all the comics, not just the Main Room elite. He suggested what he thought would be a painless solution: simply add $1 to the $4.50 cover Mitzi was charging at the time, and split that extra dollar among the comedians. If a couple hundred people were in the club on a given night, that meant $200 split among the comics; it wasn’t much, but it was a start, and even those few bucks could mean a lot. But Mitzi turned him down flat. “She said no, they don’t deserve to be paid,” Dreesen recalls. “I knew then that we were in trouble. I thought it was about money. It was about control.”

In late March of 1979, with the talks at an impasse, the comedians went on strike. A picket line was assembled in front of the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard, the strikers carrying placards with slogans like no money, no funny and the yuk stops here. The spectacle of stand-up comedians, many of them well known from television, recasting themselves as extras in F.I.S.T., was an irresistible national story. Johnny Carson made jokes about it on The Tonight Show. Some of the more established comics were scornful (“This strike is the biggest joke I’ve ever heard come out of the Comedy Store,” quipped David Brenner). But among the younger comedians it was a serious matter, and the vast majority of the 150 or so who worked at the Comedy Store walked off the job. Some of them had careers outside the club and didn’t need the money, but supported the strike nevertheless. In the midst of the walkout, Letterman filled in for Johnny Carson as guest host of The Tonight Show. Immediately after finishing the show he drove to the Comedy Store and joined the picket line. “This was the umbilical cord for a lot of guys, myself included,” says Letterman. “Money wasn’t necessarily an issue for me, because I had a couple of bucks in the bank. But for these other guys, this was it. This was sustenance.” Richard Lewis, who had moved on to concerts and television, wouldn’t join the picket line but thought the cause was just. “I didn’t want to picket, because I didn’t want to say to the owners of the clubs, ‘I need your twenty bucks.’ To me, it trivialized my goal,” says Lewis. “But once I saw the bigger picture, that people were making no money, I said, this is bullshit. I was totally pro-strike.”

Budd Friedman, who was just as much of a tightwad as Mitzi Shore and had struggled for years to keep his club afloat in New York, didn’t pay his comedians either — in New York or L.A. — but he smartly positioned himself as a friend to the strikers. His L.A. club had been severely damaged in a fire just before the strike began, but he set up a makeshift performance space in the bar area of the club and continued to operate, promising to abide by whatever agreement the comics reached with Mitzi. Meanwhile, with most of her talent on strike, Shore shut down the Comedy Store for a couple of weeks, then reopened it, using the few loyalists who crossed the picket line, like Hamilton and Maynard, as well as several neophytes who saw the strike as an opportunity to get stage time. But she was shocked and hurt that so many of the comics she had nurtured, and in some cases helped out financially, were now turning against her. “The people who stabbed her in the back were people she fed and gave places to live,” says Alan Bursky, the former stand-up who had become an agent — and who ostentatiously crossed the picket line just to show his support for Mitzi.

She was crushed the night Letterman — one of her favorites, the kid from Indiana whom she took under her wing and, she claimed, had talked into staying when he wanted to go back home — showed up on the picket line. “I watched him in the bay window here,” Mitzi would recall years later. “I was taken aback. I was crying. Three and a half years working with him, every night. I called him that night at his apartment. I was totally choked up. And he said, ‘Those comedians are my friends. And they’ll be my friends for the rest of my life.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that, David.'” Says Argus Hamilton: “It broke her heart.”

Hamilton began negotiating as her representative and presented her with a proposal to pay the comedians twenty-five dollars per set in the Original Room. She rejected it flat out. “She was so hurt over David Letterman that she continued to dig her heels in,” he says. “She just absolutely refused. It cost her her greatest strength: her cool rationality.” As the strike dragged on, Mitzi tried to lure the comics back with a promise to pay them twenty-five dollars per set on weekends only. Garry Shandling, one of the club’s top acts at the time, thought it was a reasonable offer and went back to work.

Shandling’s decision to cross the picket line came as a blow to the strikers. The other comics who had kept working were mostly close friends of Mitzi’s or young kids who didn’t know any better. Shandling was different. “This wasn’t a hick off the street,” says Letterman. “You could tell that Garry was a real talent.” Dreesen calls his move “unconscionable.” Shandling says he felt the strike had simply dragged on too long, and claims he got private support for his position from other striking comics, who felt the same way but were afraid to cross the picket line. “I called up Dave Letterman — I didn’t know him — and I said, what do you think? And he said, ‘I think the whole thing is silly; I’m not involved in it one way or the other.’ My sense of it was he wasn’t taking any position.” (Letterman doesn’t recall the conversation, but says he was fully supportive of the strike. “I don’t remember giving my blessing to cross the line,” he says. “If I actually thought that way, I would have gone back.”) “I think there was a lot of good that was accomplished by that strike,” says Shandling. “I certainly didn’t cross the picket line just to work. But I thought it could have been resolved. It did not need to be dragged out.”

Tensions between the strikers and nonstrikers grew. Dreesen and John Witherspoon — a stand-up who also worked as a doorman and sometime manager of the club — acted as marshals on the picket line, protecting the strikers from harassment by Mitzi loyalists. One night, the bad blood got out of hand, as one of the antistrike comics tried to drive a car through the picket line, brushing some of the comics and knocking Jay Leno to the pavement with a loud thud. Dreesen ran over to him, panicked that Leno had been seriously injured. Leno gave him a wink; he was only feigning an injury and had thumped the car with his hand. But he got hauled off to the hospital in an ambulance anyway, and the incident seemed to sober up both sides.

“Mitzi called me ten minutes later and said, let’s settle this thing right now,” says Dreesen. On May 4 a settlement was reached, on essentially the same terms that Mitzi had rejected earlier — twenty-five dollars per set for all but a few specified hours during the week reserved for newcomers. After a six-week walkout, the Comedy Store comics went back to work, claiming victory.

The settlement was hard for Mitzi to swallow. “It was against my basic philosophy and the principles of the Comedy Store that this settlement was made,” she told the Los Angeles Times’s William Knoedelseder. “You might say I was unionized into a corner.” Mitzi got a fig leaf of satisfaction three years later, when an administrative law judge for the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the comedians, as independent contractors, could not be unionized. “In my personal view, workman’s comp, benefits — those were always in the back of Mitzi’s mind as something that would break the Comedy Store,” says Hamilton. “I was thrilled,” Mitzi says of the ruling. “It meant they never had to pay taxes to the government.”

But the strike left a bitter legacy. Some of the activists, like Leno and Dreesen, never worked in the Comedy Store again. Some who crossed the picket line later regretted it. “There were a lot of personal attacks on Mitzi, and I felt protective of her,” says Mike Binder, a protégé of Leno’s, who continued to work during the strike. “But it was a mistake. I didn’t understand the magnitude of it. She was a bad horse to back.” Mitzi, complaining that she could no longer afford to keep all her showrooms open on slow nights, shut down her Westwood club on weekdays and reduced the number of time slots at the Sunset Boulevard club — which meant less work for the comics.

Some of the strikers complained that Mitzi was taking retribution against them. One of them was Steve Lubetkin, a New York comic who had moved west and gotten close to Mitzi but wound up joining the picketers. After the comics went back to work, he complained that Mitzi would no longer give him any time slots. He appealed to Dreesen, who was getting ready to go back on the road. “He came up to me and said, Tom, don’t leave; she’ll retaliate. I said, she can’t; it’s in the contract. He said, I’ve called in two weeks in a row and she won’t give me a time. He looked so forlorn. I grabbed his arm and said, Steve, I give you my word. I won’t go back until you go back. How’s that?”

Another two weeks went by, and Lubetkin still heard nothing from Mitzi. On a Friday afternoon in early June, a distraught Lubetkin walked into the Continental Hyatt House next door to the Comedy Store, climbed to the roof of the fourteen-story building, and leaped to his death. His suicide note read: “My name is Steve Lubetkin. I used to work at the Comedy Store.”

It was a tragic punch line to a story that had turned darker than anyone had bargained for, and it added to the bitterness against Mitzi. When she walked into her office the day after the suicide, Mitzi found a poster of Lubetkin propped up on her couch, and the words “Got the Message” scrawled in Magic Marker on her wall. Lubetkin’s girlfriend had left it.

Lubetkin’s troubles clearly went beyond Mitzi Shore and the strike. “He obviously had some deep-rooted psychological problems,” says Richard Lewis, a friend since their days together at the Improv in New York. “Also an unbearably bad run of luck.” Lubetkin had missed out on several TV opportunities, including a heartbreaking mishap with The Tonight Show. After he had been booked to make his first appearance on Carson’s show, Lubetkin was cutting up onstage late one night at the Comedy Store when a Tonight producer happened to be in the audience. The producer didn’t like what he saw, and Lubetkin’s guest spot was canceled.

The strike worsened his relations with Mitzi. While it was underway, Lubetkin was scheduled to work a five-night engagement at the La Jolla Comedy Store (which was not affected by the strike), but he showed up late on opening night and Mitzi canceled the gig. Lubetkin said his car broke down; Mitzi was upset because he had stopped off first at the Sunset club to walk the picket line. But after his death, she angrily denied any implication that she bore some responsibility. “I was very close with Steve Lubetkin,” she says. “I loved him. He was my best friend. I was in La Jolla at the Comedy Store and when I got the message [of his suicide], I threw glasses around. I had a fit, that he would do a thing like that.” She claims Lubetkin was under too much pressure because of the organizing duties he had inherited after Dreesen left town. “He couldn’t handle what they were giving him to do,” she says. “He had definite problems. But the pressure of getting that responsibility was too much for him.” Dreesen says he doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

The Comedy Store strike, with its tragic coda, was a turning point for stand-up comedy in the 1970s. In later years, the L.A. comics romanticized it as the end to an age of innocence, the dividing line between an era of happy camaraderie and a more complicated one of competing factions and big business. But it had a more important, if less obvious, impact around the country. Pictures on the evening news of stand-up comedians walking the picket line in L.A., and the news of their victory in the strike, raised the profile of a profession that was growing fast in popularity, not just on the two coasts, but in the heartland as well. The strike helped fuel the nationwide comedy club boom of the 1980s.

From Comedy at the Edge by Richard Zoglin. Copyright 2008 by Richard Zoglin. Published by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.