The First Comedy Strike

The strike Jokes, at least, have died down. David Letterman — back on the air with his writers after making a separate deal with the Writers Guild — has moved on to wisecracks about the Cloverfield monster and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Jay Leno, who has returned sans scribes but is supposedly writing the monologues himself (angering the Guild, which claims he’s violating strike rules by doing so), is pummeling viewers with the usual rat-a-tat of gags playing off the headlines, from the presidential primaries to funny animal news.

The three-month-old strike has sidelined more than 12,000 writers — writers of prime-time shows you can’t live without, movies you haven’t heard of yet and soap operas you’re pretty sure are recycling story lines from 10 years ago. But it’s the late-night hosts who have been in the most visible, and delicate, position. Leno and Letterman are both former stand-up comics and Guild members themselves, who supported their fellow union members for weeks, refusing to do their shows until the prospect of laying off all their nonstriking staff members forced them into an uneasy accommodation to get back on the air.

Their conflicted roles in the current strike hark back to a less well remembered labor battle of nearly three decades ago. Letterman and Leno were key figures in one of the strangest and bitterest labor-management disputes in show-business history: the Comedy Store strike of 1979.

That walkout was the culmination of a decade in which stand-up became the voice of the counterculture generation. Like George Carlin, Richard Pryor and other pioneers of those years, the new stand-up comics were not just anti-Establishment rabble rousers; they were intimate, populist artists who got their power by convincing us that they were ordinary folks, with the same gripes and anxieties as everyone else. They joked about furnishing their tiny apartments and riding the subways and trying to get girls. The strike against the Comedy Store, the leading comedy club in Los Angeles, reinforced their real-life status as working-class crusaders. For both Leno, who ostentatiously took doughnuts to the picketing writers on the first day of the current strike, and Letterman, who more quietly assured his staff that he would pay their salaries in the weeks the show was dark, the first strike was a cautionary — and formative — experience.

The issues and adversaries were much different from today’s, but the dispute was perhaps more rancorous. In the 1970s, the stucco box on Sunset Boulevard that housed the Comedy Store was a nightly practice field for up-and-coming comics who would troop onstage to hone their material, try out new jokes — and hope to get seen by the agents, managers and talent scouts who were regular clubgoers. The club’s owner, Mitzi Shore — a pretty, petite brunet with a whiny, Roseanne-like voice who had inherited the Comedy Store in a divorce from comedian Sammy Shore — viewed the place not as a traditional nightclub but as a “college” of comedy where newcomers could learn their craft and grow as artists. And so she didn’t feel the need to pay them anything.

The comics put up with this for years. For one thing, they felt they were getting as much out of the club as Shore was out of them. She had helped many of them by lending them money, even giving some places to stay. Plus, no one wanted to antagonize the woman who was the gatekeeper for their show-biz dreams. But after Shore opened a second, larger showroom at her club, where she paid big-time headliners — but not the younger comics who also appeared there — the comedians rebelled.

A labor movement was born. The issue wasn’t today’s relatively abstruse one of payments for DVDS or Internet downloads; it was simply getting paid. Tom Dreesen, a comedian and former Teamster from Chicago who became a spokesman for the comics, pleaded with Shore to give them at least a token amount. “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?'” says Dreesen. Many of the struggling kids who were helping her club thrive, he pointed out, 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. “He said, ‘It was fantastic. I killed ’em.’ And then he said, ‘Tom, can you loan me $5 for breakfast?’ I told Mitzi that story, and she said, ‘Well, he should get a goddam job.’ I said, ‘Mitzi, he has a job. He worked for you on New Year’s Eve.'”

Leno, a gregarious and widely admired regular at the club, was one of the early firebrands. Letterman, another top club comic and strike supporter (and a fan of Leno’s), thought he was a little out of control. “Jay, bless his heart, couldn’t sit still,” Letterman recalls of one early mass meeting. “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.”

The meetings and negotiations continued. But when Shore wouldn’t budge, the comedians, in March 1979, walked off the job. Pickets appeared, with placards bearing slogans like NO MONEY NO FUNNY and THE YUK STOPS HERE. All but a few of the regulars refused to work. Even Letterman — though he felt indebted to Shore, who had taken him under her wing when he arrived from Indiana with his wife in 1975, making him an MC — joined the picket line after he finished a stint as guest host on the Tonight Show. “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.”

When she saw Letterman picketing, Shore was crushed. “I watched him from the bay window here,” she would recall years later, frail and shaking from a nervous disorder and sitting in the empty showroom at the Comedy Store. “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, one of the comics who was closest to Mitzi: “It broke her heart.”

The poverty-stricken comics were far less prepared for a long walkout than the relatively well-heeled writers today. Shore closed down her club, then reopened it, using the few loyalists willing to cross the picket line and some neophytes who saw an opportunity for some stage time. When she made a compromise offer to pay the comics $25 a set only on weekends, some of them, like Garry Shandling, thought it was fair and went back to work — a blow to the comics’ shaky solidarity. “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 the nonstrikers grew. 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 Leno to the pavement with a loud thud. Dreesen ran over to him, panicked that he had been seriously hurt. Leno gave Dreesen 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 10 minutes later and said, ‘Let’s settle this thing right now,'” says Dreesen. On May 4, a settlement was reached to pay the comics $25 per set on both weekends and weekdays. After a six-week walkout, the comedians went back to work, claiming victory.

The strike’s impact was far-reaching. Comedy clubs in New York City began paying their comics as well. Clubs that were springing up around the country were then forced to boost their fees too, to lure more top comics out on the road — launching the comedy — club boom of the 1980s. All of which was part of laying the groundwork for a culture in which comedians turned TV hosts help set the national agenda and have would-be Presidents as guests. Letterman and Leno may look more like management than labor these days — more Mitzi Shore than strikers. But they haven’t forgotten the old grievances. They know all the lines.

Adapted from Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America by Richard Zoglin, published this month by Bloomsbury

EXTRAS AT TIME.COM To read more on the Comedy Store strike from Comedy at the Edge, click here