![]() ![]() How to be seen by a scout? Enter Mitzi Shore. You might headline in a real night club, or you might get a TV deal, or you might open for someone big in Las Vegas, and to kill on Carson was the surest way there.īut to get on Johnny's show, you had to be seen by one of his scouts. You were blessed, and you were going to get work. There just weren't that many places for standup comedians to play on TV, so if you could kill the audience, if you could break up Johnny, and most especially if you could get the "OK" sign from him at the end of your five minutes, you had it made. Johnny Carson moved "The Tonight Show" from New York to Burbank in 1972, and when he did, the local comedy scene took off in a big way as the scouts who used to look for talent in NYC looked for new standups a little closer to the new home. Back then, if you wanted to make it as a comic, you had to play for Johnny. for the Los Angeles Times, the book focuses primarily on a period between 19, when a new and distinct generation of comedic talent broke through into the entertainment industry, and into television in particular. Written by a reporter who covered the comedy club scene in L.A. I whipped through that pretty quickly, so the few bucks weren't much of a consideration as I wondered what came next. I'd never heard of this book, but it popped up on some list of titles under $3 available for the Kindle, so I tried a sample. She fostered the careers of so many now-legendary comedians that it's mind-boggling - Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, Jimmie Walker, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Gary Shandling, Elayne Boosler, Richard Lewis, Freddie Prinze, Andy Kaufman, and many, many others. Marc mentioned this book on one of the podcasts, and it's a perfect companion piece, looking at the history of the stand-up comedy world in 1970s LA, when the scene completely exploded around Mitzi's Shore's Comedy Store, and then caused an enormous rift in the comedy world over the dispute with Mitzi and subsequent long strike of her club because she refused to pay any of the comedians that performed there. One of the reasons I read so few books in the last year and a half is that I spent a lot of my commute time - usually my prime reading time - listening to Marc Maron's WTF podcast interviews with comedians, writers, actors, directors, chefs, artists, musicians, and others that are a serious master class in the creative process and incredibly inspiring. ![]() As comedy clubs and cable TV began to boom, many would achieve stardom. In I’m Dying Up Here he tells the whole story of that golden age, of the strike that ended it, and of how those days still resonate in the lives of those who were there. ![]() And he was there when the comedians-who were not paid by the clubs where they performed- tried to change the system and incidentally tore apart their own close-knit community. ![]() He wrote the first major newspaper profiles of several of the future stars. William Knoedelseder was then a cub reporter covering the burgeoning local comedy scene for the Los Angeles Times. It was Comedy Camelot-but it couldn’t last. There, in a late-night world of sex, drugs, dreams and laughter, they created an artistic community unlike any before or since. In the mid-1970s, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Andy Kaufman, Richard Lewis, Robin Williams, Elayne Boosler, Tom Dreesen, and several hundred other shameless showoffs and incorrigible cutups from across the country migrated en masse to Los Angeles, the new home of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. ![]()
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