CHAPTER 17
For the next ten years, all through the stand-up boom of the 1970s, the Comedy Store on Sunset becomes my main base of operations.
Sammy Shore, a geeky-looking old-style comedian with curly hair and a fleshy nose, opens the club. It’s his spot, but he’s never there. He’s always on the road. He’s a warm-up comic, the guy who comes on before the big act and gets the audience going. His main gig is opening for Elvis in Vegas. He likes to call himself the Man Who Makes Elvis Laugh.
In Sammy’s absence, his wife, Mitzi, works the door. When it opens, the club isn’t even a room. It’s a bin. Just a space hollowed out of the huge Ciro’s building. There are no amenities, no decorations.
But it’s not tucked away in Beverly Hills like Ye Little Club, it’s right there on the dogleg of the Strip, between the Whisky and all the other rock clubs to the west and the Chateau Marmont to the east.
Mitzi is a good businesswoman. She keeps enlarging the club. The first space is known as the Original Room, and when she takes over the whole building, she opens the Main Room. Then she makes room for a small space, originally designated for female comics, and calls it the Belly Room.
Gradually, during the course of May 1972, Mitzi warms the place up. She hangs ferns. She puts a painting behind the bar. The decorative style goes from meat-packing warehouse to 1970s nightclub. A sign on the wall reads THE JOKES ARE FREE, THE DRINKS ARE 75 CENTS.
Minding the Store: Robin Williams, Mitzi Shore, and me at the Comedy Store
Sammy Shore going on the road is the best thing that ever happens to comedy in L.A. If the Comedy Store were left up to him, I’m sure it would go out of business. He is a gag man, not a businessman. His wife is the powerhouse. She is always there, at her post at the cash register, playing mother hen to the comics. The lady knows what she’s doing.
“I do it all for the comics,” she says, and a lot of the performers who show up are emotionally needy and love her mothering.
One small example: Mitzi gives away cigarettes to nervous comedians. It’s a brilliant ministrategy for running a comedy club. Stand-ups love them some cigarettes. Most of them smoke like the goal of their life is to get lung cancer. Mitzi hands out bubble gum, too, and if comics are really nervous, they take both. The devil is in the details.
Sammy Shore comes back to his own club after being on the road for a month. He doesn’t recognize the place. He tells his wife he wants to do a show.
“I’ll see if I can fit you in tomorrow night,” Mitzi says.
Sammy sees which way the wind is blowing, both in his club and in the marriage. He and Mitzi divorce by the time the year is out. In the settlement, Mitzi gets the club.
She’s got the club, but she still needs the laughs. If there’s one performance that makes the Store a success, it’s in June 1972, when Richard decides to try out new material two months after the club opens.
He begins his act by giving notice that things have changed with him. He’s a new comic. He goes straight for the white people in the audience:
I notice on the nights in the clubs here, like, white people come out early on Saturday night, and go home, and leave it to the niggers. It’s great to think that we can all sit in the same club together, white and black, and not understand each other. It’s amazing, it can only happen in America.
Once he gets rolling, it’s the new Richard, born in Berkeley, midwifed by Malcolm X and Marvin Gaye.
I used to be running from the cops and shit, ’cause we had a curfew. Niggers had to be home by eleven, Negroes by twelve. White cops worked at night, and if they caught you, your ass would be in trouble. “Get your hands up, black boy!” “I didn’t do nothing!” “Shut up and get your hands up against the wall.” “There ain’t no wall.” “Find one.” But I used to love getting arrested in Peoria on Saturday night because if you got in the lineup, that was like being in show business. ’Cause, like, all the ugly white girls who couldn’t get any, say niggers raped them.
All the copycat Cosby bullshit burns off Richard while he is in Berkeley. It’s like he’s firing up some base. He gets rid of all the impurities. This is the pure shit.
Richard has already put some of these routines on record, his second album, Craps (After Hours). It is mostly recorded at Red Foxx’s and other South Central black clubs. You can pick out my laugh on the tracks, booming out, backing Richard up. This shit is funny.
With Richard’s appearance, the Store turns a corner. It becomes a hip club for celebrities. Richard is a stand-up comic who wants to be a movie star, but in the Store I see movie star after movie star wishing they were comedians, long before there is any actor-turned-rapper or rapper-turned-actor or child-star-turned-tramp or tramp-turned-child-star. Comics are sexy, comics are the rage. And the Store is our lair.
Film, TV, and music stars turn up at the Store all the time, people such as Goldie Hawn, Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Donny Osmond, the Captain & Tenille, and Lee Majors, from the Six Million Dollar Man, comes in with his girlfriend, Farrah Fawcett.
Farrah and I recognize each other from an encounter at a traffic light on Sunset a few years before. I am always seeing celebrities in their cars in L.A. I get the strangest stare from Michael Jackson on Hollywood Boulevard. It’s like he’s trying to run a Vulcan mind meld on my ass.
This time, I tap my horn as I pull up alongside another convertible at a stoplight on Sunset. A pretty girl with windblown honey-colored hair is in the car next to mine, sitting in the driver’s seat as though it were a throne at a beauty pageant. This is a year before she becomes well known.
The two of us, both cars with their tops down, alone at the red. That’s enough of an introduction in Hollywood.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hi,” Farrah says.
“Are you an actress?”
“Yeah.”
“Done anything?”
“Not yet.” She smiles. Megawatt teeth.
“Whoa!” I pull down my sun visor and shade my eyes as a joke. She laughs.
“Hollywood is going to eat you alive,” I say. “This town is going to eat you alive, girl!”
She laughs again. “I hope so,” she says.
“What’s your name?”
“Farrah Fawcett.”
Using my Miss Amerae powers, I make the light turn green. I greenlight Farrah Fawcett. Lovingly, with the deepest of regrets, we pull away and go our separate ways.
Next time I see her it’s on TV. The bad guy points a gun at her and she kicks it out of his hand. The next time I see her after that, she’s in the audience at the Store, sitting next to Lee Majors and laughing at my routine.
When Richard leaves the Comedy Store after his act, going off in search of drugs, I stay behind and play Whack-A-Mole on white people. I usually make sure I go on after midnight, since that’s when the black folks come out, like they’re vampires.
My audience. Black people and brave white people.
You know, white people are sensitive. They’re like little white rabbits. They’ll leave. They’ll get the f*ck out of a place. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.” Then you got them ballsy white people. “This nigger doesn’t intimidate me. I’ll stay till the sun rises! We’ll see if this is a nigger vampire!”
The Comedy Store still doesn’t know what kind of club it is. There are all these hungry young comics like me and Richard, plus a lot of the New York guys like Jimmie Walker, Freddie Prinze, Gabe Kaplan, and Steve Landesberg. They’re transplants. New York used to be the capital of comedy. Now it’s L.A.
Then there are all these older professionals, guys who came up in the Borscht Belt and have been doing their schticks for years. They can’t figure out young audiences and they’re so tour addled that half the time they don’t know what the hell city they’re in. They just trot out the same setups and punch lines. They all want to be in Vegas.
Mitzi is all about mentoring us young comics and easing the old guys out. For one thing, she knows the young ones are less likely to complain about not getting paid. None of us are paid during our first years at the Store. We work for free, for bubble gum and cigarettes.
Mitzi has it in her mind that we are “workshopping” our acts. The payoff will come some other time, from someone else, from TV, somewhere, anywhere, as long as it’s not from her.
For a few people, it works out. All the New York comics get TV shows. Jimmie Walker does Good Times, with everybody in the country saying his signature line, “Dy-nomite!”
Freddie Prinze, who is going out with Lenny Bruce’s daughter, Kitty, nails the lead role on Chico and the Man. Gabe Kaplan goes on Welcome Back, Kotter. Steve Landesberg (who comes up with one of my favorite lines, “Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense”), gets a part on Barney Miller.
All the time I’m thinking, My turn next! If I were a Borscht Belt comic, I’d be asking, “What am I, chopped liver?” I don’t sit around waiting. I am always working either at Ye Little Club or the Store. But the phone never rings with my big TV break.
I know that producers who pass me by are leaving millions of dollars on the table. They say the profit motive is sacred, but it’s not true. Racism trumps capitalism. Hollywood prefers to pass up a program that I know I can make a hit, rather than work with a proud black man like me. I make them too nervous. I freak them out. It reminds me of my guerrilla newspaper in high school, or my alternative talent show. You don’t want to work with me? Fine. I’ll do it myself.
I’m surprised by the ignorance of the people around me at the Store, including all the young white comedians I’m hanging with. It’s like for them, the world began yesterday, and it starts and stops in the white neighborhoods of Brooklyn.
I’m reading a lot of African history, black history, all kinds of history, so I start working it into my act.
Don’t let Chinese people fool you—they didn’t invent rice. Rice didn’t come from China, it came from Africa, like a lot of shit, we invented a lot of shit, okay? The piano. The English found the piano in the middle of the jungle and brought it back to England. They put white keys on it, f*cked it up, ruined it. So Uncle Ben’s black ass belongs on the rice box, because we introduced rice to Chinese people. We scared ’em—we threw the rice at ’em. They said, “Don’t touch it, pick it up with sticks!” The rest is history.
I sort of mildly wonder if it’s this kind of material that’s closing doors in my face in Hollywood. It ain’t that I think of changing or making it more pale to suit the tastes of the Hollywood suits. I’m just curious, that’s all. My act doesn’t strike me or Richard as radical. Neither of us can understand how anyone can really be offended by it. It’s the truth.
“Nixon in China, now that shit is offensive,” Richard says. “What you do, Mr. Mooney, that’s just keeping it real. You ain’t offensive. You’re colorful.”
Richard has a love-hate thing with Hollywood. I just settle on hating it. But he can’t give up his fantasy of becoming a movie star.
The month after the Comedy Store opens, Johnny Carson moves The Tonight Show from New York City to Los Ange-les—actually, to Burbank. Johnny will have Richard on, because he’s too popular to ignore, but his producer Fred De Cordova blocks my shit. Freddie doesn’t want to know me. He hires everyone else in the world, not me. I think he’d have a f*cking statue on the show before he’d call me.
I watch comic after young comic, the same ones I started with at the Comedy Store, I see them all flap away on wings of money, flying off to TVland. Not me.
Richard and I realize something. If we are going to crack television, we are going to have to do it ourselves.