Word: club
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...