Word: stands
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...professional ladder." Looking for an alternative to after-work beers, Siddiqui founded the City Circle, a lecture and charity group aimed at Muslim professionals. On Friday nights, well-heeled Muslims come straight from their offices to nurse cups of tea and catch, say, a Muslim comic doing stand-up, or a lecture on Sufi poetry. Go to a City Circle talk and you won't see a defensive minority turning inward, but educated Britons with the confidence to be self-critical. The week after the July 7, 2005 bombings in London, the weekly panel discussion was boldly topical: "The criminal...