For 48 years, Los Angeles' Comedy Store has been the mecca for every comic who ever dreamed of making people laugh _ from Richard Pryor to David Letterman to Jerry Seinfeld.
And writer-producer Mike Binder was one of them. Binder started out as a shaky 18-year-old pitching jokes in the smoke-filled room run by the infamous Mitzi Shore.
Now Binder, screenwriter on "The Upside of Anger," "The Mind of the Married Man," has mined the memories of jokesters who started there in a documentary for Showtime. The five-parter, "The Comedy Store," premieres on Sunday.
Comic Bill Burr recalls his initiation at the Lourdes of Laughter. "I was living in LA in the late '90s and I went down there to audition. And it was a big deal, and I was super intimidated," he says.
"And I went up and I thought I had a good set, and Mitzi was just, 'He's not ready.' I heard her say it in the middle of my set.
"Her voice could just cut through the room, so it was weird because I probably still had three bits left _ knowing I already blew it. And I was upset. Like a lot of young comics, I thought I was ready. But she was right. I wasn't," he recalls.
Five years later he tried again. This time he had a feeling he aced it. "I'm living in New York. I don't care if I'm in this club. Of course I did, but I was telling myself I didn't. And then I went up on stage. And I didn't realize she was in the room. And somebody grabbed me. It might have been (her son) Pauly. He goes, 'My mom wants to talk to you.'
"And she just went, 'Very funny. You are so funny,' and all of this stuff. Just considering the people that she saw over the years _ all of my comedy heroes _ it was such a huge thing for me."
Louie Anderson remembers his first shot at the Store. "When I moved from Minnesota my parents had retired to Carson City, so I came that way. When I hit Tahoe and Sacramento, I hit the 101 and saw palm trees on the freeway. I called my friends and said, 'There's palm trees on the freeway, and I'm never coming back to Minnesota.'
"I went straight to The Comedy Store. Jimmy Walker made Mitzi Shore watch me. Then she made me an unpaid regular and then a paid regular. I'm still friends with the Shores."
Andrew Dice Clay says his inauguration was different. "It was never really about standup to me, it was theater to me," he says.
"It was about performance to me. When I hit The Comedy Store I figured instead of going to acting school I'll just be on stage every night and develop my acting chops. Instead of going once a week to a school, I would be on stage every night. That's how I looked at it."
George Lopez was 23 when he first tried The Comedy Store. "In 1984 I went to The Comedy Store on Sunset and that night I vowed I was not going to quit anymore, because I'd quit at everything else," he remembers.
"I'd quit accordion, on baseball which I loved, quit on friends, on jobs _ I was a quitter. And I didn't like that part of my personality. I started to continually go to The Comedy Store on Mondays, then started to find other nights to go. From there I went to the Ice House (club) in Pasadena. And they gave me a job as master of ceremonies. Out of that I built something out of a spark."
While it's a difficult job making people laugh, comics relish the challenge. Comedienne Annie Lederman says it's a thrill to tickle the funny bone.
"I call it an ocean job. It's like I do this because I was thrown into the sea. I can't do land jobs, 9 to 5s _ I know how much money I'm going to make. I know exactly what's going to happen. That doesn't work for me. I like to be either pulled down under the waves or on top of one. And so I think that's what's so exciting about it. It's like maybe we're all sort of working (with) PTSD from our last bomb," she says.
While preparing the series, Binder says he came across some videos of Robin Williams. "I found this old clip of him, and he was so comfortable late at night on stage at The Store _ so loose. And it felt like watching Miles Davis or something, because that's where he didn't have to worry about who was watching him or what. He just could be himself doing what he does. There was nothing at stake. And I think that for these guys, that's what The Store becomes after you make it. At first it becomes the place to make it. But then it becomes the place to reclaim it."
AMC+ GOES TOXIC
Imagine if your town were suddenly faced with the possibility of the presence of one of the most virulent toxins in the world. That's exactly what happened to the British community of Salisbury two years ago when a Soviet double agent and his daughter were doused with Novichok, a poison so terrible a half-teaspoon could wipe out a city.
How that municipality dealt with that is the subject of "The Salisbury Poisonings," premiering on AMC+ Thursday. Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson are the creators of the four-part series. "Adam and I used to be investigative journalists, so we set about researching this just as we would have a piece of investigative journalism," says Lawn.
"Everyone who you see on screen cooperated with the drama, and all of those real people read the scripts ... And then, of course, there are more unofficial sources off-screen in terms of counter-terrorism police and other sources who we ran stuff by just to make sure that we were right. So, really, for the first four months of this it was investigative journalism, and then it became screenwriting."
Lawn reports that England's police are closing in on the culprits. "British investigators have identified two Russian men who they believe were involved, and they are pursuing them," he says. "I believe they would like to extradite them from Russia. That's highly unlikely to happen. So, yeah the authorities in the U.K. have a pretty good idea of who was involved."
ALEXA SPAWNS FOX SERIES
Artificial Intelligence is like the weather _ everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. Well Manny Coto does with his new Fox series, "NeXt" arriving Oct. 6. It all began with his "personal assistant," he says.
"The whole premise of the show started because of Alexa. My son woke me up _ I was really tired one morning, and I was, like, 'What's the matter?' And he was, like, 'My Alexa started talking to me at 3 a.m., out of the blue by itself for no reason!' He claims this has happened a couple times. And so I didn't know if he could set an alarm or what or what happened. We never got down to the mystery," Coto says.
"But those things seem to have a mind of their own every once in a while, even though we still have, like, five of them in the house because the kids won't let me get rid of them."
John Slattery (so great in "Mad Men") stars in the drama. He says it isn't the massive turmoil fomented by AI that makes the story so intriguing, but, alas, the little things.
"The more mundane usage of this AI is the most frightening," says Slattery. "It isn't necessarily the highest-concept usage of the AI that's the most frightening. It's the simple stuff. Everywhere you look _ you go on an airplane, just waking up and seeing zeros in your bank account ... and the things that those simple hackable opportunities could lead to ...
"It's out to not necessarily attack you in a linear way. It's the nonlinear attack of getting us to fight with each other, thereby giving it time to go somewhere else. So we are searching for this _ it's a manhunt without a man ... "
CARLYLE STARS AS PRIME MINISTER
PBS is importing another Anglo-drama Sunday when it presents "Cobra," a political thriller starring Robert Carlyle as the British Prime Minister faced with an imminent crisis.
The Scottish Carlyle is best known for his performances in "Trainspotting" and "The Full Monty," but you'd never know he was Scottish by some of his other roles. He played the Irish dad in "Angela's Ashes" and even took a turn as Hitler in "Hitler: The Rise of Evil."
Carlyle continues to be amazed that he's arrived where he has but tells me he stumbled along the way. "My teenage years was definitely the hardest time because I was brought up by my father. My mother had left when I was 4," he says.
"So my father brought me up alone. I didn't think about it at first, that's the way it was, y'know. Then suddenly, 15, 16, adolescence kicks in, you begin to feel resentful about things: 'Why do I have to go home and make the tea?' 'Why isn't my mother making the tea?' This chip develops on your shoulder so that kind of hung around for a couple of years _ that feeling of why me? Why me? Why me? What changed that was the first few relationships I started to have with girls. I began to realize I takes two to tango. There's good and bad on both sides."
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