Make ’Em Laugh
35 Years of the Comic Strip, the Greatest Comedy Club of All Time!
by Jeffrey Gurian and
Richie Tienken,
Introduction by Chris Rock
Skyhorse Publishing
In the 2009 film “(500) Days of Summer,” there’s a scene where Joseph Gordon-Levitt dances joyously through the streets, joined as he goes by all around him, after finally hooking up with the girl of his dreams.
As Jerry Seinfeld watched that scene in October 2010, he turned to a longtime comedian friend and said, “That’s how I felt when I passed the audition at The Comic Strip.”
The Comic Strip opened on June 1, 1976 on Second Avenue, between 81st and 82nd streets, and wound up launching the careers of comedy stars like Seinfeld, Ray Romano, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler and Eddie Murphy, to name just a few.
Club owner Richie Tienken and journalist Jeffrey Gurian interviewed the club’s famous alumni for their hilarious and revealing memories of the days that many clearly consider some of the happiest of their lives.
Seinfeld passed his audition there just weeks after the club opened. Living nearby in a $210-a-month apartment, he spent all his time there, and his wardrobe largely consisted of Comic Strip T-Shirts.
He recalls what he considers his first great joke, which concerned the recently built Roosevelt Island tramway.
“Well, isn’t this great,” Seinfeld would say. “The city’s going bankrupt, and they’re putting in rides for us. The next thing I guess we’ll have some sort of roller coaster through the ghetto, and that’ll be the first roller coaster where they scream on the flat part of the ride!”
Murphy began performing there in the late ’70s, and after joining “Saturday Night Live” in 1980, became the club’s first big star, even recording his self-titled debut album there in 1982.
Romano, who lived at home until he was 29, honed his craft at the Strip while he had a day job delivering futons. One customer was Larry David.
“He complained about it, and we had to exchange it. Typical Larry,” Romano says. “It’s just so bizarre that years later we wound up with our own shows.”
Rock, meanwhile, was a high school dropout from Bed-Stuy who knew about the club because of Murphy, who he watched religiously every week on “Saturday Night Live.”
He began hanging out there as a teenager, and got on stage when the club’s manager, Lucien Hold, “made me a deal that if I stacked chairs at the end of the night that he’d let me get onstage.”
Rock would eventually take to sleeping outside the club in his red Toyota to wait for spots, and learned to survive hecklers, including the occasional celebrity.
“Nothing worse than getting heckled by LL Cool J,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “He was bigger than everybody, and his heckles rhymed.”
Murphy returned to the club on a Friday night in the mid-’80s, by now a big star, and “wanted to see a black comic.”
Despite having “never been onstage in front of more than like 12 people,” Rock performed to a packed crowd, spurred on by Murphy’s distinctive laugh.
“I come offstage and Eddie starts talking to me about the business like he knew I was going to make it,” Rock recalls. “He was giving me advice on buying my mother a house, and I didn’t even have any money yet.”
Rock joined the star and his entourage, including Murphy’s mother, two nights later for a screening of new director Spike Lee’s “She’s Gotta Have It” that found Lee “selling T-Shirts in front of the theater.” After the film, Murphy said to Rock, “we’re going to L.A. tomorrow, so if you wanna come, just come.” Rock wound up in L.A. for about two weeks, staying at the L’Ermitage, and visiting the set of Murphy’s film, “The Golden Child.” He was even soon cast in the star’s “Beverly Hills Cop II.”
The book is filled with these sorts of intimate remembrances, including Gilbert Gottfried’s skewed “memories” of the club’s early days.
“I got there a few years before it opened and stood out in the street waiting for it to be built,” he says. “I figured out where the stage was going to be put, and I stood in that part of the street until the club was planned, built, and finished. I had a slight idea in my head where they might put the bar, and then I’d go over there and get a soda.”
It’s clear that for so many of the great comics of our time, The Comic Strip is not just a club, but the place where they became who they were meant to be.
“In a way, 1976 is the year I was born,” Seinfeld says of his first year there. “It’s when I figured out who I was and what I was supposed to be doing, and I figured it out here.”