I'm Dying Up Here
Book | William Knoedelseder
A surprisingly compelling overview of how Hollywood became stand-up's center in the 1970s
The subtitle promises a dishy sex-and-drugs tell-all about Los Angeles' burgeoning stand-up comedy scene of the 1970s: Stand-Up Babylon, perhaps. And yeah, the sex and the drugs are definitely there, but on the fringes of the main story, which is a surprisingly compelling overview of how Hollywood became stand-up's center once Johnny Carson moved The Tonight Show from 30 Rock to Burbank in 1972. Early breakout success by the likes of Freddie Prinze brought a flood of comics (Boston's Jay Leno, New York's Richard Lewis, Indiana's David Letterman, Chicago's Tom Dreesen, Mars' Andy Kaufman) to The Comedy Store, a once-struggling "showcase club" where young comics performed for free in exchange for exposure. Throughout the briskly-paced book, Knoedelseder (who covered standup comedy for the Los Angeles Times during this period) weaves in the story of a near-unknown comedian, Steve Lubetkin, amongst the future stars. As I'm Dying Up Here reaches its startling climax, a 1979 comedians' strike for wages against The Comedy Store that pits comics against each other and the club's mercurial owner Mitzi Shore, Lubetkin's story takes a tragic turn that gives the story an unexpected emotional depth.
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