the comedy store

There's this documentary series on Stan at the moment called The Comedy Store. I have watched two episodes so far, and if I was of a mind I could make a page of two columns of pros and cons and I would probably find myself with a pretty full page with fairly equal columns. However, I would not deride the filmmakers for the cons, rather I see it as indicative of the difficulty inherent in the material.

The basic story is pretty simple. Mitzi Shore (1930-2018) was the owner and operator of The Comedy Store; it is suggested (surely it wasn't this simple) that her husband started it up but she took it in their divorce. There are claims made for it as an institution which probably don't check out for pedants but work as a broad ruling, eg, that it was the first club where it would just be comic after comic onstage, not comedy interspersed with music acts, etc. There is a strong line run that Shore was a gatekeeper who not only kept the gate at the Comedy Store as a kind of old-fashioned god that one could not question or challenge, but who also kept the gate on late 20th century culture, because apparently American comedy is entirely responsible for all culture. 

The episodes are framed as podcast interviews between particular comics who often drive the narrative (I can't tell how contrived this is, but it doesn't come across as contrived, which is surely the main thing). Within that there are interviews (David Letterman comes across particularly well) including some archival interviews. It is not a cock forest of a program and there are a lot of women amongst the interviewees (including Whoopi Goldberg) and while it's hard to tell if this is representative of the reality of the 70s-80s, I think we should take it. 

Here's a major downside, which I would admit is somewhat subjective. So much of the comedy is horrible, by which I mean not funny ('My wife...'). Comedy is like that, it almost always has a use-by date. People are very often represented here by the fleetest of soundbites and it begs more questions than it answers. I suspect this is probably an outcome of (1) comedians work differently, some build and use repetition, some just tell outright jokes; the first sort craft a persona, the second have to depend on conventional tropes which make sense in, I don't know, 1975 but seem outdated soon afterwards; (2) everyone has to be represented equally, and there's only so much time in the show to give examples of work and propel a narrative. Richard Pryor, by the way, gets a lot of screen time herein, but via other people recounting the substance of improvised work, forty years later.*

Mitzi Shore is a very compelling figure who no-one really seems to know how to take, although everyone seems to feel happy imitating her voice. Presumably if she had been a man she'd be much less interesting, because she appears to have acted simply as a fairly conventional (if opinionated) businessperson. The beginning of episode 3 has various comedians talking about fucking her to get priority in the club, but it's hard to tell whether this is meant to be funny or has an element of truth to it.

On balance I am going to say that this show succeeds in its attempt: it portrays a big, messy, bizarre, horrible, wonderful (?) scene which did arguably spawn a host of very famous actors/comedians of the late C20, and it is filled with rapid-fire anecdotes and badinage, etc. Where it is unsatisfying is in elements outside the filmmakers' control. One thing I can't help feeling is that I am being asked to regard something cruel and psychotic as a cavalcade of wonder. But it's probably an accurate representation of something cruel and psychotic (and venal), so I should probably suck it up and/or stop watching it if I can't take it. 

*So within a setup where Pryor is the master of everything and an absolute game-changer, so he should get more 'screen time', the question of whether it's really about him getting 'screen time' is confused by the fact that it's not him so much as how people remember him.