Black Is the New White by Paul Mooney & Dave Chappelle

Author:Paul Mooney & Dave Chappelle [Paul Mooney & Dave Chappelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Autobiography
ISBN: 9781416587958
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-10-20T09:18:04.020000+00:00

CHAPTER 17

For the next ten years, all through the stand-up boom of the 1970s, the Comedy Store on Sunset becomes my main base of operations.

Sammy Shore, a geeky-looking old-style comedian with curly hair and a fleshy nose, opens the club. It’s his spot, but he’s never there. He’s always on the road. He’s a warm-up comic, the guy who comes on before the big act and gets the audience going. His main gig is opening for Elvis in Vegas. He likes to call himself the Man Who Makes Elvis Laugh.

In Sammy’s absence, his wife, Mitzi, works the door. When it opens, the club isn’t even a room. It’s a bin. Just a space hollowed out of the huge Ciro’s building. There are no amenities, no decorations.

But it’s not tucked away in Beverly Hills like Ye Little Club, it’s right there on the dogleg of the Strip, between the Whisky and all the other rock clubs to the west and the Chateau Marmont to the east.

Mitzi is a good businesswoman. She keeps enlarging the club. The first space is known as the Original Room, and when she takes over the whole building, she opens the Main Room. Then she makes room for a small space, originally designated for female comics, and calls it the Belly Room.

Gradually, during the course of May 1972, Mitzi warms the place up. She hangs ferns. She puts a painting behind the bar. The decorative style goes from meat-packing warehouse to 1970s nightclub. A sign on the wall reads THE JOKES ARE FREE, THE DRINKS ARE 75 CENTS.

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