The Definitive Guide to Comedy
In the late 1990s, between the comedy booms, perhaps the hottest live stand-up show in Los Angeles happened every week on a Tuesday night. That’s when Guy Torry began hosting Phat Tuesdays at The Comedy Store, introducing black comedy for black audiences into the lily-white-dominated landscape of show business — …
Unless Adam Eget is pranking both me and his longtime colleagues at The Comedy Store, the club’s longtime booker has announced — on April 1 — that he has left Los Angeles for Austin to run the new comedy club that Joe Rogan plans to open in Texas’s capital city. …
Kansas native Jeremiah Watkins trained at both The Second City and The Groundlings, and has become a fixture at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles as part of several trademark shows; among them, he was one-third of “The Wave” for Roast Battle as it developed and grew from late-night Tuesdays …
Stand-up comedian and actor John Witherspoon, who started working comedy clubs in the 1970s and was still working the clubs into his 70s, and planned on reviving his role Willie Jones in another Friday movie, has died. Witherspoon was 77. His family announced the sad news overnight. “It is with …
Sammy Shore, the stand-up comedian who founded The Comedy Store in West Hollywood with his wife Mitzi in 1972 before giving her complete ownership in their divorce two years later, has died. Shore was 92. He was surrounded by his current wife and family in his home in Las Vegas …
I’m Dying Up Here may have died after two seasons on Showtime, but the pay cable network is going directly to the source material for a new four-part docu-series about The Comedy Store and its late great owner Mitzi Shore. This is not news to anyone who has visited the …
Yakov Smirnoff got his big break in America thanks to Mitzi Shore, who not only put up the Soviet immigrant in her home behind The Comedy Store in 1977 but also gave Yakov’s father a full-time job, too. Smirnoff himself became a big star during the Reagan years, starring opposite …
The Comedy Store closed on Monday night for a private event, the memorial for the late great comedian Steven Brody, aka Brody Stevens, aka Steven Brody Stevens. His best friend and comedy benefactor, Zach Galifianakis, walked onstage first before the memorial itself began officially to address the crowd of friends …
My colleague on the West Coast, freelance comedy journalist Julie Seabaugh, has turned many late Tuesday nights at The Comedy Store into a brand-new book documenting the rise of Roast Battle from open mic experiment in the Belly Room to Comedy Central TV series and countless official and unofficial versions …
In the wake of Mitzi Shore’s death two months ago, The Comedy Store has partnered with the Motion Picture & Television Fund to create a Comedians Assistance Fund. The MPTF, based in Southern California, is devoted toward helping elderly members of show business age with dignity. The Comedians Assistance Fund will …
