Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.)

by Andrew Hankinson

  ROD REYES

  BRAD TRACKMAN

  JORDAN RUBIN

  TOM SHILLUE

  PAUL MECURIO

  ROSS BENNETT

  GODFREY

  LOUIS CK

  SARAH SILVERMAN

  ANDREW KENNEDY

  BILL McCARTY

  DAVE ATTELL

  MIKE DENICOLA

  JIM NORTON

  TODD ALLEN LYNN

  TRACY MORGAN

  HOOD

  JR HAVLAN

  JIMM D

  SAM GREENFIELD

  ROB MAGNOTTI

  GARY GREENBERG

  KAREN BERGREEN

  LENNY MARCUS

  JOHN PRIEST

  ROBERT KELLY

  STEVE BYRNE

  MOODY McCARTHY

  BERNADETTE PAULEY

  SUNDA CROONQUIST

  CHAPTER 81

  Hood Qaim-Maqami stops doing the suicide bomber joke,

  I dropped it … except for one time when Manny very kindly suggested that I re-try it at the Cellar. I did and immediately got heckled with a very loud, ‘That’s not funny!’ Oddly enough, the heckle was a perfect lead-in to the follow-on plane/Israel jokes. But it didn’t feel right. I’m confident that Manny would have supported my continuing to use it. But for me, it wasn’t about having the courage or being comfortable with the cringe. It also wasn’t about the thin-skinned PC types who would heckle without having been directly impacted. In fact, I was more directly impacted by 9/11 than ninety-nine per cent of Americans and New Yorkers. But that’s still not one hundred per cent. And for me, it was about avoiding that rare instance when someone more directly impacted, someone who had lost a loved one, was actually in the crowd. Others might look at it as an opportunity to be New York edgy. I think it’s just callous.

  CHAPTER 80

  Hood: I met Robin Williams. He was sitting in the back of the Cellar, maybe a couple of days after 9/11. And I walked in to do my set. He was sitting in the back talking with Manny and others. And again, I had never until that point met Robin Williams. When I came to the back they were all sitting and Manny goes, ‘This is Hood. This is the guy I told you about,’ to Robin Williams. And Robin said something like, ‘Are you still doing the bomb bit?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. Why? Did something happen?’

  CHAPTER 79

  Days earlier, Hood’s running late for work. He’s about ten blocks away when a plane flies into his office.

  His spot at the Cellar tonight is cancelled. The club’s closed.

  The next day, Ava opens the Olive Tree again.

  Ava: I live upstairs so I came down here and opened up.

  Noam: We couldn’t get deliveries though.

  Ava: I went to 14th Street and I got them from there with the shopping cart.

  Noam: I remember the first day was easier, and then the couple of days later it became harder and they wouldn’t let people down, but they would let the vendors come down to deliver.

  Ava: I called Manny. Manny was … He couldn’t get here because of the trains and he was like, ‘Whatever you want to do.’ And I remember, it sounds corny to say, but I had just been talking to my sister who lives in Israel and I’d said, ‘How do you keep going about your business? How do you survive with children?’ And she said, ‘The trick is just to keep like the same as normal. Just keep it as normal.’ And for some reason that came into my head.

  The Cellar opens again after three days.

  CHAPTER 78

  Author: People are making assumptions about you when they look at you.

  Hood: And it played off all those assumptions Andrew. I wasn’t a … Most of the terrorism that was happening, even pre-9/11, it’s not really Iranian, and on top of that, I’m not a Muslim, but not only does it not matter on stage, it also … All joking aside, I do get flagged for random searches more often than maybe random signifies. Right? So it’s not just onstage that I get tagged as a potential threat, it’s everywhere, and as soon as I start talking people realise I’m not a terrorist threat, but even as a light-skinned Middle Eastern person, there’s still enough Middle Eastern in my look that …

  Author: That was the whole joke to me, or that was part of the joke to me, was that you were getting up on stage and making people think about the way they think about someone who looks like you. It seemed brilliant to me.

  Hood: But Andrew, even when I did the bomb thing, you have to realise, I didn’t do things like speak in a thick accent. I spoke exactly as I’m talking to you. And if you haven’t heard the joke, you’ve read about it, it would be … I’d get on stage, I’d thank everyone for coming, I’d tell them I’m originally from Iran. That inevitably, when you say you’re from anywhere you get some kind of applause, but it would usually get no applause. At which point I said, ‘Thank you, I feel the warmth,’ which would get a laugh. But then I say, ‘Well, if you’re going to be that kind of a crowd, I’d like to start off tonight by doing something in the name of Allah.’ I would lift my shirt, show the bomb. That’s when, pre-9/11, the crowd would just explode with laughter. And then I’d go, ‘Wow, thank God you reacted that way. Not all crowds get this kind of humour. I did this joke two weeks ago in Israel and cleared off the entire plane.’ Right, so you can see how pre-9/11 … And Manny, when he first saw me do this, getting back to the Comedy Cellar, Manny was … God, I really miss him. I’m not exaggerating when I say I loved Manny. I really loved Manny. But he would see it, and he was deeply conservative in the opinions he had, but he was also a humanist.

  CHAPTER 77

  Author: Can you remember any other incidents like that, where it’s got into the public domain that there’s been a problem at the club?

  Noam: Yeah, there was a big Seinfeld …

  Ava: Yes, Maija.

  Noam: Maija. What was her last name?

  Steve: I didn’t know her. She made the movie.

  Noam: She wanted to videotape her own act and then they started … They couldn’t record when Seinfeld was on stage, but they did record for her documentary or something like that, and then they got into a fight with Seinfeld about it.

  Ava: In the hallway, right.

  Noam: In the hallway, and then, oh, he was going to have his thugs come down and take care of my father, and my father ran upstairs, and somehow the media got wind of it and it was in the Post.

  Ava: Absolutely. Actually, he remembered it exactly right.

  Author: So what happened in that situation? I didn’t quite understand. So she was filming. She wasn’t supposed to film Seinfeld but she did?

  Noam: She had her boyfriend with her. He was a tough guy. He did end up having words with Seinfeld.

  Author: In the Cellar?

  Noam: Now you have to understand that Seinfeld was really one of our first entrees into the big time in terms of a huge star coming regularly … Before that people who’d started here had become famous, but he was one of the first really famous guys who started coming down here regularly, filming his documentary here, and it was important. The idea that he might have been turned away or discouraged from coming back, or feel uncomfortable here, this was huge. It was a knife to our throats.

  CHAPTER 76

  Christian Charles: As far as, you know, these guys walking into those clubs, this is the oxygen of these places. When Jerry Seinfeld walks into your club or Dave Chappelle walks in or Robin Williams walks in because they want to work out, that’s everything to these guys, so that relationship is really straightforward.

  CHAPTER 75

  Author: You were filming half the time and Gary Streiner was filming half the time?

  Christian: Yeah. This is really … This to me is the essence of why this film … There’s a bunch of reasons I think it works. I had his trust. And I’m not sure he would like me saying this, but I think he used Gary and I as a
crutch. Because he was quietly terrified about going into clubs by himself. And we were a little bit of a buffer for him. Because it allowed him to just have his buddies with him and kind of defend himself from a little bit of the need to directly engage with the community. But the most important thing about this film and its success to me is I had the most famous man in America and I had to present him in a way that people would accept him as a regular guy. Meanwhile he’s flying around in private jets, he’s worth, you know, $400 million and he’s got houses all over the place and the biggest collection of Porsches on the planet and it’s not an easy task. And so we made the decision that we would shoot with these prosumer cameras and look like a couple of bozos, and never really kind of present ourselves as a flashy professional operation. So Gary and I made that decision very early on. So we shot it ourselves. At one point I clipped a wireless mic to Jerry, early on in the process, and he said, ‘This is not a film, this is my life.’ And he actually got quite frustrated that night with the fact that he was wired.

  Author: Where was that?

  Christian: I think that was … Oh goodness I want to say it was the Cellar. And you’ve been there, you know, this is not a place of polish. This is like … This is like, you know, it’s the most organic thing a building can be.

  Author: So you think in the Cellar or in the Olive Tree above it you were clipping a mic to him and he objected to it, he said, ‘This is my life.’ And did you take it off him?

  Christian: He wore it once and he never wore it again. Yeah, he went up on stage with it and he just wasn’t happy. He wasn’t happy. So that was …

  Author: I was just going to say, you named a kind of camera?

  Christian: Prosumer. As in it’s a professional consumer camera. It was the Sony TRV 900. It was shot on mini-digital video tape and the footage was … We were very, very lucky. We had this genius who made the film look like 16mm. We tested multiple conversions and this guy’s version of it was like fifteen times better than anyone else and it kind of saved us.

  Author: And some of the critics were unhappy with how the film looked.

  Christian: Fuck them.

  Author: I wondered if Jerry ever said anything about that. Did he ever see any of the footage and say, ‘Why aren’t you using …’

  Christian: Oh yeah, he was very much involved, and I think that’s the point of it. They kind of missed the point of it. Sound was tricky. We actually ended up with Frank Morrone, who is like this multi-award-winning mixer, to mix it because we had to dig, dig, dig to get the sound to be … But the point of it is that it looks that way very deliberately because you see Jerry as a real human being. You’re seeing all these guys as real human beings.

  CHAPTER 74

  Colin: That was before 9/11, I think it’s important people realise that, and Jerry had just come back to New York, and when I saw Hassan, I go, ‘Hassan, if you kill him you’ll be a fucking hero in all the Arab lands for eternity.’ I didn’t know about the seventy-two virgins in those days. It was before 9/11. I go, ‘You’ll be a hero, that’s the king of the Jews right there.’

  CHAPTER 73

  Hatem Gabr: Have you heard of Hassan? He was a manager there, one of the biggest managers, an Egyptian guy. I can’t believe you’ve never heard of him.

  CHAPTER 72

  Noam: You’ve got to speak to Ava and Hassan. You’re really not going to do the book right if you don’t speak to Ava and Hassan.

  CHAPTER 71

  Hassan Ragheb: When any famous comedian came to the Olive Tree, Manny used to respect him and to give him like a big, big … To make him feel like a very big man, you know what I mean? To make a lot of things special for him. So one time Jerry Seinfeld came and he parked his car in front of the Olive Tree.

  Author: His Porsche? Was it a Porsche?

  Hassan: Porsche, yeah. And he said to me, ‘Take the key and put it in Manny’s park.’ So I looked to him and I said, ‘What you talking about? Who are you? You tell me about your car, why?’ When Manny came of course he screamed at me. I said, ‘Manny, I don’t know him and he asked me to park his car. I’m not here to park people’s cars.’

  Author: So Jerry Seinfeld parked in front of the Olive Tree, got out of his car, took his key out, gave you the key and said …

  Hassan: To watch his car.

  Author: To move it if somebody came along basically?

  Hassan: So anyway, after that we had a lot of talk and especially Manny tells me always who’s this and who is famous, so when he came I treat him very, very nice.

  CHAPTER 70

  Colin: I mean, once again, if you spoke to the wait staff, they’d have a whole different story maybe.

  Author: Because he was a tough boss?

  Colin: Because he was a tough boss. Like, he saw everything that was happening. So he’d be talking about Israel or whatever and he’d go, ‘Why is that still happening?’ You know what I mean? He’d sit there, but he’d be watching here.

  CHAPTER 69

  Hatem Gabr: So we have this table called twenty-one, that’s the table for the comedians. And then there’s table twenty-three, which is next to it. So these are the comedians that are at the Comedy Cellar but they don’t dare to sit at twenty-one, but they want to listen, so they will sit there. And then you have two other tables. Comedians that want to be there, but they’re not performing, and comedians that will never perform there. They’re just there. So you already have three audiences, and the funny part is, we never told anybody where to sit. They know. Like, ‘I will never perform here, I’m just going to go sit there.’ They know their table. So if you get called to the back table, it’s like you’re getting called to the witness stand, like in a trial. ‘Holy shit, I am going to be grilled.’ Because you don’t want to be there. So if they say, like, ‘Manny wants you at table twenty-one …’ If he wants me at table twenty-three, that’s a different story, but twenty-one is a problem. This means that I’m going to be attacked. So when you go there you will have Louis CK. You can have Colin Quinn. You can have Nick Di Paolo. Tom Papa. Some of the funniest people on the stage. Greg Giraldo of course. You will have Jim Norton. So you go there, they’re probably debating about something and they’re going to ask you the question, and you’d better answer right, because, you know, that probably … That means there’s two lines. For example, I don’t want to be against Jim Norton, because he’s going to just destroy you. So, whatever. So that’s one. Now, in this particular table you will, you know … A comedian will go back and forth. One time a comedian called Tony Daro, he’s one of the great debaters and he’s always against Manny and Israel and all that. So one time he had a huge fight with Manny at table twenty-one and they decided to settle it as a debate. So they had literally a big table in the middle of the Olive Tree, about maybe forty people, comedians, and they all show up with their documents and stuff and start debating each other. But the funny part is, customers walking in, they have no idea. The whole middle section became a debate. One sitting on one end and Manny on the other end, all books and stuff. And in the middle, twenty comedians each side, screaming at each other.

  CHAPTER 68

  Lenny Marcus: Dean Obeidallah and Manny would yell at each other for hours over Israel and … But I hate politics. I hate politics. If I brought up sports, even to this day if I bring up sports at the table Noam gets really mad, like, whatever. I can’t even sit down. I can’t do it. It was horrible. I hated watching them talk about politics. Rich Vos talking about the Middle East? I mean, come on man.

  CHAPTER 67

  Noam: I’m walking towards Sixth Avenue and I walked by a homeless guy at some point, and I don’t remember … I just remember noticing him. He looked at me and then I keep walking, I guess this is before the garage, and I’m walking towards the garage and a homeless guy walks past me. He’s walking faster and he catches up with a cop, and I see him talking to the cop, and then he points
at me, and then the cop comes over to me and he says, ‘Up against the wall.’ And like, ‘What?’ And he very roughly puts me up against the wall, and I try to explain to him who I was. I say, ‘Listen, I own the Olive Tree.’ The cops all eat at the Olive Tree. The Olive Tree has been there for twenty-five years at that point, so every Sixth Precinct cop knows the Olive Tree. I pointed at the Fat Black Pussycat, ‘And I own this place.’ And he grabbed me and goes, ‘Shut up.’ Like that. And he was rough with me, and he frisks me and blah blah blah.

  Author: What does that mean? Hands up against the wall and kicks your legs apart?

  Noam: Like in the movies?

  Author: And then feels you all over, as in, between your legs as well, to check you don’t have a gun or something?

  Noam: Yeah. I mean, I don’t remember being molested or anything, but yeah.

  Author: But pats down the outside of your leg and pats down the inside of your leg?

  Noam: Yeah. At some point he said he was checking me for a gun because the guy said that. And I remember trying to tell him, you know, ‘That guy’s a homeless guy.’ I couldn’t understand it. So it was a very unpleasant experience, but I knew a city councilman at the time who I was friends with and I told him the story and he, who was also a lawyer, was pretty outraged because apparently the cop had not followed any proper procedure. There was no probable cause. I don’t know what the rules are. So the cop was, I think, reprimanded in some way.

  Author: And did you get a ticket? How did you know who the cop was?

  Noam: No, I didn’t get a ticket. There’s only so many cops in the precinct. I think I knew his name. I think I knew his name. I remember what he looks like.

  Author: So he put you against the wall, frisked you, and then said … He was a bit menacing in the way he talked? And then just said, ‘Okay, free to go’?