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

by Andrew Hankinson

  Noam: Yeah, and then probably said, ‘Free to go.’ And it happened to me two times. The second time wasn’t as rough, but the cop threw me up against the wall by the Cafe Wha and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He says for peeing on the street. I’m like, ‘Peeing on the street?’ And again, I had trouble … He was cutting me off and I said, ‘Dude, I own this place.’ Like, ‘This is my place. Why would I be peeing on the street?’ And again, you have to wonder what they were doing. Were they just looking to bust balls? It was bizarre. Or maybe you see a whole big crowd, you think I was the one peeing on the street. I have no idea.

  Author: On the first occasion, when was that?

  Noam: This is both around 2000 I’d say. Both incidents happened within a pretty short time of each other.

  Author: And were the police officers white or black? What was their race?

  Noam: The guy who was rough with me was white. The peeing on the street one, I don’t remember.

  CHAPTER 66

  Godfrey: It was one thing I loved about Manny, it was like, we argued about shit all the time.

  Author: Like about what?

  Godfrey: Oh, politics. Race. The business. Yeah. It was great.

  Author: And can you think of an example of something that he argued about?

  Godfrey: We would argue about … Sometimes I would argue about the unfairness of black comics and white comics. Sometimes.

  Author: What is the unfairness?

  Godfrey: You don’t know the unfairness? You as a white man do not know the unfairness? Are you just being a journalist?

  Author: No, no, I really want to know. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.

  Godfrey: Oh, I just always think it’s just easier for white comedians because they’re white. That’s it. They’re just white.

  Author: And what would Manny say?

  Godfrey: Manny would be like, ‘No, that’s not true.’ I was like, ‘Yes it is, it’s very true.’

  Author: Like, easier to get spots?

  Godfrey: No, just in business. White males, it’s run by them, so they get more shit. Like, black comics have to be super, super, super-duper funny, funny, funny. A white comic can be okay and still get ten sitcoms and shit. But if you’re a person of colour you’ve got to be like super, super extra … And black comics, we day in, day out kill. Murder, murder, murder. And then every once in a while you have a black person that becomes the famous person and then all of a sudden we all have to aspire to be that particular person. We can’t just be a whole bunch of different black people. White people, there’s nine-hundred white comics that have their own shows. And black comics, there’s that one famous black person. Because we always used to call it one negro at a time.

  CHAPTER 65

  Author: So you were standing outside Mamoun’s?

  Sherrod: Between Mamoun’s and the Cellar right there, and I had just finished.

  Author: You’d been smoking a spliff, like a cigarette with weed in it?

  Sherrod: Yes.

  Author: Just finished, stubbed it out or whatever, and the policeman came along?

  Sherrod: He came up from Minetta Lane.

  Author: And then Manny noticed the policeman talking to you so he came out?

  Sherrod: Yep. And then he asked, ‘What’s going on?’ They were taking my ID. They were looking at my ID. And Manny was like, ‘Is there a problem?’ And they were like, ‘Step back.’ He was like, ‘This is my property.’ Now we were standing right in front of the Cellar. He’s like, ‘This is my property. I don’t have to step anywhere. You don’t have to yell at me. Why are you yelling? What are you, the Gestapo?’

  CHAPTER 64

  Author: I couldn’t quite figure out what the argument was about. And was it on the stairs outside the Cellar when he pushed you?

  Allan Havey: It was in the club. And he was pushing me, and Estee said to him, ‘Leave him alone.’ I don’t know what happened. I really don’t know. It goes to show you, it was really important at the time. And it surprised me. I think it was this anger building up. I think too they expected me to be a bigger star and I don’t … I think, and this is what happens, like, people, when I was younger, ‘Oh, you’re going to be this and do that.’ And I had great success. I had the talk show, did a couple of HBO specials, but it’s not enough. It’s never enough. You have to always do more. And I think they were disappointed that I wasn’t a bigger star than I was.

  Author: Really?

  Allan: That’s just personal. That’s what I think personally. You don’t have to put that in the book, but I think that’s …

  Author: Do you still have the letter that he sent you apologising?

  Allan: I have it. It’s tucked away somewhere. It’s very gracious. Very simple.

  Author: Do you think there’d be any chance of me seeing that?

  Allan: No, it’s tucked away. I’m sorry.

  Author: That’s alright, don’t worry, it’s a lot to ask. Some of the stuff people are letting me see I’m surprised about. But if ever you changed your mind, I’d love to see it.

  Allan: If I run across it, you know, I’ll kind of look for it, but I know it’s tucked away. I didn’t throw it away, but it’s certainly not something I would show anyone. I showed it to my girlfriend at the time, now my wife. You know, it meant a lot when I got the letter and I wrote back and then I called him. I said, ‘Did you get the letter?’ ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Good, because my girlfriend mailed it.’ He goes, ‘Oh, you had to have your girlfriend mail it?’ So we kind of laughed and got into it. Manny and I could have the biggest argument in the world. I love the guy.

  CHAPTER 63

  Sherrod: Everybody would see him leave and he’d come out, get in the car, ‘Bye everybody’, drive off. I’m like, ‘Watch. Two minutes, this motherfucker will drive back around.’ He would go around the block and come back around, and then any staff he caught out there smoking or taking a break when they weren’t supposed to, he would chastise them.

  Author: Would he get out of the car and do it?

  Sherrod: Yeah, sometimes he would get out the car. Sometimes he would yell out the car. Sometimes they would peek and see the car coming and run back in. It was classic.

  Author: Going down MacDougal?

  Sherrod: He would go up Minetta or he might drive down to Bleecker and go around that way. He would go around the whole block just to come back around slowly, driving like he was about to do a drive-by. I would say, ‘Manny, why you so hard on the staff?’ He was like, ‘If you give them an inch they’ll destroy the place.’ But that’s his baby. That place, the Olive Tree and the Comedy Cellar, that’s his babies man, that shit’s everything to him.

  CHAPTER 62

  Nick Di Paolo: I had a set the next night after I moved back to New York. I had a couple of sets at the Comedy Cellar and I remember going down there, and I had performed there previously many times. And I found myself standing amongst the people at the bar, the customers, and I said to Manny … Manny came in, who I adore to this day, my favourite personality that I ever met in this business, and I go, ‘Manny, for Christ’s sake, can’t we just like reserve that table in the back for the comedians?’

  Author: So it was that specific?

  Nick: Yeah, oh yeah. I pointed right to the table and he just he gave me, like, a smirk and just, like, a nod, and I don’t remember, but I came in the next night … This was the type of guy he was. I come in the next night and there’s the table and it’s got a reserved for comedians sign on it, and so I sat right down, proud. But that’s the type of guy Manny was, you know. He always put the artist first. There were many nights that I got out of hand on stage and most club owners would have said, ‘Look, don’t come back for a little while.’ He always defended my political incorrectness. He was a musician himself. He’s kind of famous. So he put the artist first, you know.


  CHAPTER 61

  Ava: Everything was always breaking and I was doing most of the hiring, so desperately needed a carpenter. And not good people were coming in. And John came in. He was a pretty scary-looking guy. Huge guy. Tattoos all over. Long braid. A real character. He had a like a Swastika … An SS tattoo.

  Author: He had a Swastika?

  Ava: I’m sorry, no, no, no, it was an SS tattoo.

  Author: So, like, an SS tattoo. As in, like, the letters SS?

  Ava: Yeah, but you know, the Nazi SS. Yeah, and he had a nurse with a …

  Author: Was he a former neo-Nazi?

  Ava: No, not at all. Not at all. Don’t get the wrong idea. Not at all. Not at all. Not at all. He just had these scary tattoos. He had a nurse with a hypodermic needle. He had, like, really bizarre tattoos.

  Author: Where was the SS tattoo?

  Ava: I saw it, but it was funny, maybe he was wearing shorts. He had a lot on his legs or something. It was small. It was faded. But of course … I know this, but you know, I think … That’s when the two lightning bolts are together? Right?

  Author: Yeah.

  Ava: Like I said, he was a huge guy. Looked like a giant bear, and had this long braid, and anyway, but I interviewed everybody. Don’t judge a book by its cover. And I remember he said the things that he could do, I was like, wow, he could do everything, this guy can do everything, electrical plumbing, sheet rock, according to what he said, carpentry, and the stories he was telling me. So I was like, ‘Okay, it’s too good to be true.’ So I called Noam’s carpenter in the Wha, so he came up and interviewed him for me, because he knew if the things … He kind of tested him if that makes sense, because he could do the same things. So he passed that with flying colours and he was like, ‘Yeah, he looks scary, but, yeah you know, whatever. And I was like, ‘Alright, I’m going to go ask Manny for a third opinion.’ So then Manny interviewed him, because I didn’t want the responsibility with that SS thing. So Manny interviewed him and he was like, ‘Yeah, he’s really nice. He seems good. So whatever, try it if you want to.’ Then Manny went and asked … So he said, ‘Okay, we’ll get back to you.’ So Manny asked Taweel, I think it was Taweel, to ask one of the policemen, because in those days it was neighbourhood policemen. He asked one of the neighbourhood policemen if he could check him out, as we had his information, and yes, we found out that he was … Well, he had told me this in the interview, that he was from the Hell’s Angels, that’s why he looked the way he looked, and he said to me, ‘Don’t be scared about the way I look. I was with the Hell’s Angels. I’m not with them anymore.’ And that’s why he had that tattoo, because of the Hell’s Angels. And so he actually said that to me. He said, ‘Don’t go by what I look like.’ So they confirmed he had been in the Hell’s Angels and had been arrested because of them for armed robbery, he was a bad guy, you know, before he went to prison. And I remember … You know the stairs down to the Comedy Cellar?

  Author: Outside?

  Ava: From the inside. I don’t know, I have this memory, but there was a juke box there at the time. I know you haven’t seen a juke box, but there was a juke box in the entrance to the Comedy Cellar. Manny, John and I went to the top of the stairs and I remember Manny saying, ‘Listen, I know about your background. I’m not going to tell anybody. I checked you out with the police, but I’m going to give you a chance. But they know who you are. And they know what you’ve done. So if anything happens here, they know who you are.’ And John was in shock that he got hired. In shock.

  CHAPTER 60

  Keith: We started our table right around here. You know, a nice rowdy table. Me, Jim Norton. Wherever we were, it was like a table, me, Rich Vos, Jim Norton, Patrice O’Neal. That was it. A certain crew. We come here and play chess and all that. And we see Ray Romano and them back there, quiet, talking about who got Leno. And we set up here and just played chess and fucking screamed at each other, and talked about shoes, shirts and all that shit.

  Author: And did Manny hang around with you guys?

  Keith: No, why would he? We were just trash really.

  Author: So he was up there with Ray Romano.

  Keith: He was back there with Ray, Colin, maybe Jon Stewart and all them, but we were here creating a ruckus. We would always play chess, you know, get the chess board out. I scream at Norton. I tease Norton a little bit.

  Author: What would you tease him about?

  Keith: Lift his pieces up. That prison shit. Like, ‘Look at you.’ I lift his queen up, ‘What kind of panties she got on? Oh, she got good panties.’ And he’d get mad, ‘Come on man, don’t touch my pieces.’ ‘She got real good panties.’

  Author: So, childish stuff.

  Keith: Of course, why not?

  CHAPTER 59

  The author emails Dan Naturman to ask about Lewis Schaffer. Dan replies,

  Lewis stood in front of the club and harassed passersby telling them to come in and see the show. What’s interesting is they never asked him to do it. He was MC’ing and did it on his own initiative. He was so good at it that he became the full-time MC for a while.

  CHAPTER 58

  The author emails Noam,

  You said on a podcast once that Lewis Schaffer is a ‘Comedy Cellar legend, a man in many ways responsible for the modern iteration of the Comedy Cellar.’ I wondered why that was?

  Noam replies,

  I really don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into here.

  CHAPTER 57

  Author: Do you remember the date when you first left the Cellar and went to work at the Boston?

  Lewis Schaffer: I don’t remember.

  Author: The year? Do you remember the year?

  Lewis: ’96? ’97? How do people remember this shit?

  Author: I guess if something important happened in your life at the same time.

  Lewis: Yeah.

  Author: So you went to work at the Boston. Do you remember how Manny reacted?

  Lewis: I’d been fired. He got somebody to take my … I don’t know how I told him. He was angry. He was mad at me, but he was also, I think by that point, a bit fed up with me. I mean people don’t like me. They don’t like me. I think he had thought, ‘Okay, we’ll get somebody else to do it.’ I remember what happened was, right after … Well, when I was there the place started to get buzzy on its own. So I was there for a year or two, I don’t know how long I was there for, but it was getting buzzy on its own.

  Author: The Boston?

  Lewis: The Comedy Cellar. It was getting buzzy and Chris Rock had decided to make a return. And so there were, you know, it suddenly became, not suddenly, but it was becoming busier, where it was busy at weekends, and then during the week it was busier. It wasn’t dead. So things were alright without me there towards the latter. I mean obviously I made a difference, okay. So I go over to the Boston about a year later and he would drive down West Third Street to get to MacDougal Street, driving in his car, coming from Ardsley or whatever. He’d drive by and every time he saw me outside with my clipboard and he would say, ‘Lewis, Lewis, look at the car, it’s a Lexus.’ And he’d drive on. He’d say, ‘Lewis, we’ve added a third show on a Saturday,’ and drive by. He’d say, ‘Lewis, do you know who did a spot at the club last night? Jerry Seinfeld.’ And he’d drive by. And it’s like, the Jews, they do drive-by gloatings. It was about just making me feel bad that his business was doing better than mine.

  Author: Did you smile when he did that? Was he smiling when he did that?

  Lewis: Yeah, it’s Manny. You know what I mean? I wasn’t angry at him. Okay. My feeling was, I was thinking what I think all the time, ‘Why don’t people appreciate me? Why didn’t he appreciate me?’ It was more confused, more confused, but I wasn’t angry at Manny, and Manny wasn’t angry at me. He was probably a bit relieved, he suddenly had a business again. I mean, he always had a business, it was always going to
do well, but suddenly … Yeah.

  CHAPTER 56

  Lewis: Let me ask you a question. You’re a writer. How much of this should I make up?

  Author: Don’t make any of it up.

  Lewis: I don’t remember. I just remember I was fired after the meeting.

  Author: So the meeting must have happened and then you had this phone call with Manny afterwards, and that’s when you yelled at him?

  Lewis: I yelled at him. Because I thought he couldn’t live without me, but he had a saying, ‘Everyone’s replaceable, including me.’ Including Manny. He owned the place. He said, ‘Everyone’s replaceable, including me. Don’t think you’re so special. Everyone’s replaceable.’ And I thought this couldn’t be done without me, but I had shown him how to do it, like a schmuck. Not like a schmuck. It was unavoidable.

  CHAPTER 55

  Lewis: So he calls me and he says, ‘Lewis, you’re annoying people. The show is going on and you’re sitting people in the front of the show. The comedian’s onstage and you’re sitting people.’ And it was like, I knew you had to sit people … If you’ve got five people, they’ve got to sit in the front row. If they walked in on their own they would sit all the way at the back and not be part of the show, and it wouldn’t help attract more people, and it wouldn’t be good for the show. So you had to sit them right around the stage. So I would go in and I’d lean over the customer and say, ‘You have to sit here’, when the comedian’s on stage, and they did not like that. It was disruptive to them. And they said to me, ‘You’ve got to stop’, but I knew that if you didn’t do that there wouldn’t be enough people to create a critical mass to attract other people. This is what I’ve learned from every single show that I’ve done since, you’ve got to get a critical mass. They’ve got to be sitting there. Even if two people are sitting in the front row laughing, it’s better than a hundred people all the way in the back … I don’t know, that’s too many for the Cellar. Anyway, thirty people at the back, just leaning against the back wall. So he called me up and said, ‘You can’t do it’, and I just started screaming at him.