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

by Andrew Hankinson

  CHAPTER 39

  Author: When Louis said every Arab country, I guess that was an exaggeration?

  Noam: Yes, I didn’t. I’ll tell you the story. I took a semester abroad in Israel in 1983 and we went to Egypt and everybody treated us with amazing hospitality, and then Hassan, who you’ve interviewed, he found out I was in Egypt. Somehow he found out and he called his family, and his brother called every hotel in Cairo until he found us, and he showed up at the hotel and took us … We’d never met him … He took us on this grand tour around Cairo, and on a boat on the Nile, then back to their humble apartment and we had like a seven-course dinner. This was Arab hospitality … I wouldn’t even say on steroids because I believe that may be typical Arab hospitality. It was amazing generosity and they knew I was Jewish. So that was, I’m sure, the story that I told Louis.

  CHAPTER 38

  Hassan: I said, ‘Manny, listen to me, you’re my boss. He said ‘Yes.’ I said to him, ‘If you give me the order, any order, and I say no to you, what are you going to do to me?’ He said, ‘You can’t say no to me because I’m the boss.’ I said, ‘I’m asking you what you’re going to do to me. I know you’re my boss.’ He said, ‘Maybe I will fire you.’ I said to Manny, ‘Imagine if you don’t believe in God from the beginning? What’s God going to give to you? I’ll tell you what he’s going to give to you. First, he’s going to put you in the hell. But where in the hell? Did you see this grill?’ You know the grill when we cook the sheesh kebab?

  Author: No. Just say it again. God’s going to put you in hell, but where in hell? Is it a place close to the sun or something?

  Hassan: Yeah. He’s going to put you in the hell. Which place? You know the grill when we cook the sheesh kebab?

  Author: Yeah.

  Hassan: When you cook the picnic, you have something to cook the sheesh kebab, the barbecue, like you have the fire on top and you have the bits of wood come from the material, and then come the stone on top of this.

  Author: Where it’s white and hottest?

  Hassan: Yes. You will be under all this. You’re not going to come past. No way.

  Author: So why do you get put there? Just for not believing God? For being an apostate?

  Hassan: Yes.

  Author: Was it a particularly bad place because he was Jewish?

  Hassan: No, not because he’s Jewish. Because he doesn’t believe Allah.

  Author: Okay. And how did Manny react to that?

  Hassan: He’s laughing.

  CHAPTER 37

  Noam: This guy Bill Grundfest came in and said, you know, ‘I’ll bring comedians, you take the bar, I’ll take the door.’

  Author: Okay. Who’s Bill Grundfest?

  Noam: He was a comedian. He went on to become the head writer on Mad About You. He was a young guy at the time who was, you know, he had a good idea. You can contact him. I can get you his email if you want?

  CHAPTER 36

  Author: With Marc Maron then, you wouldn’t book him, would you? And did he complain about that in person?

  Bill Grundfest: Sure. Sure. Oh, he cursed me out something fierce.

  Author: Where did that happen?

  Bill: The Comedy Cellar. Well, at some point he was like … Why would you go to a place … Even Marc Maron wouldn’t go to a place specifically just to curse somebody out, I mean, that would be odd behaviour, but no, listen, what he was doing, it didn’t work in the room. This room was a positive energy place. One of the common denominators of all of the acts, and it’s continued, it is still part of the DNA of the club, everybody has got a positive energy. Nobody is working that angry. There’s only one comic that has any hint of anger, you know, like real anger, and that’s Allan Havey. And I’m not sure why he has always worked well in the room. I think people feel his essential niceness and so, the anger, they’re not really threatened by it. But Marc Maron’s anger? That’s unfiltered. That’s unbridled. That’s just pure rage. That’s, ‘Here, let me spew.’ And I would say, ‘It’s not therapy Marc.’

  Author: Did you say that to him?

  Bill: Yes. ‘It’s not a therapy session where you get to share your rage. It’s not like inverted …’ Some comedians think that this is inverted group therapy. In group therapy you have a group of patients and one therapist. In stand-up comedy you have a group of therapists and one patient. It’s not that.

  CHAPTER 35

  Bill: The number of people who like me versus the number of people who don’t are going to be highly correlated with the number of people that I booked on a regular basis, and who felt that I supported them in their careers, and the number of people who don’t feel that way. I remember one time … One time three women comedians attacked Manny, not physically, but it was in the Olive Tree, and they got their gumption together and they confronted him about not … It was really weird, because they didn’t confront me about it, they confronted him about it, and he wasn’t really involved. And they confronted him about not booking them, ‘You don’t book us because we’re women.’ And Manny said, ‘No,’ very calmly, ‘we don’t book you because you’re not funny.’

  Author: Oomph.

  Bill: And what you just did, oomph, is what I just did. And it’s what I did when I was standing there, I went oomph. And they were flabbergasted. They were flabbergasted that someone had said that to them.

  CHAPTER 34

  Author: You just mentioned Henriette Mantel there as well. I was in touch with Henriette. She had this funny story which Bill told me originally, which is when they confronted Manny and said that he wasn’t giving them stage time because they were women. And Henriette had this good line which was … They had a big argument and Henriette said she wouldn’t speak to him again unless it was at Camp David. I wondered if you could remember that or anything like that?

  Judy Gold: I don’t know if I blocked it out, but it was a bad time for women comics, because most clubs wouldn’t put two women on the same show. So, if there was one woman on the show, that was the quota.

  CHAPTER 33

  Bill’s on stage,

  Bill: This is a great world to be a comedian in, because you don’t have to write any jokes. All you have to do is just tell people what’s really going on. It’s unbelievable the shit that really goes on. You couldn’t make it up. Especially here in New York. Just pick up a newspaper. If you can’t find a newspaper, just pick up the Post. It’s an interesting city. Really. Am I right? The shit that goes on in this town. You couldn’t make this shit up. If you took acid you could not make up the things that go on in New York. We had … I’ll give you examples. We had people here from Muncie, Indiana, a family that got caught in a gunfight in front of St Patrick’s Cathedral. You know these people? The headline in the Post the next day, ‘We still love New York’. This is how smart people from Indiana are. ‘We still love … ‘ If a New Yorker went to Indiana? Forget a gunfight. Steps in a cow pie? The headline the next day would be, ‘Fuck this place’. Really, it’s unbelievable what’s going on in this world. And just to prove it, allow me to read form The Satanic Verses now shall we? This is unbelievable. George Bush said that the Ayatollah’s death sentence was offensive. He said it was offensive. The guy hires a hitman for $5.2 million. It’s offensive. ‘Mr Rushdie, you have just been assassinated, how do you feel?’ ‘I am deeply offended.’

  CHAPTER 32

  Author: That sounds pretty good, University of Pennsylvania, then New York State bar. So why didn’t you become a lawyer? Did you do it for a few months?

  Noam: I did a few months in LA at a firm which disbanded called Buchalter, Nemer, Fields and Younger. It was a pretty good firm in LA but I can remember specifically when I decided I didn’t want to be a lawyer. The way it works is, after your second year in law school you get a job with a law firm. It’s called summer clerking, and typically you work there for a few months, and if they like you then they make
you an offer of employment after your third year of law school. So it’s a very important thing, who you clerk with as a summer clerk, and it’s a pretty intense interviewing process. So I got this job with this firm.

  Author: In?

  Noam: In LA. They did entertainment work.

  Author: So you wanted to get into entertainment pretty early?

  Noam: I thought it would be fun. So they’re trying to induce you to want to take a job with this firm, and this firm’s big selling point, and the reason they thought this was the place you ought to work as opposed to the guy down the block, was that after seven years of being partner you were given a one-year sabbatical with pay to do whatever you want. I’m not sure if you understand what that means. Usually you’re associate for seven years and then after you’re an associate, if you make partner after seven years, you’re a partner for seven years. So basically after fourteen, fifteen years, then this big pot of gold is you can have a year to do what you want. I had grown up in a house where my father always did what he wanted. Always. Always. Always. And that’s kind of what I said. I said, ‘This is not for me. At least I ought to exhaust other possibilities before I get on this treadmill here, because I’m not used to that, you know, I don’t want to punch a clock like that.’ So that’s when I decided I didn’t want to be a lawyer.

  CHAPTER 31

  Hassan: Manny called me at eight o’clock in the morning. He knows I work all night until seven o’clock. So he called me and he said, ‘Are you asleep?’ So I got like really scared. I said, ‘What happened?’ Because I know he always called me if he has a problem at the Olive Tree. So he said, ‘Nothing happened. Did you hear the news?’ I said, ‘Manny, I’m sleeping, what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘Leave the bed and come back to me now. I’m going to meet you in the Olive Tree.’ I said, ‘Manny, I’m asleep. I’ve only had two hours’ sleep.’ He said, ‘I’m asking you, come to me.’ So I went to the Olive Tree thinking, ‘God, what’s the problem? Is it a big problem? Bad problem? So we’re going to have a fight?’ Because I always fight with him, but fight for the work. Always I fight with Manny in the work. Like, fight personally? We hate each other personally? No, no, no. You understand?

  Author: Yes.

  Hassan: So anyway, I went to the Olive Tree and he gives me like a big punch in my chest. He says, ‘Congratulations.’ I say, ‘For what?’ He says, ‘Reagan says illegal people here before ’82, he can have the green card.’

  CHAPTER 30

  Author: I really loved this thing Hassan told me, which was that immigration officers came to the Olive Tree and arrested him or took him away with Little Ali, and you were a big part of this story. The way Hassan describes it is about four immigration officers came in, they took him away because he didn’t have his papers. You were waving over to him, trying to get his attention, trying to get him to leave the Olive Tree, but he didn’t and they got him. And then they took him to the immigration building and Manny got him a lawyer. You told him not to say anything until the lawyer arrived, and while he was in there, you were in a McDonald’s across the road and you waited for him. Later in the day, after the lawyer arrived to help, Hassan came out of the building, you went up to him and hugged him and he said you said, and I’m sure this was you being nice, ‘Hassan, don’t worry, even if I have to go to Egypt and marry you myself we’ll do it, we’ll make sure you’re not going to get deported.’

  Ava: I don’t remember that. He would remember. We were just trying to make him feel better, yeah, like you said.

  Author: Does that sound about right? Do you remember the immigration people coming to the Olive Tree?

  Ava: Yes, I remember the immigration people coming. I don’t remember that whole second part that you told me, but it sounds right. It sounds like … Manny loved him so much.

  CHAPTER 29

  Author: Hassan also told me this other amazing story which happened around that same time, which was that he paid $5,000 to a woman …

  Ava: I can’t believe he told you that. Oh my god. He did, yes.

  Author: He paid $5,000 to this woman who hooked him up with another woman who he went and married, but he took his marriage certificate and birth certificate along with the woman to the immigration office. He described it as a judge, I’m not sure it really was a judge, but this person started going through their documents and came to, I think, her birth certificate, and looked at this certificate and said it didn’t look right. So he said, ‘Come back in a couple of hours, I just need to check it.’ So you and Hassan and the woman he’d married went and sat in the McDonald’s again and the woman said, ‘I’ll be back in five minutes.’ She went to go to the bathroom, but disappeared. But the immigration office had all Hassan’s documents and he didn’t know what to do. It was obvious he’d married this woman for what he described as ‘business’, but in the end he went back to the immigration office and made some sort of deal which I couldn’t quite understand, but they said, ‘If the people who sorted you out with this marriage get in touch again let us know, otherwise you’re free to go.’ And they didn’t deport him.

  Ava: That’s exactly right.

  CHAPTER 28

  Author: Did you lose your $5,000?

  Hassan: No, no my friend. I did something … You’re going to laugh, but I’m very mad. Five thousand is big money from my balance. I used to open the Olive Tree, so before I opened, and nobody in the street, like seven o’clock in the morning, I sit in the chair in front of the big window in the Olive Tree, and I saw the woman.

  Author: The woman who introduced you to the woman you married? The one you paid the $5,000 to?

  Hassan: Yeah, so I said, ‘Come, I want to talk to you.’ She came in and we sat by the window and I closed the door. After she sat I brought the shawarma knife. It’s true.

  Author: Right.

  Hassan: And then I went to her, I said, ‘Listen, I want to tell you something. You know you make me so I’m married to a girl? Is she married before? I don’t know what happened, but anyway, she married with a fake certificate.’ I first got very red, understand? So I said, ‘I don’t care about this. Only what I care about is my money. Because now if you don’t give me my money, you going to be the end of your life. I do something very bad for you and I leave because I’m leaving anyway. So give me my money.’ She said, ‘Hassan, it’s no problem, I will give you the money, but let me use the phone.’ She said, ‘I’m going to ask in front of you, a girl who lives with me to bring the money.’ She called the girl, she bring the money. I take my money. I said, ‘Okay, I take the money. Now I know you live in front of me, but do me big favour, I don’t want to see you here anymore. You don’t lose anything. I don’t lose anything. Bye, bye, bye, bye.’ And I take my money back.

  CHAPTER 27

  Author: You said that someone heckled you on the stage at the Cellar, do you remember what that man said?

  Carol Siskind: I’m trying to … I know my response was … I said, ‘It’s hard for you seeing a powerful woman up here, isn’t it?’ I remember that was my response, because very much in that moment I got it and I don’t … I’m trying to remember. I don’t think it was about my appearance, but it may have been, because you know, that was a big thing for women back then, how you dressed, what you look like. I mean it still is for a woman, let’s face it. That’s the first thing people see and … You know, I had a friend who was very well-endowed and she would dress in these huge sweatshirts, you know, she was trying to draw attention away from her bust, so that was always an issue. I’m trying to remember what he said. I think it was more a comment on some of my material.

  Author: So his comment hasn’t stuck with you, but what you said to him has, and you think it was, ‘It’s hard for you to see a powerful woman up here’?

  Carol: Yes. As a woman, making an audience laugh puts you in a very powerful position.

  CHAPTER 26

  Author: You said
you got into stand-up because there weren’t very many female comedians, so you thought it was an opportunity for you, and I really want to focus on the Cellar …

  Rita Rudner: I wish I could remember more, I just remember the chairs weren’t very comfortable and I drank a lot of Diet Coke.

  Author: Do you remember Manny Dworman?

  Rita: Who? I’m sorry?

  Author: Manny Dworman, the man who owned it.

  Rita: Oh, I remember him slightly, but Bill Grundfest was the one person who was there all the time. He was the one who ran it. He was the one responsible for scheduling and everything.

  Author: And with Bill did it feel like a place where women were welcome and you were given equal opportunity there?

  Rita: Absolutely, yeah, because a new comedy club has to welcome comedians who were doing well in the area and he was a nice guy. And he was very affable, so everybody liked to … He was happy all the time.

  Author: Bill told me a story about three female comedians who complained they weren’t getting booked because they were women, and he used you as an example. He said he booked Rita Rudner every opportunity he could possibly get. I think he said he stalked you to get you to do more spots there.

  Rita: He did, yeah, and he was nice to me. Absolutely. But I think you have to earn your keep there. And I already had a reputation around town, and I was making people laugh, and I was getting on local TV shows and the David Letterman show. I was somebody who he could count on to be funny when I got on stage.