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

by Andrew Hankinson

  CHAPTER 25

  Vic Henley: Quinn was just the funniest guy in the world. And I always remember that if you bombed or it didn’t go well, Quinn was always there to say the right thing. He was always there to … ‘These people are fucking stupid. Don’t pay any attention. That was not you. That’s them. They’re fucking stupid. That goddam … That Copernicus reference.’ That’s Colin. The hardest thing in comedy Andrew, the only thing that you cannot teach in comedy, is to not give a fuck. They can’t teach that. You just have to innately not give a fuck. Otherwise you will be a nervous wreck based on every laugh or not laugh that the audience gives or takes away from you.

  CHAPTER 24

  Jon Manfrellotti: Grenada was some, like, tropical island where America had a university or something, and some people, some terrorists or something were holding the students hostage. So we sent in some troops and the whole campaign lasted about ten minutes, you know. They freed everybody. And I was on stage one night and it was in the news and I probably wouldn’t have done this joke if I hadn’t been watching the news earlier in the day, and I said, ‘You know we attacked Grenada? That’s like attacking Club Med, you know what I mean. People are on the beach putting suntan lotion on, “Honey, is that a submarine?”’ And that’s all I said, you know, and some guy stood up and said, ‘My buddy was there and he got wounded.’ But that was it. That was it. You know what I mean?

  CHAPTER 23

  Author: I wondered whether you could think of a time when you said a joke at the Comedy Cellar which annoyed people or outraged people at all? Do you think there’s anything you said on the stage which had a bad reaction?

  Gilbert Gottfried: Well, it’s like, back in those days, the very worst … I mean, when people would go … Sometimes people would hiss.

  CHAPTER 22

  Ava: We would have to take flak at the door sometimes from customers that weren’t happy with what the comedians said. I remember that, because Manny and I and Estee and people would always be at the door and somebody would be like, ‘Oh, my god, what’s going to happen now?’ Maybe somebody would say something and we’d say nicely, you know, ‘We understand, but that’s the art of comedy.’

  Author: Somebody said an interesting thing, which was that if a customer was angry sometimes Manny would talk to them, but sometimes he’d send you instead if it was a man, because it would defuse them better. It would deescalate things.

  Ava: I don’t even think it was because it was a man. I feel if it was anyone, because we both had that big empathetic gene in us. And I really did understand. They knew that I meant it from my heart that I was sorry they felt that way. That’s it. Not only that, but in the beginning there was no security people at the door. Sometimes I’d run to Manny for back-up but it was much easier to talk to people. It was more about talking to people. Just listening and talking.

  CHAPTER 21

  Author: Regarding your dad’s views on like, political correctness, freedom of speech and things like that, have you got any kinds of recordings of him or any kind of documentary evidence of him ever writing about it?

  Noam: No, I don’t, but this is what you have to remember, in those days, that was the liberal opinion too. The American Civil Liberties Union, the gold standard of liberal views, went to court to defend the Nazis, their right to march on Skokie. They would never do that today. I actually … On one of my podcasts they had the former head of the Civil Liberties Union on, I don’t know if you heard it, and he said he didn’t think they would do it today. So when my father had those views about people being able to say whatever they want, and should say whatever they want, and let’s have a debate, let’s get a Holocaust denier in here, this was mainstream, and if anything, liberal views. I mean, you have to live through it to shudder at how it’s changed. When I went to college they invited Meir Kahane and Noam Chomsky and I mean any kind of radical guy. Nobody cared. Nobody cared. And they spoke and we saw the lectures and they were interesting and we didn’t become Nazis. But now, I know how he would feel about this, but it wasn’t an issue then, there was nobody saying anything about trigger warnings or anything like that.

  CHAPTER 20

  Author: I interviewed Mark Cohen.

  Rick Crom: How’d you get him to concentrate for more than ten minutes?

  Author: He was great actually, he was really good.

  Rick: He’s wonderful. Very talented.

  Author: And he mentioned, when he first came here he was doing …

  Rick: He did a guitar act.

  Author: And he said one of the songs upset you a little bit, because it was kind of …

  Rick: Homophobic? Yeah, there was something that he did.

  Author: ‘Queen of the Road’ I think it was? He camped it up a little bit.

  Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you have to remember, at that time I was … I was only hypersensitive because I didn’t want to be a gay comedian. I just wanted to be a comedian. And there were a lot of us who were out in our regular lives but not on stage. So people who were overtly … It was just, like, it was cheap. It’s stupid. It upset me more then than it would upset me now. Now I just go, ‘Really? The campy voice?’ Manny would go, ‘It’s funny.’ ‘Yes, it is funny, so is doing a Jewish actor going, “Such a deal, such a deal, such a deal.” That’s funny too, isn’t it? Or doing a minstrel show? That’s funny too, yeah?’ But back then … Back then doing … Doing gay jokes was perfectly fine, you know. You’re talking … You could do … On TV you could do Polish jokes. They would use the word, ‘Two Polacks this …’ Johnny Carson would do it. Then the Polish League Against Defamation went, ‘Stop that.’ So anyway, I was a little hypersensitive back then in a way I wouldn’t be now.

  Author: And Mark thought he stopped getting booked for a little bit because of it. Like, only a month or something like that. Then he talked to Estee and explained, and I think he stopped doing it actually.

  Rick: Well, I mean, I didn’t like Mark Cohen at all when he first came in. I didn’t like him and I think it’s because, in retrospect, he was doing a music act.

  CHAPTER 19

  Mark Cohen: They loved me and I worked for like a week or so there. She put me instantly on the wall there and then they stopped using me. And I went up to them and I said, ‘Why did you stop using me?’ And it was because Rick Crom complained about me. Rick’s a really good friend of mine by the way, and we ended up becoming very close and performing together. But I used to do this … It’s really not offensive. I used to do a parody of ‘King of the Road’ called ‘Queen of the Road’. I mean, it’s nothing I’m necessarily proud of, but it wasn’t angry against homosexuals. But he took offence at it.

  CHAPTER 18

  Charles Zucker: I was just playing the piano. It was a baby grand and the piano had a … I don’t know if Bill told you this. It had a Plexiglass cover on it and Bill would as a joke sometimes pick it up and use it as a shield. He’d say, ‘Oh, I need a shield’ when the audience was being hostile or mean to him or something. So one night there was a couple who wouldn’t shut up. They were just nasty, they wouldn’t shut up and Bill was really patient, trying to get them to quiet down, and it’s not my proudest moment but I had the microphone at the piano and in sort of a low but loud voice I said, ‘Can somebody please put a dick in her mouth?’

  Author: Bill’s told me the story but it’d be great for the book to hear it from you.

  Charles: So they went nuts. Bill puts up the audience shield as a joke and the next thing you know, silverware and ashtrays and dishes are flying at the stage and it looked like mayhem. And Bill was very gracious, and the woman and the guy were like, asked to leave, and she starts screeching something like, ‘I’ve never been treated this badly in my whole life’, and Bill says, ‘When you behave with some civility you’ll be treated in kind.’ And the audience applauds and they leave and they go out in the hall. And I’m sure Bill told you, the n
ext thing I know, it was a little hazy, but out of the corner of my eye I see that Bill’s feet are no longer touching the ground because this guy has his hands around his neck and he’s choking him.

  CHAPTER 17

  Bill: I needed the best comics that I could get, so the question is, how can you attract them? How can you get them to come from uptown? And one way is to pay them a little more, so that they have cab fares, as well as they’re able to put ten bucks in their pocket, but that is in addition to what I was describing yesterday, with creating a home. These guys are by definition lone wolves. They do what they do in isolation. They’re stand-up comedians. They write their own material. They perform by themselves and they’re solitary, but by creating a place that was warm and welcoming … We gave them a club house, and said to them, ‘Come and experiment …’ See, that’s another thing, the uptown clubs, Catch, Comic Strip, the Improv, you had to kill every set, and with us, we would say, ‘If you want to kill every set, that’s what the uptown clubs are for. Here, this is your gym. Experiment. If we believe in you, we think that even your bombing will be interesting.’

  CHAPTER 16

  Bill: What I said to Manny was, if anybody who’s coming for the Brazilian piano bar comes early, before ten o’clock, I’m not going to charge them a cover charge, they’re welcome to come in. And if any of our audience wants to stay, then they’ll stay. But it wasn’t but a few months before the piano player had to find another bar to work in.

  CHAPTER 15

  Bill: I was really nervous because I needed to find some place, and I walked past a couple of times because I just kept looking at this dank staircase and, ‘Oh, it’s just so icky.’ But then I said to myself, ‘Places that aren’t icky, you’re not going to be able to get.’ So then I went in the Olive Tree and I asked to see the owner and as luck would have it he was there and I showed him this review.

  Author: Was he sitting at a table?

  Bill: No, I told the hostess, who … I forget who it was who I approached. And they came back with him, so he was at the front and, you know, I asked him what he was doing with the room downstairs and he told me a Brazilian piano bar. And I said, ‘Well, what time do you do?’ Because, you know, perhaps somebody else would have said, ‘Sorry for bothering you.’ But I was just looking for any opening. So, ‘What time do you start at?’ ‘Oh, ten o’clock.’ ‘Okay, so, you know, I would like to do this comedy club from eight to ten, and we’ll have a cover and a minimum and I’ll pay the comics and I’ll pay to get an audience in and to promote it and you serve food and beverage, and it’s extra food and beverage. If a lot of people come, great, and if not a lot of people come, fine. There’s no way for you to lose. It’s only a question of how much you can win.’

  CHAPTER 14

  Author: I know your dad’s a civil rights lawyer, so I read his book.

  Rachel Feinstein: That was crazy that you read my dad’s book.

  Author: He mentions Don Imus and other people who used language that backfired on them, and your dad doesn’t seem very happy with what these people said. I wondered if he’d ever disagreed with any of the language that you or any other comedians use, and whether you ever talked to him about that at all?

  Rachel: No, no, he … I mean, he has a dark, weird sense of humour. That’s where I get a lot of my sense of humour. Like, he would come in the room and be like, ‘It smells like Jews in here. It’s really gross.’ Like, ‘Can you guys get out of the room?’ He would say things like that.

  Author: When you were a kid?

  Rachel: Yeah, yeah, he would jokingly sing, ‘Last train to Auschwitz, I shall see you at the…’ Things like that. And my mom would be like, ‘Howard, that’s enough.’ So he had always had a weird, dark sense of humour, and sometimes I think that’s the way he would call out the preposterousness of all of it.

  CHAPTER 13

  Author: You’ve said there were lots of anti-Haitian jokes when you were growing up. Why were they telling anti-Haitian jokes?

  Wil Sylvince: I guess they didn’t like Haitians or thought they just, you know … I don’t know the reason why people pick on each other when they don’t understand a culture or religion or a thing or can’t relate. They just make fun of it. Plus, you know, another thing has to do with Haitians, we didn’t have like a hero to make us look cool. For example the Chinese had Bruce Lee, the Jamaicans had Bob Marley. So we didn’t have like a cool figure, so it was easy to make jokes of us, you know what I’m saying, because no one wanted to be Haitian. The things that we had about us were negative stereotypes and some of them aren’t true. For example, there’s some cool stereotypes, like Asians know how to do math and they know kung-fu. Black people have big penises. But then we had that we do voodoo, we wore mismatched clothes, or the worst one was probably Haitians had AIDS.

  Author: Do you remember any of the jokes?

  Wil: One of the jokes … I remember a few of them. ‘What do you call Haitians on skates? Rolaids.’ ‘What do you call a Haitian band? Band-Aids.’ Jokes like that.

  Author: And did children tell those jokes to you knowing you were Haitian?

  Wil: Yeah.

  Author: And something I’ve read is, your dad told you just to pretend to be Jamaican because that would make your life easier. Is that true?

  Wil: No, you got that wrong. My dad did not say that. Actually, my parents were very proud to be Haitian. I came up with that when I went to a different school district and I had … It was almost like a new take on life, a new start on life, and I figured I could have a new identity by just pretending to be something I wasn’t.

  CHAPTER 12

  Keith: Ain’t nothing changed.

  Author: Did people say stuff about your sneakers?

  Keith: Absolutely, but they know I would get them. Eventually I would get them. One thing … I thought about this. That I didn’t realise I was bullying. Like a lot of guys … One guy … Used to talk about him so bad and he punched me right in my face.

  Author: He punched you?

  Keith: Yeah.

  Author: What did you say to him?

  Keith: I kept calling him schizo-fag. Like, one minute you’re gay, one minute you’re straight. It was a good chuckle. Everybody laughed. I was like, ‘Ah, this is good.’

  Author: Where was that? At the back of the bus?

  Keith: In school, in the back of the classroom, also was … The teacher said, ‘Keith, go to the back of the room, you’re not going to learn, you just want to make fun, get your ass to the back.’ And I’m smiling and I was, ‘Hey, hey, schizo-fag.’ Guys are laughing. We’re just having a good time. But I didn’t realise back then that was a form of bullying. A girl, I used to always mess with her. Like I would do the Beverly Hillbillies song, ‘Black gold, Texas tea’, because she was real dark. That, ‘Hey there lonely girl’, I’d say, ‘Hey there ugly girl.’ I would just fuck with her so bad, right? I would fuck with her so bad and like … I mean really bad. I was fucking with her, seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade.

  Author: Did she cry?

  Keith: Oh, you didn’t see how bad it was. I was out of school now, graduated high school and all that. I was maybe nineteen at a church, sat there, Bethel Baptist Church, and I’m sitting there and she starts kicking my chair. Boom. I’m like, ‘What the hell? Who’s kicked my chair?’ It was her, making faces at me, just angry. She was still hurt from sixth, seventh grade.

  Author: When was that?

  Keith: I was nineteen then. I was only thirteen, fourteen when I was teasing her. And she was in there kicking my chair. I’m like, ‘Huh? Hey.’ ‘Fuck you.’ ‘What? We’re in church.’ She hated my guts.

  Author: Did you apologise to her?

  Keith: No, because you don’t know. And I’m like, ‘Why is she so mad? I was just joking with her.’ But you don’t know the effect you can have on people.

  CHAPTER 11

/>   Hood: Let’s call us persecuted, is probably the right word. If you do a ‘Bahai Iran persecution’ Google search you will see some horrific things that started about one hundred years ago and continue to today. So as a religious minority, persecuted religious minority, it just made sense for my family at the time to kind of send us off to boarding school, and to relocate after boarding school to the US. We initially came over here because my father was doing some … He has a doctorate in veterinary medicine. He was doing some research at the university in Maryland on bees and honey bees specifically. So that’s what landed us here. And in 1979 Iran started to, you know … It had fifty or so more guests than maybe it should for a little while and that whole hostage thing led to an increase in the persecution, because of the Ayatollah takeover, and we were able to very justifiably claim religious persecution and head down the track of US citizenship.

  CHAPTER 10

  Hassan: When I left from Cairo, my mother, she said to me, ‘Hassan, I know there are a lot of Jewish people in America, so watch. Be careful.’

  CHAPTER 9

  Noam: He always let me read and see whatever I wanted. There was absolutely no … He used to get a lot of flak from other parents and stuff like that. I remember I was reading The Exorcist at eleven years old, the woman at the drug store started screaming at him. And also, even more memorable, he took me to see Straw Dogs. Have you ever seen Straw Dogs with Dustin Hoffman? You know that rape scene? When did it come out, 1969 or something? It was rated R, so he was allowed to take me, and the woman at the box office didn’t want to let me in and he was screaming at her, ‘It’s none of your fucking business.’