The Comedy Store Strike of 1979

• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Sunset Strip Playground
• Chapter 2 Mitzi Shore’s Kingdom
• Chapter 3 The Currency of Exposure
• Chapter 4 The Original Room and the Main Room
• Chapter 5 The Tonight Show Golden Ticket
• Chapter 6 Empty Pockets, Full Houses
• Chapter 7 Whispers in the Parking Lot
• Chapter 8 Tom Dreesen and the Spark of Rebellion
• Chapter 9 Comedians for Compensation
• Chapter 10 The Meeting at Canter’s Deli
• Chapter 11 Delivery of the Demands
• Chapter 12 Mitzi Digs In
• Chapter 13 March 1979: Pickets on Sunset Boulevard
• Chapter 14 Crossing the Line: The Divided Roster
• Chapter 15 The Improv Connection
• Chapter 16 Celebrity Pickets and Late-Night Solidarity
• Chapter 17 Blacklists, Shouting Matches, and Bad Blood
• Chapter 18 Steve Martin and the Strike Fund
• Chapter 19 Dark Nights on the Strip
• Chapter 20 The Tragedy of Steve Lubetkin
• Chapter 21 The Weight of the Roof
• Chapter 22 Breaking the Stalemate
• Chapter 23 The Settlement and the Contract
• Chapter 24 The Return to the Mic
• Chapter 25 The Dawn of the Professional Comic

On any given night in the late 1970s, the stretch of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood known as the Sunset Strip was a vortex of neon, gasoline, and raw ambition. Rolls-Royces purred past crowds of tourists, industry powerbrokers, and aspiring rock stars, but the true epicenter of cultural gravity was a low-slung, black-painted fortress perched near the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights: The Comedy Store. Inside, in rooms thick with cigarette smoke and clinking highball glasses, a revolution was unfolding. Stand-up comedy, once confined to dingy lounge acts, Borscht Belt resorts, and stale variety hours, had transformed into the rock-and-roll of the post-Watergate era. Young men and women armed only with microphones were redefining American humor, packing houses, and turning a niche performance art into a multi-million-dollar entertainment juggernaut.

Yet, behind the roar of laughter and the velvet ropes, an absurd economic reality governed the scene. The owner of the kingdom, a shrewd and visionary matriarch named Mitzi Shore, had built an empire by charging patrons cover charges, drink minimums, and premium prices, all while refusing to pay a single penny in wages to the people on stage. Her operational philosophy was as brilliant as it was predatory: the stage was a "college," the stage time was the tuition, and the only currency an artist needed was "exposure." For years, hungry young comics accepted the bargain. They slept in their cars, stole food from buffets, and shared cramped apartments with half a dozen other dreamers, enduring poverty for the faint, golden promise that talent scouts from The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson might catch their set and catapult them to overnight fame.

By the spring of 1979, the engine of exposure had finally blown a gasket. The comedians looked around the room, calculated the nightly bar receipts, and realized that while the management was getting rich, the people providing the labor could not afford breakfast. In March of that year, the impossible happened: a demographic famously allergic to discipline, solidarity, and authority formed a union. Led by hard-nosed road veterans like Tom Dreesen, organized under the banner of Comedians for Compensation, and backed by legal counsel from the Screen Actors Guild, dozens of performers walked out. They traded their microphones for picket signs, marching outside the club under the glare of headlights and television news cameras, demanding a modest wage of twenty-five dollars a set.

What followed was a brutal, six-week civil war that shattered the close-knit fraternity of the comedy community. The strike tore friendships apart, divided rising stars from established celebrities, and pit the comics against a mother figure who took their defiance not as a legitimate business negotiation, but as an unforgivable personal betrayal. The picket line on Sunset Boulevard became a theater of high-stakes drama, featuring midnight screaming matches, clandestine funding networks, blacklists, and deeply personal recriminations. It was a confrontation that pushed the art form to its emotional and psychological brink, culminating in an unfathomable personal tragedy that cast a permanent shadow over the industry and forced both sides to confront the true human cost of their standoff.

The Comedy Store Strike of 1979 is the definitive chronicle of that volatile crossroads in American pop culture. It is not merely a piece of showbiz nostalgia, but an essential labor history of a uniquely fragile profession. Through vivid narrative, deep research, and first-hand accounts from those who held the line—as well as those who crossed it—this book explores how a ragtag group of outcasts, eccentrics, and perfectionists challenged the undisputed queen of Hollywood comedy and forced the corporate machinery of entertainment to recognize stand-ups as legitimate professionals entitled to the dignity of a paycheck.

Today, stand-up comedy commands arena tours, lucrative streaming specials, and global corporate sponsorships. But the bedrock upon which the modern comedy industry rests was laid in the spring of 1979, on a cold stretch of California pavement, where a handful of funny people decided to stop begging for a break and demand what they were owed. This is the story of how they fought, what they sacrificed, and the spring that changed American comedy forever.

To understand the sudden, explosive birth of the modern comedy industry, one must first understand the unique geography of the Sunset Strip in the mid-to-late 1970s. This mile and a half stretch of Sunset Boulevard, winding through the unincorporated territory of Los Angeles County, had always existed outside the strict jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department. It was a sun-drenched, neon-soaked haven where the rules of polite society were routinely suspended in favor of indulgence, reinvention, and nocturnal commerce. By 1978, the Strip had transitioned from its golden era of old-school Hollywood glamour and its subsequent decade of hippie counterculture into something far sleeker, louder, and infinitely more lucrative. It was a playground fueled by cheap gasoline, high-grade cocaine, and an insatiable desire for live entertainment.

On any given Friday night, the air along the Strip was a thick mixture of exhaust fumes from idling sports cars, expensive perfumes, and the sea breeze rolling in from the Pacific. The sidewalk was a dense, slow-moving parade of aspiring starlets, music industry executives with unbuttoned silk shirts, tourists looking for a thrill, and eccentric street characters who seemed to exist purely to provide local color. The soundscape was a chaotic symphony of roaring engines, screeching tires, and the competing basslines of rock music spilling out from the open doors of legendary clubs like the Whisky a Go Go, the Roxy, and the Rainbow Bar and Grill. It was an environment designed to overstimulate the senses, a place where fame felt so close you could reach out and touch it, or at least buy it a drink.

Nestled into this chaotic landscape, at 8433 Sunset Boulevard, sat a building that looked remarkably unassuming by day but transformed into a fortress of ambition by night. Originally built in the 1930s, the structure had once housed Ciro’s, one of the most famous and opulent nightclubs of Hollywood’s golden age. In its prime, Ciro’s was the place where stars like Judy Garland, Cary Grant, and Lana Turner drank champagne under silk-draped ceilings, while big bands played and paparazzi gathered outside the velvet ropes. By the seventies, however, the big bands were gone, and the building’s glamorous past had been painted over with coats of matte black paint. It was now The Comedy Store, and while the physical elegance of Ciro’s had faded, the room retained a heavy, almost electrical charge of history and ambition.

Inside the club, the atmosphere was dark, claustrophobic, and intensely intimate. The walls were painted black, the carpets were worn thin by thousands of scurrying feet, and the air was perpetually thick with a blue haze of cigarette smoke that hung over the audience like a low ceiling. Customers were packed elbow-to-elbow at tiny, candle-lit tables, their faces illuminated by the flickering orange glow of wax cups and the harsh, direct beam of a single spotlight focused on the stage. The stage itself was tiny—just a raised wooden platform barely large enough for a microphone stand and a stool—but to the people who stood upon it, it was the most important piece of real estate in the Western world.

For the audiences of the late seventies, a night out at the Comedy Store was not just a spectator sport; it was an immersive, unpredictable experience. Stand-up comedy was undergoing a profound evolutionary shift. The old guard of comedy, defined by Tuxedo-clad joke-tellers delivering rapid-fire, setup-punchline gags about mothers-in-law and bad airline food, was rapidly being replaced by a new breed of performer. These new comics did not wear tuxedos; they wore faded denim, leather jackets, and open collars. They did not tell jokes in the traditional sense; they shared intimate, observational, and often deeply uncomfortable truths about their lives, their sexualities, their anxieties, and the absurdities of a post-Watergate, post-Vietnam America. They were the rock stars of a new era, and the audience hung on their every word, waiting to see how far the boundaries of acceptable speech could be pushed.

This cultural shift created an unprecedented demand for talent, which in turn drew hundreds of young, hopeful performers from every corner of the United States to Southern California. They arrived in battered Volkswagens and Greyhound buses, carrying little more than a spiral notebook filled with scribbled premises and a desperate desire to be noticed. Los Angeles was the ultimate destination because it was the home of the television networks, the movie studios, and, most importantly, the talent scouts who could turn a struggling artist into an overnight sensation. The Comedy Store was the primary pipeline for this talent, a sorting house where the raw, unrefined energy of the streets was channeled onto a stage and presented to the gatekeepers of the entertainment industry.

The daily routine for these aspiring comedians was a grinding test of endurance. During the day, they worked menial jobs—parking cars, waiting tables, delivering telephone books, or selling dynamic-range expanders at stereo shops—just to secure enough money for rent and a daily meal. But as the sun began to dip below the horizon and the neon signs of the Sunset Strip flickered to life, their real day began. They would gather in the gravel parking lot behind the Comedy Store, a space that functioned as an open-air green room, office, and support group all rolled into one. Here, under the dim orange glow of security lights, they would pace back and forth, muttering their sets to themselves, bouncing premises off one another, and watching the kitchen door to see who was arriving.

This parking lot was the true heart of the comedy community. It was a democratic space where a complete newcomer who had just arrived from Ohio could stand next to a seasoned veteran who had appeared on television the night before. The conversations were a mixture of neurotic self-doubt, creative brainstorming, and cynical industry gossip. They discussed who had killed on stage the previous night, who had bombed, which network executive was rumored to be sitting in the showroom, and how to survive on a diet of cheap hamburgers and leftover appetizers salvaged from the club’s kitchen. It was a fraternity of the dispossessed, bound together by a shared obsession with the art of stand-up and a collective willingness to endure near-total destitution for a shot at greatness.

The economic reality for these performers, however, was stark and unforgiving. While the Sunset Strip was awash in money—with patrons routinely spending fifty dollars or more on cover charges, parking, and overpriced drinks—the comedians themselves were paid absolutely nothing for their performances. The prevailing philosophy, dictated by the club's management, was that the Comedy Store was not an employer, but an educational institution. It was a showcase room, a place where comics could hone their craft, develop their material, and, most importantly, be seen by the industry. Stage time was the currency, and the opportunity to perform in front of an audience and influential industry scouts was deemed to be payment enough.

For a long time, the comedians accepted this arrangement without protest. The sheer thrill of being part of the scene, combined with the intoxicating possibility of overnight success, was enough to keep the engine running. They lived in communal apartments, often sleeping three or four to a room, sharing mattresses on the floor and pooling their meager resources to buy groceries. Some slept in their cars parked on the residential side streets of West Hollywood, using the restrooms of local gas stations to wash their faces and brush their teeth before heading to the club. They tolerated these conditions because they believed they were paying their dues, participating in a time-honored rite of passage that would eventually lead to fame, fortune, and a house in the hills.

The relationship between the performers and the venue was thus defined by a profound imbalance of power. The Comedy Store held all the cards; it controlled the stage time, the lineup, and the access to the industry professionals who frequented the VIP booths. If a comic complained about the lack of pay, there were fifty others standing in the parking lot ready to take their spot without a second thought. This surplus of hungry, desperate talent allowed the club to operate as a highly profitable commercial enterprise while relying entirely on free labor to provide its core attraction. It was a business model that could only exist in an environment where the dream of success was powerful enough to blind intelligent people to their own exploitation.

As the late seventies progressed, the scale of this exploitation became increasingly difficult to ignore. The Comedy Store was no longer just a local showcase; it had expanded into a massive, multi-room entertainment complex that was drawing thousands of paying customers every week. The club was expanding, opening new rooms, and generating massive revenues from ticket sales and alcohol consumption, yet the policy of zero compensation for the performers remained firmly in place. The tension between the glittering, high-rolling world of the Sunset Strip playground and the hand-to-mouth existence of the people who made that world possible was reaching a boiling point. The dream of exposure was beginning to lose its luster, replaced by the cold, hard reality of empty pockets and unpaid rent.