The Comedy Store opened on Sunset Boulevard in 1972 on the site of the former Ciro’s nightclub, and it has been a launchpad and mecca for the biggest
The Comedy Store opened on Sunset Boulevard in 1972 on the site of the former Ciro’s nightclub, and it has been a launchpad and mecca for the biggest stars in stand-up ever since. In Showtime’s wide-ranging five-part docuseries “The Comedy Store,” writer-director and former comic Mike Binder returns to the late Mitzi Shore’s iconic club to interview many of those stars and reveal the stories behind the laughter. Binder spent more than two years sourcing vintage performance footage and conducting new interviews with David Letterman, Chris Rock, Jay Leno, Jim Carrey and Whoopi Goldberg. He also interviewed a host of Jewish comedians, including Jerry Seinfeld, Andrew Dice Clay, Roseanne Barr, Marc Maron, Jeff Ross, Howie Mandel, Bob Saget, Richard Lewis and Sandra Bernhard. The series spotlights great routines and backstage shenanigans, but it also includes comedy’s darker side: feuds, overdoses, a labor strike and the premature deaths of Richard Pryor, Freddie Prinze and Sam Kinison. For the first-time documentarian, it was a massive undertaking. “There’s hundreds of hours of footage. What to put in and what to leave out? It was just so hard,” Binder said. There was a lot riding on his decisions. As Letterman told him, “Man, you’ve got a lot on your shoulders to tell this story. You better do it right.” “Everybody is going to have their own version of what the story is and you’re never going to make everybody happy,” Binder said he realized early on. But his personal history with Shore and the Store increased his pressure to try. He was just 18 when he first went onstage there, killed, and became one of Shore’s favorites, babysitting her children by day and working the door by night when he wasn’t telling jokes.
