12-18 Aug 2017^ guide^10
Television Critics Association
panel earlier this year. “I met
somebody at the Improv [a
renowned comedy club] who
said they had a room, but it
turned out to be a closet.” Aguilar
later tells me that while living
in said closet, Carrey was also
dating the singer Linda Ronstadt.
“I am pretty sure he went to her
place,” he quips.
Such dimly lit, booze-fuelled,
late-night depictions of the
comedy club world and curious
lives of standup comedians
would appear to be having a
moment. HBO’s Crashing, the
semi-autobiographical story
of its creator and star Pete
Holmes’s early days on the
circuit is currently filming its
second season in New York,
where Amy Sherman-Palladino,
creator of The Gilmore Girls, is
also knee-deep in production
on her new series for Amazon,
The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, the
tale of a housewife and would-
be standup in the 1950s. The
Big Sick, standup comic Kumail
Nanjiani’s real-life tale of how
he met his wife, is still doing
good business in cinemas. And
Funny Cow, starring Maxine
Peake as a comedian on the
northern working-men’s club
circuit of the 1970s – which, bycomparison, makes living in a
closet in LA seem impossibly
glamorous – is set for release
later this year.
I’m Dying Up Here stars
Melissa Leo as Goldie Herschlag,
the fierce matriarch of the
fictitious Goldie’s, the club
in which aspiring comedians,
including Bill Hobbs (Andrew
Santino), Eddie Zeidel (Michael
Angarano) and Cassie Feder
(Ari Graynor) vie for coveted
spots; Goldie herself is closely
based on the famed Mitzi Shore,
who founded Los Angeles club
The Comedy Store in 1972.
“They really captured the
feeling of the era, the feeling
of the camaraderie and the
competition, and the smartass
quality of being a comic,” said
Carrey of the show. “Oftentimes
it wasn’t who was funniest on
stage; it was who was funniest
at the bar or who was funniest‘The banality of
comedy is not sexy,but it’s relatable.
I can’t relate to thelife of a rock star’
in the parking lot. That’s what
mattered to comics.”
This authentic transposition
of club to screen stands in stark
contrast to the apparent problem
in capturing another creative
industry – the music business- and turning it into successful
television drama.
The series Empire and
Nashville stand out as notable
recent exceptions, but HBO’s big-
budget period piece, Vinyl, set
in the record industry of 1970s
New York City, was canned after
one season, in spite of a creative
team that included heavyweights
Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese.
Showtime’s comedy-drama
Roadies, about the backstage
world of touring bands, also
lasted just one season. The
Get Down – Baz Luhrmann’s
ambitious Netflix show tracing
the birth of hip-hop, also in
70s New York, and notable for
costing a reported $120m for its
first season – has recently been
cancelled, too.
“The world of standup
comedy, and the world of being
a musician in a band both
fascinate people – because
it is nightlife, and travelling,
and there’s a grungy aspect
to it, so it seems a ripe world
to exploit – yet it is so hard to
capture the authenticity of
those particular worlds,” says
Sherman-Palladino. She should
know; her father, Don Sherman,
was a standup, and she spent
her childhood in California
“with a group of Jews sitting
around in my backyard, talking
about the good old days in the
Catskills [the upstate New York
area where standup boomed in
the postwar years].” She later
worked at The Comedy Store, for
Shore, a friend of her father. “But
even if you don’t know what it’s
like to be in a band, even if you
don’t know what it is like to be
a standup comic, you can smell
it when it is not authentic,” she
MATHIEU YOUNG; PAUL W BAILEY/NBC/GETTY says of audiences.