I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era

A brilliant walk through the world of stand-up in its modern glory age. I felt like I was meeting and making new friends with names like Letterman, Leno, Lewis, Williams, Pryor, and Boosler. What an amazing privilege to share their journeys from rags to riches... and sometimes back to rags. I couldn't put it down.

This is a wonderful book that captures the feel, the significance and the emotions of the era. While it is exciting to read about Dave and Jay's origins, it is the stories of Richard Lewis, Tom Dressen and Steve Lubetkin that give this book so much heart (a heart that The Washington Post's reviewer must not have). As noted in another review, there are errors and I hope that they are corrected in future editions (e.g. Howie Mandel's name is spelled wrong and Howard Cosell's variety show was on ABC and not NBC).

"I'm Dying Up Here" is a great yarn--a funny and moving story, suspenseful, even, in its depiction of a tightknit community that eventually unravels. The jokes, the riffs, the gags are there--there are hilarious moments throughout. But Bill Knoedelseder has done a fine job of awakening these figures who are either unknown to most of us or (more of a challenge, I think), too well known. He gives them dimension and dignity and, best of all, he gives them real human frailty. This book has made me think a lot about the recurrent spiral of ecstatic coherence and heartbreaking dissolution that every band of brothers and sisters dances through. It's Camelot, it's the Beatles, it's every great run that comes to an end, it's what we keep looking for when it's not there, that feeling of "we chosen few" that can't last but is never forgotten. Knoedelseder has delivered a solid read, a captivating tale, and an honest tribute to those who take on the heroic and essential task of making us laugh.

Once in a great while, a writer will manage to cast in a new and fascinating light, what we think of as familiar territory. In this fabulous chronicle, Bill Knoedelseder takes a cast of characters well known to -- and loved by -- most of us (Leno, Letterman, Richard Lewis, Robin Williams, et al) all at the beginning of their respective rises to iconic pop culture status, and spins a yarn around an (until now) little ballyhooed, but pivotal moment in their respective lives...the Comedy Strike of 1979. Set against the backdrop of the birth of the contemporary stand-up comedy scene in Los Angeles, Knoedelseder writes with a strong and sure voice about the lives of some of our favorite comic icons as they intersected in and around a little Sunset Blvd. club called the Comedy Store. With a true insider's knowledge, he tells us of the loves, failures, successes, and rivalries, of a tight-knit family of performers, riven by their opposition -- or allegiance -- to the reigning diva of the LA comedy scene at the time, Mitzi Shore. Don't miss this! You will never think of stand up comedy the same way again.

How did this story go untold for so long? Before some of America's best known comics were household names in homes like yours, they were household names in but their own homes. That is, they were nobodies. And most of those homes were hovels. This book tells the largely untold story of how they -- or at least many of them -- made it big while turning standup into a business and art form as culturally vital as rock and roll. Though you'll instantly key in on people like Robin Williams and Richard Lewis, after but a few pages you'll feel like you're best friends with a lot of people that I at least had never heard of, and root for them in their many battles against unfair working conditions, addiction and changing tastes. Author Knoedelseder is a reader's writer --he respects your intelligence and your time. He's got a witty, engaging style that makes you feel like you're chatting over a beer or cup of coffee and the writing is super tight. Not a wasted word. You won't be able to put this one down.

I really enjoyed this book. It's about a labor dispute in 70's in Hollywood, the twist is that the disputers are a bunch of stand-up comedians, many of whom will become famous. It's a treat to see them young and struggling and to get the inside story on relationships between people who have since become iconic. All of the characters,even the unknowns (at least to me), are colorful and the plot reads like a novel.