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

By Andrew Hankinson

This is a book about three things:
1. A room called the Comedy Cellar.
2. Who gets to speak in that room.
3. What they get to say.

AMY SCHUMER. LOUIS CK. JERRY SEINFELD. CHRIS ROCK. They all worked the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village, honing their acts, experimenting, taking risks. It was a safe space, thanks to the principles of its first owner, Manny Dworman, then his son Noam. The only threat to freedom of expression was a lack of laughs.

But how did a New York taxi driver, born in Tel Aviv, create comedy’s most important stage? How did he influence some of the biggest names in stand-up? What are the limits of a joke? Who decides? And why does the comedians’ table matter so much?

Andrew Hankinson speaks to the Cellar’s owner, comedians, and audience members, using interviews, emails, podcasts, letters, text messages, and previously private documents to create a conversation about the perils, pride, and prejudice of modern comedy. Moving backwards in time from Louis CK’s downfall to when Manny used to host folk singers including Bob Dylan, this is about a comedy club, but it’s also about the widening chasm in contemporary culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Aug 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781925693690

Andrew Hankinson

Andrew Hankinson is a journalist who was born, raised, and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, northern England. He started his career at Arena magazine and is now a freelance feature writer who has contributed to publications including GQ, The Observer, The Guardian, and Wired. His first book, You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat], won the CWA Non-Fiction Prize in 2016.

Book preview

children

Author: This is a book about the Comedy Cellar, a comedy club in New York. Do you care about the Comedy Cellar in New York?

Stewart: Well, not really.

It’s 8 June 2018. The author’s interviewing Stewart Lee in the Hawley Arms, in Camden Town, London.

Author: I want to ask you about the broader debates that are going on, which you’ve talked about loads and loads, so I’m sorry if it’s boring for you, I hope you don’t mind, but this club, the Comedy Cellar in New York, was opened in 1982 by an Israeli immigrant called Manny Dworman.

Stewart: Yeah.

Author: He’d been a folk musician.

Stewart: Yeah.

Author: And he smoked pot every day.

Stewart: Yeah.

Author: He wanted to cultivate the Comedy Cellar as this place of debate.

Stewart: Right.

Author: And free speech.

Stewart: I think I’ve been there but I can’t remember, because in two thousand and …

Author: Four?

Stewart: Four or five, I did about a week of seven-minute slots in New York clubs and they’re a blur because they all look exactly the same. They all have a brick wall thing at the back.

Author: The Comedy Cellar’s got a brick wall at the back and a Middle Eastern restaurant upstairs called the Olive Tree.

Stewart: I probably did it.

Author: So this guy started it and wanted everyone to debate. He had some right-wing views.

Stewart: A Libertarian.

Author: Exactly. So he hired Arab and left-wing staff and comedians to sit around the back table of the Olive Tree and argue, like a salon.

Stewart: But he tried to manufacture a salon, and normally they grow organically.

Author: Right, but he started a book group and handed out reading material, most of it, like, pro-Israel.

Stewart: Yeah, yeah.

Author: So that’s what interested me, but when I ask if you’re interested in a book about the Comedy Cellar, like most people, you don’t give a shit.

Stewart: Yeah.

Author: So I want to frame the book with this conversation, showing that what it’s about are the values he cultivated, such as open debate and free speech, and when I get to free speech you’ll think I’m an arse, but I’m just trying to get answers.

Stewart: Well, I think free speech is a really difficult term now because these things move at incredible speed don’t they, due to social media and the internet. Now the free speech debate seems to be monopolised by what you’d call the alt-Right.

Author: Which makes it an uncomfortable place to argue from.

Stewart: Which makes it an uncomfortable place to argue from.

[After thirteen minutes]

Stewart: They’ve got this night at the Backyard club in Whitechapel where you can go and say the unsayable and all these things that you’re not allowed to say anywhere else, and I always thought on the circuit you could sort of say it anyway. I mean, there wasn’t a stranglehold of political correctness, but what was good about political correctness was it made people think they might have to justify what they were saying.

[After eighteen minutes]

Stewart: They accused us of trying to be blasphemous and I thought, if you were trying to be blasphemous, why would you write this rather thoughtful thing which suggests we don’t live up to the standards of God? And also suggests that the Bible portrays the same sort of emotional struggles between its very human characters as you see in a Jerry Springer show? To me that wasn’t blasphemous. I thought, if you were being blasphemous you’d do this wouldn’t you, you’d vomit into the gaping anus of Christ, but still, if you’re a half-decent person, you can’t just do that. It has to be about something. What I tried to do was write something which on paper would sound terribly blasphemous, vomiting into the gaping anus of Christ, but hopefully make it meaningful and moving and funny, and not just shock horror.

Author: Because political incorrectness can’t be a thing in itself?

Stewart: It has to have a reason, yeah.

Author: So I was looking at the criticism some of these American comedians were getting for what they were saying, and I felt very strongly I should defend free speech. I’m a writer, so I thought we should be able to write what we want or say what we want on stage. Then, about two years into writing the book, I started worrying about Bernard Manning. My dad went to see Bernard Manning and liked him, but I didn’t like some of the things my dad said, and I thought, would I have defended Bernard Manning’s right to go on stage and say the word ‘paki’, you know?

Stewart: Well, I’ll tell you another thing that’s changed is this, right, you might be able to defend Bernard Manning’s right to go on stage and say the word ‘paki’ in front of a load of people who have made some sort of informed choice of whether to go through the doors of that venue to see a man who is known for saying the word ‘paki’. What’s different now is that YouTube and social media and whatever else propel offence like that into places where it’s indiscriminately spewed out.

[After twenty-three minutes]

Author: You talk about the character of Stewart Lee, and lots of comedians say things they don’t really mean or push in one direction when really they want to snap back in the other direction.

Stewart: Yeah.

Author: And I think you said Paul Provenza told you the stage should be treated like giant inverted commas, and you talked about Bouffon clowns, where you drew a circle around yourself on stage. That all seems to say this is a stage.

Stewart: Yeah, but that doesn’t work anymore because the circle’s been punctured by YouTube and Twitter, and the stage is being filmed from an angle on someone’s camera phone that removes the inverted commas.

Author: Right.

Stewart: It’s difficult.

Author: So now comedians have to be more careful as a character, or when saying things they don’t really believe?

Stewart: Yeah, I think so. It’s sad. It’s a sad situation. But I don’t think you can afford to take a reactionary position for comic effect in a world where that reactionary position can be stripped of your intent and broadcast all over the place without your control. And I’m surprised to hear myself saying that, but I think now your intent has to go through every layer of the act as clearly as the word ‘Blackpool’ in a stick of rock, so it can be snapped at any point and you would still know what you’re trying to achieve. Isn’t that sad? But I do think that, because you don’t control the point at which the act is snapped anymore.

[After twenty-seven minutes]

Author: So that thing when people say, ‘It’s just a joke,’ you don’t think …

Stewart: No, I think a joke is a powerful thing. I don’t think you can say it’s just a joke, no. I don’t think you can, because it’s harmful ideas. They can harm people. And some of the ones I tell I do intend them to harm people.

[After twenty-eight minutes]

Author: One of the things I’ve done is interview people who were in the audience at the Comedy Cellar and complained about things including race. One person said she didn’t want to hear that stuff on stage even in character because it emboldens people who really believe it, particularly since Trump came in.

Stewart: Yeah, I understand. Again, Trump’s changed everything, as has Brexit. I mean, Brexit has sabotaged the Pub Landlord.

Author: Al Murray’s character?

Stewart: Yeah. When the character is the same as the people that led the campaign to leave Europe … It makes more sense what the Landlord says than things that some of the people in Vote Leave say.

Author: Yeah.

Stewart: You can’t be ironically anti-PC in America when the bloke in charge is saying let’s build a wall to keep the filthy Mexicans out, and has had, like, Born-Again Christians who believe the apocalypse is coming doing speeches in Jerusalem. You just can’t. If you imagine you’re satirising some liberal, PC cabal, well that cabal is not only powerless but is irrelevant now.

Author: Is it powerless?

Stewart: Well, the guy in charge of the country is saying for real … What can you say that’s more mad than the things he’s saying for real? It’s difficult, and I think a few of them have felt it’s changed. I know the ex-husband of quite a famous American comedian. He said she was struggling after Trump to do her mock-offensive schtick because you’ve got a genuinely offensive man in charge. I don’t know. It’s an interesting time to have this discussion because I think it’s all up in the air. I don’t really know. I’ve probably written and said things ten, fifteen years ago about freedom of speech in comedy that I’m not sure I’d agree with now, because there’s this rocket-powered accelerant behind stuff which means you lose control of the context.

Author: You go through the cuttings and you can see your views changing with events, which is the way it’s supposed to work though, isn’t it, I think.

Stewart: Yeah.

Author: You also had this great quote which was, ‘If you try to control what people can say through legislation or intimidation or threat, then they’re going to push against the boundaries’, and I think it pushes people to the Right. I think that has happened in America and the UK.

Stewart: Well, this is exactly what the writer of Jonathan Pie is saying, Andrew Doyle, who I used to know actually.

Author: He was criticised a lot.

Stewart: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if I agree with him. He said the reason there’s … That Tommy … He keeps changing his name doesn’t he, the EDL bloke, he led a march for freedom of speech through London, and Andy Doyle’s point, I think, was that this has been caused by liberals telling them what they can’t say.

Author: What do you think?

Stewart: I don’t know.

Author: See, I thought you’d take a much stronger line against him saying that.

Stewart: No, no, I don’t agree with him. I think a lot of things have caused the rise of the EDL and I don’t think liberals is near the top of the list.

Author: The English Defence League seem like an extreme case, but those who are around the middle … Like, I’ve got some relatives who are Conservatives, you know, and I see them shifting to the Right in their views.

Stewart: I got in a cab the other night. It’s always good talking to cab drivers. And the guy goes, ‘What do you do for a living?’ And I went, ‘I’m a comedian.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, it must be difficult now with all this political correctness?’ And I went, ‘Well, I like political correctness, I’m a big supporter of it.’ He said, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He goes, ‘Makes your job difficult though doesn’t it?’ And I went, ‘No, it made it better, because you had to be more creative and think about what you’re doing.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, it’s gone mad though hasn’t it?’

Author: He did not.

Stewart: And I went, ‘Well, I don’t know about you, I don’t want to go back to the days when you could say Paki, nigger, wog, coon and put No blacks, no Irish, no dogs outside your pub, and the British football team … The English football team went to see the Black and White Minstrel Show for their Christmas trip, and the black kid in my school in 1983 was called the black spot, and we did Ten Little Niggers as the school play,’ and I kept saying ‘nigger’ and ‘paki’ and ‘coon’ to him. I wanted to see … And he goes, ‘No, you don’t want to go back to that.’ If you confront them with it … ‘Do you want nigger written everywhere? Is that what you want? What is it that you want to say that you’re not able to say?’ And apparently they wanted to say that all these Muslims were raping people in Rochdale. That’s said now and it’s said by their own community. That wasn’t caused by political correctness.

[After fifty-one minutes]

Stewart: Have you ever seen Kunt and the Gang?

Author: No.

Stewart: Well you can’t now, he’s given up, but he’s fucking hilarious, right. He knew that he couldn’t ever do what he did on a mainstream platform, but in the room he created this sense of … He was such a cheeky character. It was like a bloke playing a Casio keyboard, but a cheeky Essex bloke, and his songs were the most disgusting songs. But it didn’t matter because we were all in this room. We were in this room where it was like normal rules had been suspended. He had this song called ‘Paperboy’ and it was about when he was little and fancied this girl, but he never got it together with her, and then when he was old, like in his thirties, a little paperboy starts delivering his paper who looked really like the girl he’d been in love with when he was little. So he starts to really fancy this paperboy, and this really happy chorus was, ‘Paperboy, paperboy, I never thought that I would rape a boy …’

This is a book about a room.

It starts with the return of Louis CK.

CHAPTER 204

Noam Dworman, owner of the Comedy Cellar, is at home in Ardsley, a small town up the Hudson from Manhattan. There are lots of trees. The author phones him,

Author: So you wouldn’t have been surprised?

Noam: The world wouldn’t have been. I mean, there was a guy named … Jesus Christ … Poindexter? Was it Poindexter?

Author: With the feminism thing?

Noam: No, it was during the Iran-Contra hearings. One of those guys, I can’t remember his name. Bud McFarlane. He had been humiliated and he tried to kill himself, and that example always stayed with me. I know people think I’m the one with no empathy, but when you imagine what it’s like to essentially go on the world’s sexual offenders list, except every single person knows about it, and your children are carrying your last name, and you’ve lost everything, and you don’t know if you can work again, and you can’t walk down the street, and you can’t go in a restaurant, everybody’s staring at you, is it so surprising to think that somebody might say, ‘Listen, I’m checking out?’

Author: I think it doesn’t cross a lot of people’s minds, the people who pile on with these things.

Noam: It doesn’t cross a lot of people’s minds?

Author: Yeah. I think the people who pile on, who get really angry … Whenever something like that happens I have empathy with basically everyone involved and I try not to make it worse for anyone, but some people who are piling on, I think they’re never thinking that Louis is vulnerable or upset, they don’t care about him, they’re just thinking he needs punishment and, ‘How can we get him?’

Noam: This is a comment I’ve usually made when somebody has talked about the fact that, ‘Oh boo hoo, he hasn’t suffered’, and I say, ‘Do you really think he hasn’t suffered? Because would you have been surprised if he had strung himself up? If you wouldn’t have been surprised if he strung himself up then clearly you recognise there’s some suffering going on.’ That’s kind of where I was coming from. It’s totally disingenuous. It’s like, I hate Saddam Hussein, but when they picked him up in that spider hole, would I say he’s not suffering? Yeah, he’s suffering. You could say, ‘Good, I’m glad he’s suffering’, but what they try to do, and I see this through so many areas now when I think about it, how dehumanisation is the first step to bigotry, it’s so interesting, it really is, you have to find a way to discount them as human beings, and then it’s an open road in front of you. So they can’t accept that he’s suffering at all, because the whole premise is this is all okay because he hasn’t suffered. And it’s not honest. Yes, he’s suffered enormously. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t deserve it, but don’t pretend he hasn’t suffered enormously. Then you have to decide, is it enough?

CHAPTER 203

Author: It’s getting nasty though.

Noam: Is it getting nasty? I think it’s calming down.

Author: Do you think it’s calming down? Well, maybe. I don’t know.

Noam: Why’s it getting nasty?

Author: I think people will gather themselves … It’s all just stuff online. Even that firebomb tweet that you had. People are taking against things, and it’s people who are very angry anyway and feel they want to have a fight for some reason, but it’s not necessarily people who are thinking things through carefully.

Noam: Listen, I went down there for the first time to watch him, because I hadn’t really watched him in person all through this, and I was really struck by how small this was. This tiny room, and ninety-five people watching him, and they’re all laughing. And yes, this is a man who did something shameful in his past, not exactly unique to Planet Earth in that way, and when you take away from that this nonsense that’s said about us, the way we’re treating women, and the way we’re a gatekeeper, and, like, ‘Dworman is such a powerful figure’, and all this nonsense, really, you know, then you say this is such a small event. It’s a man, a broken man, kind of speaking to a small group of people who are voluntarily listening to him and laughing, yet hundreds of millions of people who couldn’t find Yemen on a map regard this as vitally important to the world. It’s like, guys, it’s stunning.

CHAPTER 202

Noam and the author sit in Noam’s office at his home,

Author: I go backwards and forwards in my head, trying to figure it out, because I was in the room there, and I clapped for him, and I laughed at the jokes, and then I think, ‘Am I a bad person? Am I supporting a predator?’ You know what I mean? Does that seem silly to even think that? It crosses my mind.

Noam: It crosses your mind because you’re a thinking person and there’s this situation that’s feeding us that we’re supposed to think that way, but the fact is we know people all around us who have done bad things. I mean, if somebody at the table, the comedian table, said, ‘You know what, fifteen years ago I was in this hotel room with these girls’, people would say, ‘You’re a pig.’ No one would say, ‘You know, Noam, I don’t think you should put that guy on anymore’. We’d just chalk it off to another dude who did something disgusting, nothing to be proud of, but nobody would consider throwing him out fifteen years later. The world doesn’t work that way. You wouldn’t either, and then when he went on stage you’d be applauding, but now, it’s just public now. And there’s this whole thing around it. So there’s this question of, ‘Is this okay? Am I doing the right thing?’

Author: And do you question yourself?

Noam: I did a million times. That’s why I had reached out to so many people to speak to me about it, but nobody has any answers.

CHAPTER 201

The author speaks to Bonnie McFarlane,

Bonnie: I think Noam truly believes people should have a voice. That’s how he books the club and that’s why Louis gets to go on and that’s why … The other night I was with Hannah Gadsby and I almost had her convinced to come down to the Cellar and do a set, but she was worried she would run into Louis. I was like, ‘He won’t be there,’ but when I got to the Cellar, Louis was on stage so I had to text her and say, ‘Hey, he’s here.’ But I know Noam would have put her on.

Author: Why does she not want to run into Louis?

Bonnie: She’s got a lot of Louis material I think.

Author: So it’s because of that?

Bonnie: Yeah, and I think there’s a misperception that the Cellar’s saying, ‘Hey, we love this guy,’ when really that’s not what Noam’s saying. Noam’s saying, ‘I give a voice to all these different …’ He would never tell anyone … Ted Alexandro did this whole set about Louis and Cosby and the MeToo movement and stuff, and it went viral. Nobody was like, ‘Hey, don’t do that, we’re trying to get Louis back in the game.’ Noam just wants the discussion I think. I think Noam is really, truly coming from a place of his own belief system. He’s not like kissing anybody’s ass or trying to help anyone in particular. He’s just, like, ‘I like when all voices get heard and all points of view get heard.’

Author: I think there was concern from some people that having Louis at the Cellar meant it wasn’t a safe place for female comedians. I wondered if you’d heard that?

Bonnie: I don’t get it. I don’t get that comment. Like, a safe place in what way? In that he’s just going to whip it out and masturbate in front of you? I don’t think that’s going to happen anymore. That’s bizarre. That’s ridiculous. That’s insanity. That’s insanity. If a female comedian is sitting around scared Louis is going to masturbate in front of her, that’s insanity. The thing about it being a safe place or not, that audience has already been curated for twenty, thirty, forty years. I don’t think Louis coming in and doing sets is going to suddenly, ‘Oh, now it’s a bro audience.’ It’s always been a bro audience. That’s the problem with the whole system. The system has curated this bro-type audience and now they’re like, ‘Oh, women don’t do as well.’ This is any club by the way, not the Cellar, any club, maybe any club in the world, I don’t know, but in New York for sure. A certain