Farewell to Mitzi Shore, Comedy's Legendary Godmother
Mitzi Shore, the impresario and owner of L.A.’s legendary club The Comedy Store, where comics like David Letterman, Jay Leno, Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, Andy Kaufman, Richard Lewis and pretty much everyone else you can think of launched their careers and cultivated their material over the years, died Wednesday, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. She was 87.
It’s impossible to overstate the influence Mitzi Shore had over comedy as we know it today. From the time she took control of the Comedy Store in 1974 (a parting gift from her ex-husband, founder and comic Sammy Shore, who gave her his ownership stake in the club as a way of mitigating his alimony payments), she put into practice booking and managerial techniques that seem obvious now but at the time were revolutionary: Holding comics to tight 15-minute sets; allowing comics to consist of an entire bill, rather than mixing them in with jugglers and acrobats and other vaudevillian novelty acts; thinking out a line-up so there would be a variety of voices heard in a single evening.
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