Comic Strip Live

The Comic Strip Live is the oldest stand-up comedy showcase club in New York City and the world, located at 1568 Second Avenue (between 81st and 82nd Streets).

Beginnings

Before emerging as venue spotlighting only stand up comedians, the club originally featured singers, magicians, and novelty acts. Chris Rock used to clean tables to get extra stage time and Colin Quinn was a bartender at the club as well.

Present

Primarily a showcase club, the Comic Strip encourages performers to consistently write, perform and perfect new material. Once a year, the club holds an "Audition Lottery", where aspiring newcomers line up to be given a date to try out their routine on "Audition Night". If they do well, the club's talent booker passes them. "Passing" means getting a chance to work late night, where you perfect your act. This occurs weeknights after the regular show has ended.

Guinness World Record

From June 3, 2008 through June 5 the Comic Strip Live broke the Guinness World Record for the Longest Continuous Stand Up Comedy Show finishing at slightly beyond the 50-hour mark. The entire event was hosted by William Stephenson and included performances by Dave Attell, Judah Friedlander, Ted Alexandro, Tony Rock, Jeffrey Ross, Mike Birbiglia, Judy Gold, Rich Vos, Greg Giraldo and more.

Laugh Factory

Coordinates: 34°5′52.8″N 118°21′52.1″W / 34.098000°N 118.364472°W / 34.098000; -118.364472 The Laugh Factory is a comedy club with locations on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, Long Beach, California, Chicago, and inside the Tropicana Las Vegas. The chain is owned by Jamie Masada.

History

Masada arrived in America at age 14. He worked multiple jobs in Hollywood to support his family back home, while also performing on the comedy circuit to build his stand-up career. Despite the fact that he was living in a garage and barely spoke English, he combined Persian and Hebrew and soon was working with professional comedians like Richard Pryor, David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Redd Foxx. Masada's father told him, “Making people laugh is the greatest Mitzvah of all.” In 1979, after a dispute over club owners refusing to pay comedians, a then 16-year-old Masada decided to open a new venue for comedians to perform. After obtaining a loan of $10,000 from Neal Israel, he opened the Laugh Factory in a building formerly belonging to Groucho Marx.Richard Pryor was the first comedian to perform at the club.

Comic Strip Live (TV series)

Comic Strip Live is a weekly, late-night, hour-long stand-up comedy showcase that aired on the Fox network from 1989-1994. It started as a local show at Igby's comedy club. It was originally hosted by John Mulrooney and filmed at the comedy club, Igby's. Jamie Masada, owner of the Laugh Factory proposed that they take the show nationally and Fox agreed and moved the show to the Laugh Factory in Hollywood. Mulrooney was replaced by Gary Kroeger for the second season and then Wayne Cotter for the remaining seasons. By the end of the run, the show was filmed at the Laugh Factory.

The show was successful enough that Fox created a prime time version called The Sunday Comics.

See also

References

External links

Comic strip

A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, these have been published in newspapers and magazines, with horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in daily newspapers, while Sunday newspapers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections. With the development of the internet, they began to appear online as web comics.

There were more than 200 different comic strips and daily cartoon panels in American newspapers alone each day for most of the 20th century, for a total of at least 7,300,000 episodes.

Strips are written and drawn by a comics artist or cartoonist. As the name implies, comic strips can be humorous (for example, "gag-a-day" strips such as Blondie, Bringing Up Father, Marmaduke, and Pearls Before Swine).

Starting in the late 1920s, comic strips expanded from their mirthful origins to feature adventure stories, as seen in Popeye, Captain Easy, Buck Rogers, Tarzan, and The Adventures of Tintin. Soap-opera continuity strips such as Judge Parker and Mary Worth gained popularity in the 1940s. All are called, generically, comic strips, though cartoonist Will Eisner has suggested that "sequential art" would be a better genre-neutral name.

Comic strip (disambiguation)

A Comic strip is a sequence of drawings that tells a story.

Comic strip may also refer to: