The most consequential comedy club in America was founded as a rehearsal room for one man's own act. The Comedy Store's house history dates the opening to April 7, 1972, on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, and credits three people: the comedian Sammy Shore, his wife Mitzi, and the comedy writer Rudy De Luca. The stated reason is disarmingly small. Sammy was the longtime opening act for Elvis Presley, and he "needed a place to work out when he wasn't on the road." The club bills itself as the first all-stand-up nightclub in the world — a claim worth attributing to the house rather than treating as settled fact.
The address already had a history. Before the comics, the building was Ciro's, the movie-colony supper club of the 1940s and '50s, and later Ciro's Le Disc, the rock room where the Byrds were discovered in 1964. What changed in 1972 was not the real estate but the bill: for the first time the entire evening was one person, a microphone, and nothing else.
Mitzi Takes the Room
Because Sammy was constantly touring, Mitzi ran the nights — choosing and scheduling who went on. The club credits her with coining the name. When the marriage ended, the club went with her: Sammy, per his obituary, handed over complete ownership in the divorce, and later explained he relinquished control to lower his alimony payments. Sources split on the year — the club's own history and Mitzi Shore's Wikipedia entry say the divorce was 1974, while the club's page and other accounts put her at the controls from 1973.
She then built the thing everyone now means by "the Comedy Store." She bought the building outright in 1976 and expanded it into a multi-room operation anchored by a 450-seat Main Room. In 1978 she opened the Belly Room, a 50-seat space upstairs booked exclusively with female comics — a genuine first, and, as Slate later argued, a complicated one, since a room of one's own could also function as a room you got booked into *instead of* the Main Room, where the industry actually sat.
That last clause is the whole business model. Mitzi Shore did not think of the Store as a nightclub. She thought of it as a college of comedy, a training ground, and she did not pay comics to learn their craft. What she paid them in was spots, and spots were worth something real: as Comedy History 101 notes, *The Tonight Show* moved to Burbank in May 1972, which put the most career-changing booker in television a short drive from her stage. Freddie Prinze got a Carson shot off a Comedy Store set in 1973. The currency was credible.
The Strike
By 1979 the arithmetic had stopped being funny. The club took a cover charge and drink minimums; it paid the waiters, the bartenders, and the cleaners; it paid nobody on stage. Tom Dreesen, a former Teamster, put it to Shore in the line TIME later quoted: "You pay the waiters, you pay the waitresses, you pay the guy who cleans the toilets. Why don't you at least pay the comedians?"
The comics organised as Comedians for Compensation and picketed the Sunset Strip for roughly six weeks beginning in March 1979, with Dreesen, Jay Leno and David Letterman among the leaders. It was not legally a strike — the performers were independent contractors with no contracts to withhold. Some comics crossed. The Store's own account names Argus Hamilton, who negotiated on Shore's side, among them.
The settlement terms are the part where the record genuinely disagrees, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than picking a winner. TIME and Comedy History 101 date the deal to May 4, 1979, and describe it as 50 percent of the door in the Main Room or $25 per set in the smaller rooms. The club's own strike page puts agreement in early June. LA Weekly and Wikipedia report $15 per set, LA Weekly adding a rise to $20 that December. What every version agrees on is the principle: comics got paid.
The cost is not abstract. Steve Lubetkin, born July 23, 1948, struck, and afterwards found himself frozen out of stage time. On June 1, 1979, he jumped from the roof of the Continental Hyatt House next door. The note on his body read: "My name is Steve Lubetkin. I used to work at the Comedy Store."
Why It Still Matters
Before 1979, "exposure" was a complete offer. After it, a club that ran on unpaid stage time had to explain itself. Pay standards spread to New York rooms and underwrote the club boom of the 1980s — the decade in which stand-up became a career with a floor under it rather than an apprenticeship with an unlimited term. Mitzi Shore, who died on April 11, 2018 at 87, lost that fight and still ended up the most important talent developer her art form has had. Both things are true, and the room is still open.
Sources
- The Comedy Store, official house history - The Comedy Store, 'The Strike' — the club's own account of 1979 - Wikipedia, The Comedy Store - Wikipedia, Mitzi Shore - The Comic's Comic, Sammy Shore obituary, 18 May 2019 - Comedy History 101, 'History of the 1979 Comedy Store Strike' - TIME archive, 'The First Comedy Strike' - LA Weekly, 'Death, Laughs and a Comedian Strike' - Comedian Index, Steve Lubetkin - Slate, on the Belly Room