Stand-up comedy in Chicago
By: Vince Vieceli and Bill Brady
Contributors: Brady, Bill (Comedian), author
Series: Images of America; Images of America
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Charleston, South Carolina
Language: eng
Number of pages: 127
ISBN-13: 9781467111843
Subjects: Stand-up comedy; Pictorial works; Comedians; History
Description: Ten years after Chicago saw its first full-time comedy club open, the landscape was decidedly different. "Stand-up comedy has exploded in the last couple of years," a club owner told the Chicago Tribune in 1985, "that's the only way to describe it: exploded." It was truly a comedy boom, with as many as 16 clubs operating at once, and it lasted nearly a decade before fading, taking with it some of Chicago's oldest comedy stages, including the Comedy Cottage, Comedy Womb, and Who's on First. Still, stalwarts like Barrel of Laughs (south) and Zanies (north) persevered. That part of the story is known; overlooked is the fact there was a comedy boom, period. To hear the story, it is as if stand-up comedy innately morphed from a dated nightclub scene to what one Chicago Sun-Times writer called "Chicago's atomic comedy blast."