New series puts female comedians in spotlight
The comedy scene of 1970s Los Angeles was a great time and place for talented, young standup comedians with ambition and appetites for drugs and alcohol. It just wasn’t especially hospitable to women, who were treated as also-rans and groupies.
The new Showtime series “I’m Dying Up Here,” which debuts June 4, dramatizes this world of big laughs, career-making breaks and blatant sexism. Adapted from William Knoedelseder’s nonfiction book of the same title, the show stars Michael Angarano, Clark Duke and Andrew Santino as some of the fictional comics vying for fame and attention.
It also features two prominent female characters: Melissa Leo, the Academy and Emmy Award-winning actress (“The Fighter”) as Goldie, the no-nonsense proprietor of one of the city’s top comedy clubs, and Ari Graynor (“For a Good Time, Call ...”) as Cassie, a performer holding her own in a male-dominated field.
Leo and Graynor, reunited by conference spoke about working on “I’m Dying Up Here,” looking back at the 1970s through a modern-day lens, and serious lessons they’ve learned from their time in the funny business. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. Q: What did the 1970s mean to you? MELISSA LEO: The ’70s is my youth. And while it was going on, we going, well, this is really boring. In eighth grade, we had a sock hop at my school, because that seemed so much more interesting than anything that was going to happen for us, musically.
ARI GRAYNOR: I wish that I could have lived during that time. It just felt free and unknown, in a different way than things feel today. It’s easy to feel like everything’s been done and nothing is new anymore. Q: What appealed to you about your roles? LEO: For me, what Goldie’s talent comes down to is, she knows funny, and she doesn’t care if it’s coming out of the Latino guy or the black guy, or the girl or the white guy. I think Goldie knows from her own existence, nobody accomplishes anything by somebody giving it to them.
GRAYNOR: Cassie is so strong-willed. She’s not riddled in insecurity. She’s not afraid to walk in that office and say, this is what I want, this what I deserve. I could get very defensive of her as a character, when certain directors would come in and say she was being so petulant, like a teenager. I was like, “No, she’s not!” It’s sometimes the blindness of youth, you just see directly in front of your foot.
Q: Did you want to try performing standup before you did this show?
GRAYNOR: I went to this one event in New York, right after I got cast, and Chris Rock was there. I said, “I’m thinking about whether I should go do open mic.” He said: “Don’t do it. Because it’s going to go terrible. And you’re going to lose all confidence.” And I thought, well, if Chris Rock just said I don’t have to do it, then I’m not going to do it right now. We did some open mics, a few episodes in. I don’t think I’ll be booking any arenas any time soon.
LEO: Around 1980, ’81, Budd Friedman invited me, in New York City, to a class at the Improv. I said, well, I’ve got to go try that. I got up and that thing of, “Now be funny!” — I was not going to rise to it. I was not going to know what to do with that. And I never went back.
Q: The show underscores how comedy in the 1970s was segregated by gender, and how rare it was for women to achieve positions of prominence then. Do you feel like things have improved, in comedy and entertainment, since then?
GRAYNOR: I went to an open mic in New York, just to sit and watch, and it was me in a basement with eight men. And almost all of them made a joke where the punch line was (a crude word about women). When the seventh guy got up to tell his joke, he said something like, “That would have played a lot better if everyone hadn’t already told a version of that joke.” I thought, oh, man, this is dark. This is scary. It’s uncomfortable.
LEO: I’m pretty sure we’ve gone backward, in exactly that regard. On “Homicide: Life on the Street,” I became — much to my surprise — one of the first women, as a regular on a television show, who wore trousers regularly.