Funny-heavy, not ha-ha
The Show: I’m Dying Up Here, Season 1, Episode 8 The Moment: The hatching chicks
Goldie (Melissa Leo) owns the best comedy club in 1970s Los Angeles. But her comedians are threatening to defect to a rival. Goldie assembles them and holds up head shots of her successes.
“Carson. Carson,” she says, slapping each photo down. “Film career.” (That’s Richard Pryor.) “Development deal.” (Freddie Prinze.) “So if any ’a you wanna go over to Teddy’s for 10 dollars and a sandwich, you know where the door is.”
The comedians squirm. “Money is your enemy,” Goldie continues. “The desire for money, I get it. That hunger, that’s what keeps you awake. And raw enough to still feel the pain that delivered you to my doorstep.” She once raised chickens, she tells them: “Chicks have to break out of their shells. Someone helps them, they die. That struggle, that’s how they survive.”
“That is some analogy,” a comic whispers. “F--- off,” another comic replies. This series is about Funny Heavy, not Funny Ha-Ha. It posits the 1970s as a time when comedy was life or death — when a Black comedian, or a Latino or a woman, felt a moral duty to craft five-minute routines to rip open society and change the world. Like too many shows set in the ’70s, this one sometimes overlooks how fun the decade was and buckles under its own serioso weight. But Leo rescues it. In her maxi skirts and studded jackets she is one tough mother hen.