NOTABLE DEATHS ELSEWHERE
Richie Tienken, 75
Comedian, founder of the Comic Strip club
Richie Tienken, a founder of the influential Manhattan comedy club the Comic Strip, where Eddie Murphy, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and countless other leading comics did some of their earliest work, died Feb. 27 in Ridgewood, New Jersey. He was 75.
His wife, Jeannie Tienken, confirmed his death and said the cause had not been determined. In recent years, he had struggled with throat cancer.
In the mid-1970s, Tienken, who owned several bars in the Bronx, went to see one of his bartenders, an aspiring comic, perform at the comedy club Catch a Rising Star, which was in Manhattan at the time. It was a Monday night — normally a slow one in the bar business — and Tienken was impressed by how packed Catch a Rising Star was, as told in his 2012 book, written with Jeffrey Gurian, “Make ’Em Laugh: 35 Years of the Comic Strip, the Greatest Comedy Club of All Time!”
In a telephone interview, Tienken’s son Richie said another business fact was not lost on his father: At the time, comics weren’t generally paid (though the Comic Strip did eventually start paying modest amounts).
“He was paying bands $400 a night” at his bars, the younger Tienken said. His father did the math, and he decided that opening a comedy club to compete with Catch a Rising Star and the Improv, the only other prominent comedy club in Manhattan at the time, could be profitable.
He and his partners settled on a run-down bar on Second Avenue between 80th and 81st streets.
The Comic Strip (now known as Comic
Strip Live) opened in 1976, and a long list of careers began or were propelled along there.
“Richie Tienken’s club gave me my start in comedy,” Seinfeld, who first performed there in 1976, said through a spokesperson. “And he had a wonderful, fatherly way about him that gave us all a feeling of encouragement as we stumbled around his stage trying to figure out how to do it. We all loved seeing him every night, and he took good care of us.”
Seinfeld returned to the club to perform a 2017 Netflix special, “Jerry Before Seinfeld,” in which he included the first jokes he told from the Comic Strip stage.
Murphy, soon to achieve stardom on “Saturday Night Live,” was another comic who honed his stand-up at the club in its early days.
Tienken and one of his co-founders, Robert Wachs, managed him for a time, and they both had producer credits on some of Murphy’s movies.
A somewhat later group included Adam Sandler, Ray Romano and Rock, who wrote the introduction for “Make ’Em Laugh” and compared comedy clubs like Catch a Rising Star and the Comic Strip to colleges for young standups.
“Catch was Yale, and the Strip was Illinois State University, Urbana,” he wrote. “Catch was stressful, like you were always on the verge of being expelled if you didn’t keep up your grades. The Strip was laid back. If you put in the work and studied, you would do well. But if you blew off a term smoking pot, it didn’t go on your permanent record.”
“He had powerful shoulders and was genial,” Rock wrote, “like a bouncer who babysat on the side.”
This month, the one that comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, Americans celebrate women’s history. The theme in 2021 — “Valiant Women Refusing to be Silenced” — is a continuation of last year’s COVID-postponed centennial celebrations of the 1920 ratification of the women’s suffrage amendment. Throughout the month we can expect talking heads to ask their guests, as they did about Black heroes last month, what woman has influenced their lives. (No fair naming mothers, whose moment comes in May on Mother’s Day Sunday.)
Promoted by Maryland’s own Congresswoman Barbara Mikulski, Women’s History Month was officially designated as such by President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Ever since, it has brought welcomed attention to both women’s issues and the often forgotten women who fought for equality and refused to be silenced. Still, if you need a promotional month, you aren’t equal.
There awaits in Congress an opportunity to truly celebrate a major step on the long and tortuous path to women’s equality by certifying the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as the 28th amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Like the suffrage amendment, the ERA was buried in congressional committees for years after its first presentation to Congress in 1921. Written by the indomitable suffragist-turned-equal-rights advocate Alice Paul, its main article reads “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” In 1972, after a burst of interest in civil rights and the work of many valiant women refusing to be silenced, the ERA received the necessary two-thirds vote in Congress. Campaigning then began for the required approval of 38 (three-quarters) of the states. Thirty states had ratified within two years and another five by the deadline imposed by Congress of seven years. And then the movement stalled, three states short of the requirement.
Right-wing forces led by Phyllis Schlafly, along with economic interests such as insurance companies, had initiated an antiERA campaign based on contradictory lines of thinking.
The first claimed that the ERA would lead to unisex bathrooms, require women to serve in combat, eliminate protections for women in the workplace and at home, and lead to more abortions. In effect, it would overturn American civilization.
The second set of arguments claimed that the ERA was not needed because women were already protected by the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act (women were famously included in the latter piece of legislation in an unsuccessful effort to torpedo the act overall). Over 20 states, including Maryland, already have equal rights provisions in their state constitutions, this thinking goes. So why clutter up the U.S. Constitution with an unneeded amendment?
For various reasons these supposed protections have had only a limited effect on the stubborn discriminations against women, however. A case in point: As late as last year Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Library was paying lower wages for similar work to female library supervisors than a male supervisor. The ERA would provide tangible changes in the relationship of women to the law. Presently sex is not subject to judicial strict scrutiny nor is it an inherently suspect legal category like race or ethnicity. The ERA would create a proper federal foundation to end various forms of discrimination. Additionally, it would serve as a powerful symbol of our national commitment to sex equality.
There is now an opportunity to certify the ERA. Thirty-eight states have now approved the amendment; the last, Virginia, did so in January 2020. But the amendment still faces two hurdles.
One, Congress had established deadlines for the ratification of the ERA that have expired, and much of the opposition to the ERA focuses on procedural grounds. As several senators, including Maryland’s Ben Cardin, have pointed out, what Congress has established, it can remove.
Secondly, four state legislatures have rescinded their vote for the ERA, a clearly unconstitutional effort that would open the serious amendment process to continual partisan pandering. By a simple majority, Congress can support the Cardin-Murkowski-Speier resolution rescinding the time deadlines and certifying the ERA as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution.
As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once explained, “I would like my granddaughters when they pick up the U.S. Constitution to see that … women and men are persons of equal stature. I’d like them to see that that is a basic principle of our society.”