How do you honor the death of a comedy club? First you kill.
When Dave Attell took the stage late Friday night at the last headlining show at Broadway’s Carolines, which is closing after three decades, Dave Attell tackled the job quickly, spraying punchlines, toasting the front row and making sure the audience raved. knew it was part of history. In a galloping tangent, Attell urged anyone who wasn’t laughing to leave. “Bring a table and a chair, because we have to clear this place,” he said.
Attell performed in Carolines between Christmas and New Years for 13 years, a holiday tradition for audiences who wanted something much nastier than the Rockettes. This time he mixed some heartfelt, even melancholy notes into his virtuoso deadpan rhythms to celebrate the passing of a legendary comedy room. But comedians grieve differently. As a waiter walked past the podium to the door, Attell, wearing a signature black jacket and baseball cap, asked him where he was going, pausing jokingly: “Unemployment.”
Like a drama queen writing her will, New York dies continuously and loudly. Hardly a day goes by without gnashing your teeth in a much-loved part of this town that’s calling it quits. Every closed restaurant is the end of an era. The most mundane and predictable demise, the end of a Broadway run, gets extensive self-examination and a public autopsy. This seems (mostly) sensible to me. It’s healthy to mark the end of things, and what could be better than a great finale? But I’ve spent too long covering show business in this dynamic city to get too sentimental. We should not overly fetishize institutions. One of the legacies of “Stomp,” which closes next month after a 29-year run, is all the shows that weren’t produced at the theater. Change is good.
And yet I felt a little melancholy as I descended the stairs for the last time to Caroline’s, a steep descent that gave you a chance to adjust to the gaudy lights of Times Square. Caroline’s isn’t technically gone; after a final New Year’s Eve show, it produces the New York Comedy Festival and other unnamed projects. But with the stage backdrop, stools, and other parts of the club soon to be shipped to the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, NY, the loss of this room is significant.
When Caroline’s opened in Chelsea in 1981 (it had two houses before moving to the Theater District in the next decade), New York comedy clubs were essentially dive bars with stages, with full bills of short sets of low-paid or unpaid comics desperate for were looking for gigs. time to work out jokes. Caroline’s introduced a new model: schedules by more established talent, bigger pay days and a more upscale atmosphere. There was plush carpeting and a dressing room. Instead of a brick wall, the strips faced a checkerboard pattern that artfully missed a few pieces. In a 1985 story in The Times, Robert Morton, a producer of “Late Night With David Letterman,” described Caroline’s as “the first yuppie comedy club,” becoming perhaps the last person to use that word as a compliment.
Many came into contact with the club through the television program ‘Caroline’s Comedy Hour’, which ended in the mid-1990s. The impressive lineups offer a history of modern stand-up. In a 1992 episode, Attell performed with Dave Chappelle, Louis CK, Jon Stewart, Susie Essman and Colin Quinn.
Caroline’s being in the heart of Broadway mattered, adding a touch of class to stand-up, an art form rooted in vaudeville and minstrel shows that then rarely gained the critical respect of theater and film. Caroline Hirsch, the club’s founder, played a key role in raising stand-up status. You can even argue that she helped pave the way for the transformation of Times Square, which opened just a few years before Disney arrived in the area.
When I asked about her most memorable nights at the club the Friday before the show, Hirsch recalled the time Robin Williams took over a Jeff Garlin set with some inspired bickering and a string of Kevin Hart performances. She also told a story about how Don King walked into the club when John Witherspoon told a joke about him. Her memories underlined the real importance of Caroline’s: the dizzying number of memorable experiences there. I had more than my fair share.
Caroline’s was the only place I saw veteran stars like Dick Gregory, Richard Lewis and Damon Wayans. Before he was on “Saturday Night Live” I caught Michael Che there. And years before he had a special, I knew Ricky Velez was going to get one after seeing him do an electric opening set. The most memorable part of a Tiffany Haddish show was when she saw Whoopi Goldberg in the audience and tearfully described how important it was as a child to see the veteran star on television.
Caroline’s was not dogmatic about the type of comics it was booking. It had no corporate identity, which may have hurt the brand, but made it unpredictable, with talent of different ages, backgrounds and styles. Bo Burnham recorded an album there early in his career and Phoebe Robinson got her start by taking a comedy class at Caroline’s.
One of the funniest shows of all time I’ve ever seen was Rory Scovel playing Caroline for an hour. A decade before John Mulaney toured arenas with bits about fame and addiction, he played a hilarious hour at Caroline’s telling jokes about his marriage and his alcoholism.
Caroline’s wasn’t above odd bookings either (Larry “Bud” Melman performed there). I once saw a 13-year-old do a stand-up act and also made the mistake of taking my 7-year-old daughter to a Ron Funches show, only to run out when the jokes got too dirty.
Towards the end of the night, Attell asked his opening acts, Ian Fidance, Jordan Jensen and Wil Sylvince to join him on stage. They riffed on each other, before Attell turned to the crowd and asked with strange formality, “May I?” Then he pulled out a blue recorder, which he described as “somewhere between a flute and a bong”.
Between the common jokes he played simple, wistful songs. He commented on the sadness of the instrument’s sound. Then he opened his jacket and took out a second recorder, a yellow one. Watching this gruff, grizzled legend wield two colorful pipes was his own viewing gag. It was also a reminder that while Attell’s oft-imitated delivery has its own musicality, when it comes to expressing certain kinds of emotion, no joke can really match a few notes played with conviction.
He then beckoned Caroline Hirsch onto the stage, calling her “a force” and thanking her for “making us all better”. She described the moment as “bittersweet” and said she would produce more shows in the future. Then everyone took selfies on stage to commemorate the moment and awkwardly shuffled off stage.
