Back
when I began writing about Austin’s comedy scene four years ago, my kid was so little and my
bank account so small that I could rarely afford to venture out to watch the
folks I wrote about. That wasn’t a huge handicap, though, as the scene wasn’t
terribly expansive. Basically, the town had two stand-up spots: The Velveeta
Room and The Laff Stop. The V-Room was a cozy club deep in the Sixth Street
scene that typically featured local comedians as headliners. The Laff Stop was
a 400-seat venue in the northern wilderness of Research Boulevard that also
booked Austin comics but for the most part featured national acts in the top
slots. Where the Velveeta Room was the place you could see really twisted acts
(and I say that lovingly), the Laff Stop was the place you could see comedy
like you’d find on all those cable stand-up shows.
I gravitated more toward the Velveeta Room because I was more interested in
the local comedians. Unfortunately, that meant I never got to the Laff Stop
much. I was lucky enough to see Bill Hicks at the club, at his last show there
before he succumbed to cancer. I’ve seen Robert Hawkins, Chris Cannon, and JR
Brow — all Texans, the latter two locals — at the Stop. And I was a judge at
their annual Funniest Person in Austin Contest this past May. But by and large,
I didn’t know the club that well.
Now, I won’t have the chance to expand my familiarity with the club, and
neither will anyone else. The Laff Stop is no more. Four months ago, Colleen
Buchanan and Bruce Barshop, the owners of the RiverCenter Comedy Club in San
Antonio, bought the Austin club. Ross Jackson, who’d run the club for 10
successful years, stepped down as general manager, and the Laff Stop name was
retired. In a full-body makeover, the venue got a new look, new management, and
a new name: The Capitol City Comedy Club, which was chosen last November in a
“Name the Club” contest.
This change of ownership/management was one of the few pieces of genuine
comedy news to hit the scene — at least from an audience perspective — in a
couple of years. Individually, local comedians had done pretty well, though
none has made that leap to stand-up celebrity. And the clubs had hung in there,
weathering the dramatic decline in the comedy business that followed the glut
of clubs and comics in the Eighties. (Nationally, the number of stand-up clubs
has dwindled from 400-plus to fewer than 300.) The Laff Stop in particular was
a consistent presence, with a loyal and steady clientele who kept returning to
see the stream of popular comedians booked repeatedly by the club. To have it
pass from the scene, or at least be transformed, was to rattle the foundation
of Austin comedy.
What made the change of hands even more interesting, however, was the timing.
With the national comedy scene in the state it is, it is to say the least a
challenging moment to take over a stand-up club. How did the new owners plan to
infuse fresh life into an artform in which the masses seem less and less
interested?
Rich Miller is the man with the answer to that question. Miller, a fixture in
the business for a decade, a man with experience running comedy clubs in
California and Minnesota, was brought in by Buchanan and Barshop to consult for
the first few months of the Capitol City Comedy Club (CCCC). (After February,
he will continue booking the room, but from the Great North.)
As Miller led me across the room that houses the mainstage, the cosmetic
changes — still in progress as we talked, all sorts of buzzing and hammering,
but now complete — were immediately apparent. In its Laff Stop days, the room
had a stage positioned such that anyone getting up mid-act to hit the johns,
any waiter running to and fro for drink orders, was a real distraction. Good
for the comedian who needed a quick laugh and could pick on anyone with a full
bladder; not so good for those with attention deficits who missed a punchline
here or there thanks to the bustle. Now the stage stands on the room’s back
wall, directly opposite where it once was. There is a new backdrop — very
similar to the one in the San Antonio club — and new chairs, covered in
material not unlike your grandmother’s heavy draperies. The overall feel of the
space is roomier somehow. “We want to seat 300 comfortably,” says Miller, who
would rather not push any higher, thereby crowding and “pissing off the last 20
or 30 people.”
More significant than these changes, though, are the invisible and near
invisible ones, namely the politics of new management and the strategies to
keep those 300 seats full. Looming large as such changes are instigated is the
shadow of Ross Jackson, the man who spent a decade steering the Laff Stop.
Margie Coyle, who is in the interesting position of having worked in both
regimes, as manager for the previous owners and day manager for the new owners,
points out, “Ross made this club worth buying. His rapport with the comedians
who worked here was great; he kept it running smooth for 10 years, which is
unheard of. He dedicated 10 years of his life, every day, to running this
place. That’s what it takes, and people worked hard for him.”
Though quick to admit that leaving the Laff Stop brought on mixed emotions,
Jackson says he is comfortable with the move, especially now that he’s had a
few months to breathe and think about it. “I enjoyed my 10 years and felt like
we provided good shows and a lot of good people and helped the local scene as
well,” he reflects. “But there’s a time and a place when you have to move on. I
was getting very very burnt out spending 50 to 60 hours a week there. Bruce and
Colleen offered me the opportunity to stick around, but I thought I’d done all
I could do. I felt like it would be a situation where they had new ideas and I
was used to doing things my way.”
While Miller does plan to do things differently than Jackson, he is reluctant
to criticize the former manager’s style. “Ross is a great guy — absolute great
guy,” he begins, and the tone is sincere. “I’ve gotten to be pretty good
friends with him. I don’t want to re-invent the wheel here; I want to
capitalize on what the Laff Stop did. I don’t want to alienate any of the
existing patrons, but I would like to branch out to some of the people who
aren’t coming in.”
To that end, Miller is out to diversify the lineup of comics who play the new
incarnation of the club. “One complaint I heard about the Laff Stop from a lot
of people — from comedians, from patrons — is that it was a lot of the same
people — comedian-wise — who came in,” says Miller.
Part of the reason for that — and a key problem with the Laff Stop, both
Miller and Coyle agree — was the talent budget. “Everyone affiliated with this
club for the past 10 years did a helluva job,” says Miller, “but I think they
were up against it sometimes because they didn’t have the strength in ownership
that maybe they would have liked. In turn, they ended up putting out a lot of
fires all the time. When your budget is what their budget was compared to what
our budget is — and I prefer not getting into specific numbers but I will say
ours is considerably higher — it gives me the ability to go out and get the
people that might be a little bit, I don’t know, different.”
Coyle is more succinct. “It was way overdue for some money to be put back into
the club. The new owners came with heavy pockets.”
Part of Miller’s strategy is to bring in not just new faces, but new faces
with fresh ideas. “This room is a little more of a profanity/dick-joke room
than I care to see. I would like to get a little bit more sophisticated. And
sophisticated doesn’t mean that we’re not swearing. I mean, my brother Dennis
[Note: Yes, that Dennis Miller] is an intelligent comedian, but he
swears on stage as much as anyone I know. He says `fuck’ constantly. But his
premises are very intelligent, and you can get away with it.
“I hate someone who’s doing a body reference joke and then also saying `fuck.’
It’s an easy cop-out. We’re going to try to get something a little more
original in here. I will sell out to that [low humor] too, because I do realize
some of that stuff sells — it’s a crowd pleaser. But if we were getting three
out of four weeks of lowest-common-denominator comedy, now I want to scale it
back to two out of four, and then one out of four.”
Another strategy Miller is employing involves booking comedians who have lots
of TV credits. For example, when the club holds its grand opening February
8-10, Jeff Cesario will headline. Cesario is producer and head writer for
The Dennis Miller Show (Note: Yes, that Dennis Miller) and he’s
won an ACE award for his HBO show. It’s a ploy that’s based not strictly on
name recognition, but also on the idea that a comedian who has played the tube
a few times is likely to be a more assured, smooth entertainer than your
average joke peddler. In the current scene, it’s something of a gauge of comedy
professionalism.
But though Miller knows the value of a polished comedian who has been on TV,
he is not one of those guys who requires a comedian to be both funny and
hyperactive. “I’m a bit more of a traditionalist,” he admits, “I like a
straight monologist, and energy level doesn’t really concern me — as it seems
to be so important to so many people in the business. I don’t think you have to
be overly energetic to get the job done. That’s kinda what’s wrong with the biz
right now.”
Ferinstance, and good news for all of us, Johnny Steele, who is, thank god, no
Carrottop, has been booked into the CCCC this week. Steele is a razor-sharp
satirist who spends more time floating in his think tank than toiling in a
prop-shop. And generic audience appeal be damned, Steele always has an agenda
and doesn’t hide it behind references to his member.
Still, solid acts or not, filling a comedy club is a very tricky business
these days. “It’s a wild balance between papering and not papering,” says
Miller, referring to the method of filling a club via the giveaway of free
tickets. “Papering has killed the business — it’s a decrease in the talent
budget because you’re not getting anything at the door. Once you start giving
away, you create a cancer in the marketplace; next thing you know, you can’t
get people to pay on Friday and Saturday nights.”
Still, since the Laff Stop was able to pull it off and stay afloat, the CCCC
will continue to offer a certain number of entertainment coupons and birthday
coupons. “In Austin, they’re very effective with their papering. I’ve been in
some cities where they paper and they still don’t get a crowd,” Miller points
out. “But we’re going to try to take very small steps to get away from it. In
the first six months, we’re going to get away from papering the Saturday 10:30
show. Then, by the end of the year, we want to get away from papering the 8:00
show Saturday.”
There are a few other changes that longtime patrons of the Laff Stop will
notice: variations in the menu, Monday open mikes scaled back to twice a month
instead of every week, and no more ComedySportz shows in the lounge on Saturday
nights. The story behind this last move is another indication of how smoothly
Barshop, Buchanan, and their team have made this transition. Les McGehee and
his troupe of improvisational comedians began performing weekly shows in the
small, front room of the club in late 1994 and developed a steady crowd over
the next year, but that arrangement came to an end once the remodeling for CCCC
began. Like Jackson, McGehee says Barshop and Buchanan didn’t push him out, but
they couldn’t be fully accomodating to him, either. “The new owners were
straight with us,” he insists. “Bruce is easy to work with. The remodeling
wasn’t conducive to simultaneous shows in the front room and the main room.
People would like to think we had some kind of bitter dealing with them, but we
didn’t. In fact, our ComedySportz affiliate in San Antonio is in their club
down there.”
Not only do McGehee and Jackson both express satisfaction with the way they
were treated by the new owners and the way they left the comedy scene on
Research, they talk about it as if it’s the best thing that could have happened
for all involved. True, Jackson wouldn’t have minded buying the club when the
old owner sold. And McGehee would have loved to continue building his steadily
growing audience in a regular venue. But neither has been deterred, or even
slowed down to wonder “what if.” Jackson is staying busy running a Comedy
Defensive Driving course in both the CCCC and in his own space on Anderson
Lane, where he also offers Laff and Learn, a comedy-based Texas Alcoholic
Beverage Commission training course for bar and restaurant employees. McGehee
and company are currently negotiating a lease on a space at Northcross Mall
that sounds to be a promising, full-bodied club. The tone each man uses
describing these new developments is summed up nicely by Jackson: “As a matter
of fact, I’ve been kind of giddy over the last three or four months because the
pressure is off. I’m still enjoying seeing the people I used to book, and I had
never had much opportunity to do the things I’m doing now — like go and see
the local scene at places like the Velveeta Room.”
As for the CCCC, it remains to be seen if the new club will be able to pick up
where Ross Jackson left off and lift the numbers to even greater heights. But
Margie Coyle, who has been there and should know, is optimistic. “It’s been a
relatively smooth transition, considering it’s a successful 10-year-old
business that changed names, which is really risky. It’s really early to tell.
But we’re doing the same amount of money we would’ve done last year. And New
Year’s Eve was a sellout, which is always a good sign.”
Meanwhile, Jackson is getting used to the idea that the outside of the
building is about the only thing left from his days in charge. “I’m glad the
name was changed. It keeps my era in itself. I’m not putting down the name
change, it’s just it says `Hey, those 10 years as the Laff Stop were Ross and
his crew.’ And we made a lot of people laugh in Austin.”
Where the biggest comedy news in my career covering the scene here is
concerned, it’s all sunshine and sweet compliments. About the only complaint I
could squeeze out of someone was a gripe by a friend who attended the New
Year’s Eve show. Apparently, the remodeling effort took out the green room — a
haven for comics before and after the show — which used to be behind the old
stage. And with that room went the wall with the irreplaceable autographs of
Bill Hicks and Sam Kinison.
“That wall is gone,” admits Coyle, “though I think it may be in
the walk-in cooler. But if I put myself in the position of a new owner, they
have to create their own Sam Kinison wall. The Laff Stop had a good reputation,
but the Capitol City owners need to come in and do their own thing.”n
Johnny Steele performs through Sun, Feb 4, Wed, at the Capitol City Comedy
Club. The club’s Grand Opening Weekend featuring Jeff Cesario takes place Feb
8-10, Thu-Sat.
Spike Gillespie has written for Cosmopolitan and Playboy, and is a regular
columnist for Prodigy’s online service.
This article appears in February 2 • 1996 and February 2 • 1996 (Cover).