Blame Mitzi!

ManningTheManosphere
SansPrestonVille


Mitzi Shore did not start the infamous Comedy Store in Los Angeles.

Instead, she won the place in lieu of alimony when she divorced the club's co-founder Sammy Shore.

By the time Marc Maron washed ashore at the Store in the late 1980's the young whipper snappers pictured above with Ms. Shore had already cashed their hard won cheques and moved on to bigger and better things.

Meanwhile, Maron quickly fell in with madman Sam Kinison's entourage and it wasn't long before he was forced to leave town in the throes of a cocaine-fuelled psychosis that just about did him in.

By the early '90's son of a preacher man Kinison was dead just as Maron was drifting into New York's alternative comedy scene.

I first became aware of Mr. Maron in the mid-aught's when he turned up as 'progressive' Air America radio's morning man. When that, and his personal life fell through, Maron moved back to Los Angeles and kept trying, and mostly failing, at both radio and pseudo-online audio projects before he and his soon-to-be ever present collaborator Brendan McDonald stumbled on the long form podcast thing way ahead of just about everyone else in 2009.

Sixteen years and more than sixteen hundred episodes later Maron recently announced that he and McDonald are calling it quits, all of which has Maron reminiscing:

...When I was at The Comedy Store losing my mind I was one with the place. I was all in. I lived there. I was a true believer in the power of the place and the system Mitzi Shore had created. I always felt there was a dark energy there that went back to the beginning of modern show business. My mind was generating its own mythos about good and evil and the place that Mitzi, with all her mystical powers, was overseeing. I believed that the beginning of the apocalypse would start in Hollywood. I had full concepts of how. I believed I was in a struggle between good and evil that was universal and my time spent there with Kinison, a true power of megalomaniacal darkness, was informing my prophecy in progress. All I knew, in my psychotic state, was that Mitzi, The Comedy Store, and some of the comics that came out of there were essential in the final unfolding. Crazy, right? But…

The two people that revolutionized the podcast medium and unleashed its potential on the world were me and (Joe) Rogan.

Both of us of products of The Comedy Store and Mitzi’s system.

Do with that what you will...

Imagine that!

.