Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here is a sprawling dramedy about a claustrophobically insular world: stand-up comedy in Los Angeles in 1973, just after Johnny Carson moved The Tonight Show to California and every young comic in the country suddenly headed west. Created by Dave Flebotte with help from executive producer Jim Carrey and loosely adapted from the nonfiction book of the same name by William Knoedelseder, the series has been, to put it kindly, polarizing. Some critics hate it (or perhaps have just grown weary of the cultural obsession with sad clowns). Some say give it a chance. And some, like, me, think it’s actually pretty great.
But few can quibble with Oscar winner Melissa Leo’s star performance as Goldie, proprietress of an eponymous comedy club where aspiring stand-ups flock to work their material out in front of a crowd known to include Carson’s bookers. The analogous character in Knoedelseder’s book is Mitzi Shore, mother of Pauly and cofounder of The Comedy Store, the legendary L.A. institution where Letterman and Leno made their names in the seventies. But Goldie, Leo insists, is not really Mitzi, but just another tough broad from the same era who managed to box out some space for herself on the top rung of a ladder built by men, for men.
“There’s only one rule in this business, and so far no one’s figured out what it is,” someone quips in the series’s pilot episode. It seems like a nod to the many prior projects that have attempted to crack the strange allure of stand-up culture. Admittedly I’m Dying Up Here isn’t reinventing the wheel. If anything it’s jumping on a bandwagon overflowing with recent offerings: HBO’s Crashing, Netflix’s Lady Dynamite, Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. But Showtime’s got Goldie, a character as enigmatic as any currently on television. Leo plays her as a shape-shifting mess of contradictions; from one angle she’s a tough-loving den mother; from another a self-abnegating wet nurse; from another a viciously vindictive power broker. She’s a visionary with no sense of her own blind spots, a relentless forward-thinker who can’t escape her past, a card shark who sometimes seems fooled by her own poker face. If she’s tough on the boys— misanthropic Bill (Andrew Santino); affable Ralph (Erik Griffin); dopey Edgar (Al Madrigal); talented, self destructive Nick (Jake Lacy), among many others—she’s tougher on the girls, namely Cassie (Ari Graynor), an orphaned Jew from Texas whose struggle to find her authentic comic voice provides a compelling through line in this shambolically plotted show.
“Acting, it’s hit or miss, make them laugh, make them cry, hopefully they have a little entertainment,” Leo muses, channeling her character. “To be a comic you must reveal yourself in your most grotesque nudity. And it’s only then, when the truth gets told, when the audience recognizes it somewhere in themselves, that they get that great medicine of laughter.”
“It’s extraordinary,” she added, not that she’d ever be willing to give it a go. We chatted about that, about ’70s nostalgia, and about why it was such a rare treat to play a character like Goldie.
You told the L.A. Times: “In playing Goldie I find I’m getting an opportunity that I have begged [for] . . . which is to play a woman that I can believe.” What did you mean by that?
Well, for many years, and probably more as I get older with each passing year (it’s odd, but that happens), the opportunity to play someone that is well rounded, that is her own person, [has been limited]. More often I’m asked to play somebody’s mother, somebody’s partner, somebody’s wife. Goldie is her own person. The club is what defines her, but the club is what she created. That’s unusual in a woman character. It seems to me that male characters get a lot more opportunities for that expression of self.
Tell me a little bit about how you came to the part.
I rarely know too much about anything I’m getting involved in. I was sent the pilot script and was just gobsmacked that they wanted me to play Goldie. I had a handful of days before I flew out to L.A. to do the pilot, so I went and bleached my hair at a local salon in the New York countryside where I live. I thought, well, that will get Goldie to California! About three or four days into shooting the pilot, I found out, oh, there’s a book? Oh, this is based on a real person?
I’m not playing that amazing human being discussed in the book. I don’t know if we’d have stand-up comedy the way we do with Mitzi Shore’s chutzpah. But I am not playing Mitzi Shore because I didn’t even know she existed when I began playing the part. But she was one of those unique individuals who did something no one else did, and that gave me a really good stepping off point for where to take Goldie. Oh, play a woman who’s trying to do something nobody’s ever done before. That’s interesting.
The word chutzpah is appropriate. Goldie’s Jewish with roots in the Catskills Borscht Belt, and the show delves a bit into the roots of stand-up comedy culture in the Yiddish theater. Is that a history you felt any connection to?
That prompted the bleaching of my hair. I’m red headed. I’m such a goy. Goldie has this beautiful speech about her grandmother in Treblinka. I had to make that real. I grew up imagining that I was far more Jewish than I’d ever have a hope in hell of being, because of the environment I was raised in in New York.
Your command of Yiddish in the past five minutes has been pretty good.
Like I said, it’s a food and a culture that I have a great deal of respect for. And who doesn’t like words like chutzpah?
And goy. Don’t forget goy. Your character is very funny, but she’s not a comic. Did you feel it was necessary to understand what it was to do stand-up? Did you ever try it?
I’ve never tried it. I would be much too terrified. My friends tell me that I’m funny. A little like Goldie is—a little bit less on purpose than the comic needs to be. To stand up in front of a bunch of people and make them laugh? It seems pretty scary to me.
I read a couple of somewhat curmudgeonly takes on the show from male writers, who, I felt, missed what I saw as the center of the story: the relationship between Goldie and Cassie, and their two different ideas of what it means to be a woman in a man’s world. It’s an ensemble cast, but would you agree that that relationship is at the heart of it?
Well, I was born a girl, and I’ve been a female all my life, so the perspective I have has that in it. I did not quite see it that way. But what you’re saying makes good sense because I’m Dying Up Here is not just another show about stand-up comics. It’s doing something that was happening in the ’70s and has ceased to happen in our society. And that is: true advancement of the human species. There’s a willingness to call a spade a spade in the show. We’re not practicing political correctness. We’re practicing humanism. Something was going on in the country in the '70s that is not happening today. Now we’ve all been told: Don’t ask, don’t tell about everything. That’s such a big problem.
I think there’s a wonderful notion that politically correct implies that we would be respectful of one another. But really what it’s doing is controlling people from telling the truth about things. I might be alone, but if my ass looks big in this, I would prefer that everybody tell me that. I think our society could use a little shot of truth. That’s one of the great joys of the show. It’s very true. Maybe it’s a little hard to remember the kind of empowerment that was going on for women in that day: why a woman from that time would get to be a certain age and go, yeah, I bet I could be president of the United States. There’s an environment that she grew up in that’s not present today. If the show is more than just a show about stand-up comics, if it’s a commentary on the social state of things—maybe by looking back we can remember that sometimes the truth is more important than a polite lie.
Is that your personal memory of the ’70s? That it was a time when the culture was advancing?
No, that was the ’60s. I was born in 1960, and in the first decade of my life, anything was possible. The Black Panthers could rise. Martin Luther could be king. The ’70s were the slow march toward quelling that. Coming of age in the ’70s, it was a bland and boring time compared to the first decade of my life. Discotheque? Now we all look back on it with great nostalgia. It’s a whole other thing to look back on it now.
We’re nostalgic for the aesthetics. I’m not so sure we’re nostalgic for the politics.
I don’t know. Right at this moment I would do anything for Jimmy Carter to be president and not the man who is. Everybody thought Carter was kind of plain. He was way too boring to be president. I would give anything for Jimmy Carter.
There’s a particular jones right now in the culture for stories about stand up comedians. It’s Dying Up Here picks up a generation after another recent show, Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, about a character who’s kind of reminiscent of Joan Rivers. Did comedians like Rivers have an impact on you growing up?
Oh golly, I don’t know, I think the comics that I had that feeling about probably were more male. Talking to Judy Gold, who came and did the show, she’s been around since back in the day as a female stand up. You kind of had to invent something, [a persona] that wasn’t quite who you were. The presentation of females is always such a thing. Fellas can present in a lot of ways and more easily be truly who they are. What interests me—funny, drama, whatever—is truth. Someone who comes to mind is Lenny Bruce. It was down and dirty and true. Growing up, I would look at somebody like Joan Rivers, and go, oh my god, the hair and the makeup and the clothing and the dissing herself. What? And now I look at it, of course, and I thank God for Joan Rivers. That she, of course, was advancing it for us. Anyone brave enough to do what she was doing . . . I wouldn’t be talking to you without people like Joan Rivers. We’ve gotta both know that.
It felt like Goldie, the way she’s written, her background, has a little bit of Joan Rivers in her.
Here’s one thing: The guy who touches up Goldie’s hair used to touch up Joan’s. Yes, really truly. This really nice hairdresser out here that I go to used to do Rivers’s hair. So yes: There is a common thread.
This interview has been condensed and edited.