To a comedian, “I’m dying up here” means they’re bombing onstage.
It’s also the name of the new Showtime series set in the comedy scene of 1970s Los Angeles. “I’m Dying Up Here” is a fictionalized look at those heady days in L.A.
In 1972, Johnny Carson moved “The Tonight Show” from New York City to Burbank, and comics hoping to get discovered started streaming west. The top places to get seen were The Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard, which was run by Mitzi Shore, and Budd Friedman’s Improv on Melrose.
One of those comedians who ended up in L.A. was Jim Carrey, who is now one of the producers of “I’m Dying Up Here.”
“When I first came to L.A., I met somebody at the Improv who said they had a room,” recalls Carrey of one of the first places he lived in town, “and it turned out to be a closet. So for the first year or so I was here, I lived in that closet.”
That little bit of history ends up as part of “I’m Dying Up Here.”
The character isn’t named Jim Carrey, though, and you won’t see any other comedians from the era, either. Though based on the non-fiction book of the same name by William Knoedelseder, the series’ showrunners decided to create composite characters in order to give themselves more freedom to tell stories.
Oscar-winning actress Melissa Leo plays Goldie, who is patterned on Shore — or as the actress puts it, “does an homage to Mitzi.”
In fact, when she took the role and shot the pilot, Leo didn’t know much about Shore.
After reading up on her, however, Leo now calls Shore a hero, noting that women who grew up in the 1930s and ’40s had very few career choices.
Leo says in playing Goldie she discovered that the character understands funny. “She recognizes that as a talent in herself that she can parlay into something.”
In “I’m Dying Up Here,” Goldie becomes something of a tough-love mentor to Ari Graynor’s Cassie, the only female in the group of comedians the series revolves around. Unlike most of the others on the show playing comics, Graynor is not a stand-up.
“What I love about this show is that it marries stand-up comedy and drama and very human relatable experiences,” says the actress, who watched a lot of videos of ’70s comedians to prepare for the role.
One thing she noticed was that they sounded different than the comics of today.
“It’s almost like listening to music,” she says. “I didn’t know a lot about stand-up before, but the rhythms are so different. The cadence is so different.”
Graynor also did a weekend of stand-up, signing up at an open-mike night under her character’s name and performing a routine written for Cassie. She says it went pretty well, but knows there is a buffer between what she was saying onstage and her real self.
“For stand-ups, there is no separation between what they do and sharing the truth,” she says.
The actress says she felt parallels between her character trying to make it and what she went through in the job.
As an example, she points to Elayne Boosler one of the few female comedians who worked in the male-dominated comedy clubs of the ’70s. “People said that she had to be everything at once — their sister, mother, lover, the funniest person in the world and the smartest person in the room,” says Graynor.
“I wanted to prove myself and be taken seriously and be as funny as the guys,” she says.
In the series, it’s two new-to-L.A. comedians (played by Michael Angarano and Clark Duke) who end up in the closet, but it’s not the only Carrey anecdote used in the show.
“Jim was really generous. He would just come in and tell us stories,” says the show’s executive producer Michael Aguilar.
Like other young comics at the time, Carrey’s aim was to get on “The Tonight Show” with Carson.
“It’s amazing just how important it was to comics back then because they respected Johnny and they wanted his OK,” says Carrey. “If Johnny liked me, man, it meant something.”
The comedian says he had been “a big deal” at 21 in his home city of Toronto when he was booked for “Tonight.” A couple of days after arriving in L.A., he did a showcase at The Improv before he was scheduled to appear.
“I had kind of a lukewarm night, and then I heard the news that I had lost ‘The Tonight Show,’ ” he remembers.
Carrey would get on the show six months later, and, indeed, Carson liked him.
And if he didn’t?
“It could have been the end of me,” he admits. “But my brain has always had this fail-safe where I think, ‘It’s going to happen another way.’ ”
