Download I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Standup Comedy's Golden Era AudioBook Free
I'm Dying Up Here chronicles the collective approaching old of the standup comedians who defined American humor during the past three decades. Blessed early in the Baby Boom, they was raised watching The Tonight Show, visited school during Vietnam and Watergate, migrated en masse to Los Angeles in the middle-1970s, and created an artistic community unlike any before or since. These were arguably the funniest people of their generation, living in a late-night world of making love, drugs, dreams, and laughter. For just one brief shining minute, standup comics were as revered as rock and roll stars. It was Comedy Camelot but, of course, it couldn't carry on. In the late 1970s, William Knoedelseder was a cub reporter given to pay the burgeoning local comedy scene for the Los Angeles Times. He had written the first major magazine profiles of Jay Leno, David Letterman, Andy Kaufman, among others. He surely got to know many of them well. Therefore he covered the scene too when the comedians-who were not paid for doing at the career-making-or-breaking venue called the Comedy Store-tried to change an exploitative system and incidentally tore apart their own close-knit community. Now Knoedelseder has gone back again to interview the major members to tell the whole story of that golden era and of the hit that finished it. Full of revealing portraits of many of the best-known comedic talents of our era, I'm Dying Up Here's also a poignant story of the price tag on success and the horrible cost of failure-professional and moral.
