I’m Dying Up Here Deserves the Heckling: New at Reason

Consider television critic Glenn Garvin every stand-up comic’s worst heckler with his analysis of Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here:

Somebody—Harry Shearer? Al Franken? Memory and Google both fail me—describing one of the grisly bloodbaths among the cast in the early day of Saturday Night Live once said, “It’s not comedy if somebody’s not crying.” That’s very much the idea behind Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here, a melodrama about the lives of a group of young stand-up comics scuffling through the comedy-club dives of Los Angeles as they wait for their big break.

In the world of I’m Dying Up Here, comics succeed not by telling jokes but by ripping their own hearts out on stage. They achieve authenticity not by getting laughs but by dishing their secret fears, avarices and perversions to a bunch of voyeuristic strangers. “These are tortured souls who leave it all out there every night,” declares Goldie, the owner of the seedy club where most of the show takes place. “That volatility, that pain—that’s the price of brilliance.”

If this seems a bit of an overwrought view of, say, Jay Leno’s monologues or Steve Martin’s salute to King Tut, you’ve already zeroed in on the weakness at the heart of I’m Dying Up Here: its relentless pretension.

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