Black comedy club with touch of class
ALL JOKES ASIDE | 'Funny Business' has one last laugh with South Loop club
Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle stalked its stage. So did Jamie Foxx, Cedric the Entertainer and best-selling author and radio superstar Steve Harvey.
(Brian Jackson/Sun-Times)
Where: Thorne Auditorium, Northwestern School of Law, 375 E. Chicago
Tickets: $5 (312-494-9509; www.chicagohumanities.org)
Bernie Mac got several standing ovations there in the middle of a set. D.L. Hughley says it was the first place he felt like a pro.
When the black-owned South Loop comedy club All Jokes Aside opened in 1991, in a segregated city whose laugh lairs were largely patronized by whites, it was a haven for black comedians and black comedy mavens alike.
Many of them share fond and funny memories in an as-yet-unfinished documentary called "Phunny Business: A Black Comedy." Talks are under way for a possible premiere on Showtime.
Twenty minutes of the film will be previewed Sunday at a Chicago Humanities Festival event titled "A Funny Business: The Rise and Fall of All Jokes Aside." Screenwriter and erstwhile "Saturday Night Live" cast member Tim Kazurinsky will moderate.
"I realized that none of my friends in town had ever heard of this place," says Los Angeles-based John Davies, executive producer of "Phunny Business" along with former All Jokes co-owner Raymond Lambert and Filmworkers post-production company owner Reid Brody. "None of my white friends ever went to that club."
Davies, a native Chicagoan, produced "Sneak Previews" and "Wild Chicago" on WTTW-Channel 11 and went on to co-create "Run's House" on MTV. He first visited All Jokes while working with the L.A.-based charitable organization Comic Relief.
One of its comedians, Sinbad (he of the oft-mocked baggy pants), asked for help with a philanthropic event he was doing in Chicago at All Jokes. Davies jetted in, checked out a show and was "blown away."
All Jokes garnered national attention when Comedy Central set up shop on site to tape 13 episodes of a series called "Comic Justice." In 1994, a short-lived outpost opened in Detroit.
"Our ultimate goal," Lambert told Black Enterprise in 1995, "is to build a national chain."
Rick Uchwat, owner of Zanies comedy club on North Wells since 1978, made occasional visits to All Jokes' Chicago room during the '90s.
"It was a nice club," Uchwat says. "They ran it well."
And they lured the vastly under-served black audience he never could.
"And I tried," says Uchwat, whose crowds have been mostly white in a mostly white part of town. "I tried to get a mixed audience [at Zanies] for years. ... Comedy is funny. It should be universal."
A bright and ambitious Morehouse College marketing major who'd moved to Chicago to work at the broker-dealer Gardner Rich & Co., Lambert was part owner of All Jokes (there were three, including James Alexander and Mary Lindsey, who currently operates Jokes & Notes on King Drive in Bronzeville), and he imbued the place with his stylistic and comedic sensibilities.
"I wasn't trying to censor anybody," the low-key Lambert says in a roomy suite at Astrolab on West Erie, where he and co-writer Davies are editing their documentary along with fellow producer Brian Kallies. "I became a fan of stand-up, so then I went back and studied all the great comics. Or at least good black comedians. So I took pride in the fact that you had to have an act. [A set on TV's] 'Def [Comedy] Jam' is seven minutes long, whereas in a club it's a completely different animal. Our headliners were going to do 45 minutes or an hour. A feature is going to do 20 to 30. You really had to have something to say and a point of view.
"The idea of just cursing or shock value, it didn't work because we had a really sophisticated audience. You had a broad range of people, from everyday working guys to a doctor, a lawyer. You covered everything, and you had to navigate those waters."
Which isn't to say All Jokes comics avoided working blue.
"Going in that place, the first thing you learned was, don't sit in the front because you could become part of the show," says Chris Gardner, an All Jokes patron and the owner of Gardner Rich LLC, who nowadays is most widely known for his bestselling memoir The Pursuit of Happyness and the hit movie it spawned starring Will Smith. "There was a guy sitting in the front row one time. I'll never forget it. Jamie Foxx took one look at him -- and this cat had some serious dreadlocks, but they were very symmetrical and nicely put together -- and said, 'Man, it looks like you're getting f---ed in the head by a tarantula!' "
Gardner lets out a big laugh. "And we all had to look at him, like, 'Damn! That is what it looks like.' "
Lambert began laying plans and booking talent for All Jokes while still employed by Gardner Rich. His boss, Gardner, found out about the club -- which initially rented space from an art gallery (paintings by day, yuks by night) and soon found a permanent home at 1000 S. Wabash, near Buddy Guy's Legends -- only after it opened and began causing buzz.
"Ray did not let me know, but I was one of the original financiers of All Jokes Aside," Gardner jokes. "He was settin' that s--- up when he was working for me! He was supposed to be on the phone doing business. And look, funny things happen and you laugh sometimes. This dude would be cracking up. I'm thinking he's on the phone with a customer. He's on the phone with Bernie Mac, Jamie Foxx, D.L. Hughley. So I'm owed a commission or something!"
Davies notes that All Jokes, which seated 300, was far from a typical low-rent chuckle hut. It was an uncommonly classy joint, and Lambert had rules that applied not only to comics, but to audience members as well.
"It was a very old-school sensibility," Lambert says. "So there were no jeans, no gym shoes. Very early on you had to have a jacket onstage, which was very hard for this whole hip-hop generation. [Comic] Deon Cole tells a story about how he had to go to a thrift store because he didn't own a jacket or a tie. He had never had one in his life. But I knew he was opening for Steve Harvey, and Steve Harvey's going to have on a suit and a tie and a shirt. ... You had to look like you were in show business. You had to look like you cared."
And lots of stand-ups, especially black ones, did care -- more than a few of them deeply.
"All Jokes Aside meant to black comedians that we finally had a place where we could be heard in Chicago," comic and WGCI-FM (107.5) personality Tony Sculfield says in the documentary.
Cedric the Entertainer lauds its role in the "great incubation of some of the greatest comics that we have."
"When they loved you," Carlos Mencia says of All Jokes' especially responsive crowds, "it was ridiculous."
Although Lambert says All Jokes made money, it ultimately fell victim to financial and political circumstances that made its continued existence impossible. The implosion of Chicago's glutted stand-up comedy scene didn't help matters.
"I'm done, but I'm not done," Lambert told the Tribune when All Jokes closed in 1998 (ill-fated efforts to re-open downtown continued until 2000). "I'm going to come back in another form."
Gardner, too, thinks "a whole new thing" could live again. He'd even help bankroll it.
And location matters not, Gardner says.
"We would come."