Modified On November 9, 2004
Nadine Heintz, writing for Inc. Magazine, tells the story of one of New York’s longest running comedy shows. Through three different locations and through the boom, the bust and the re-boom, Caroline’s has offered standup in an upscale setting to Manhattan patrons for more than two decades. We worked the club when it was Caroline’s on 8th, in the Chelsea district, and we worked it a few times at the Seaport location, before we fled to the West Coast in ’88.
I opened a cabaret with two friends in the early ’80s. They were both guys, and they wanted to name the club after a woman, so we called it Carolines. But the cabaret acts weren’t really doing it for me, so I suggested we start doing some comedy. I had a feeling that there was going to be some sort of explosion, between Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno. Leno was our first act. It brought in a whole different kind of clientele. People in their late 20s and early 30s came out. I could feel it was the start of something.
Hmmm… no mention of Neil Hirsch, the eye-poppingly wealthy dude who, the legend goes, bankrolled the original club and was Mr. Caroline Hirsch at the time. We heard third- or fourth-hand that their marriage went belly up somewhere during the Reagan administration. Not sure if it was acrimonious or amicable. His conspicuous absence from the Inc. piece would suggest the former.
We skipped on over to competing biz rag Forbes, where Adam Leitzes and Joshua Solan wrote a fascinating piece about Neil back in December of 2000:
…Actually, try 1969. That was the year Neil Hirsch founded Telerate, a financial information service that provided securities prices for the international bond and currency markets. In a remarkable display of foresight, Hirsch helped usher in the age of electronic networks by building a global infrastructure of terminals. For more than 20 years, he helped Telerate become one of the most powerful brands in financial information and eventually sold the company to Dow Jones for more than $1.5 billion in 1990.
We remember Neil haunting the Chelsea club one week when we were on the bill. Rumor had it that he owned the first Mercedes stretch limo in Manhattan. We knew he had some jack, but whoa!
We don’t bring up Neil to take anything away from Caroline’s accomplishments. Far from it. She runs a hell of a club. Even had a TV show shot there! In fact, she lines up with us closely on one of our pet theories; says Caroline:
There was talk in the early ’90s that there was so much comedy on TV that it diluted all the clubs. Not true. If anything, it’s made us stronger. Even today, when I have young talent in the club who has been on TV, fans come out in droves. We recently had three of the standups from the reality show Last Comic Standing and they generated a tremendous amount of business. When a musician puts out an album, that album drives concert sales. It’s the same thing with comedy — people want to see the performer live.
And she caps off the article with this string of gems, for which she will always have our undying admiration:
I enjoy what I do, and I’m a big fan of comedy. If you don’t like it, there’s something grossly wrong with you. See your shrink. If people tell you they don’t like it, run. Run away fast!
Run away fast, indeed! This would make a tremendous motto for this very publication! A great interview. If you like, you can read the rest.
As for Neil, he’s a superstar in a totally different discipline– global communications networks. He was into global communications before it was cool. A fascinating profile. If you like, you can read the rest.