Lucien Hold

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on December 10th, 2004

We heard last night, hanging out with a few comics at the Borgata, that Lucien Hold, the GM and talent coordinator of New York’s Comic Strip, passed away just a few short days ago. We hadn’t seen anything on the wires, so we were going to hunt something down on the WWW when we got the chance. On the way home from Atlantic City, we decided that perhaps the best way to run something on Hold’s death would be to ask someone, a comic (of course), to write something up on him and reflect on what his life and death might have meant to the writer and to the comedy community in general. For some reason, we decided that we’d send an email to Ross Bennett. A couple of other matters got in the way an we neglected to send out the email.

So we were quite surprised when we received an email from Bennett today… and doubly surprised when the email turned out to be an alert to a piece that he had posted on his website concerning factual errors that had occurred in some of the mainstream press’ obituaries of Lucien Hold.

When Lucien told me this story he spoke of how some comics “rise to the occasion.” And this is what Chris (Rock) did. Lucien said that Chris had always been hot and cold when he had seen him. Sometime his anger turned off audiences, and he was still learning how to balance it and his act. In fact Lucien had said that a very important manager had only earlier that night said disparaging things about Chris in terms of him not being of the level of talent that could make it, asking why Lucien gave him any attention and access to the COMIC STRIP stage at all. Why did he even let him do late-nights?

Fascinating. Read the rest here.

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