History
In 1979, after a dispute over club owners refusing to pay comedians, a then 16 year old Jamie Masada recognized the need for a new venue for comedians to perform. After obtaining a loan of $10,000 from Neal Israel, he opened the Laugh Factory in a building formerly belonging to Groucho Marx. Recognizing his passion for comedy, Richard Pryor was the first comedian to perform on the now famous Laugh Factory stage. When Jamie attempted to pay him, Pryor instead handed him a $100 bill and wrote on it, "You need this for your rent, boy."
From that point on the Laugh Factory has grown to be one of the most famous comedy clubs in the world. USA Today has cited it as being the #1 comedy club in the country. Mr. Masada still comes in almost every day and attends Tuesday Open Mic Nights to screen possible comedians for the Laugh Factory stage. The Laugh Factory now has four locations. Two are located in California: Laugh Factory in Hollywood, California and Long Beach, California. The Laugh Factory also has locations in Las Vegas inside of the Tropicana Las Vegas and in Chicago, Illinois after a 5 million dollar renovation of the old Lakeshore Theater.
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“These anyway might think it was important
That human history should not be shortened.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)