Austin Comedy History: Bill Hicks, Sane Man and the Laff Stop's Strip Mall

In March 1986, Howard and Sandy Marcus of Houston opened the Laff Stop at 8120 Research Boulevard, in a north Austin strip mall. The Austin Chronicle put it at about 400 seats, booked mostly with national acts. Four hundred seats in a strip mall is a big bet. That's not a comedy club, that's a Luby's with a microphone and a lot of nerve.

Three years later, Bill Hicks walked onto that stage and somebody pointed a camera at him. The somebody was Kevin Booth, his friend from Stratford High School in Houston, who had gone to the University of Texas and was by 1989 working as a producer at Austin's public-access station, ACTV. The two of them had started a little Austin production company back in 1982. Booth taped Hicks across two shows at the Laff Stop and cut them together into Sane Man, a pilot meant to be shopped to cable networks, HBO among them. You will notice there was no HBO special. Cable executives in 1989 watched a man do long, furious bits about the war on drugs and smoking, and decided America was not ready, which is what cable executives decide about a man right up until about ten years after his funeral.

So the tape did what Texas things do. It was sold around Austin and by mail order, it got bootlegged, and it came back in 1999 remastered with half an hour of extra footage. Rykodisc gave it a proper national DVD release in December 2005. The DVD Talk review called the direction amateur, which is fair. The amateur was holding a public-access camera. If you want polish, go film a cooking show.

Hicks was born in 1961 and died in 1994, at 32, which is a young age to leave and a very old age for a joke to keep working. He kept coming back to the room; the best-known photo of him on Wikipedia was taken at the Laff Stop in 1991. The club's own history page says much of his recorded catalog was taped there. I'd take a club's word on its own legend the way I'd take a fisherman's, but in this case the fish is on the wall.

Hicks was not the only one. The club lists Sam Kinison, Ron White, Ellen DeGeneres and Joe Rogan among the acts who played it, years before Rogan decided Austin was his to rearrange. In 1996 it was renamed Capitol City Comedy Club, Cap City for short. Patton Oswalt and Ari Shaffir taped specials there. For more than 30 years it ran the Funniest Person in Austin contest, and the people behind it helped run the Moontower festival.

Then 2020. The club closed that March for the pandemic, and on September 8 its owners said Research Boulevard was done for good, pointing to the lease along with everything else. A virus could close the doors. It took a landlord to make it permanent, which is how most of Austin's history ends.

Cap City came back, a few miles north, at 11506 Century Oaks Terrace, Building B. You can't sit where Hicks stood, but you can sit in the same family tree: it's 18 and up with a two-item minimum, and the items can be iced tea. The cheapest way into the story is the Tuesday open mic, where you bring three minutes and hope your name gets pulled from a bucket. Hicks started at 16 in a Houston workshop, so you're already behind him. Don't let that stop you. It never stopped anybody worse.

A comedy club is a strip-mall lease with ambitions. The lease runs out, and the jokes, it turns out, don't.