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In the beginning, there was the Ding Ho -- Western décor, Chinese food -- Boston's first full-time comedy club

by Barry Crimmins

In May of 1979, in the lonely days before Ronald Reagan had any other fictional characters to hang around with, I came to Boston looking for a chance to ply my craft as a stand-up comic.

On Memorial Day weekend, I found a listing for a show produced by the "Comedy Connection" at a club called the Springfield Street Saloon in Inman Square. I really liked the room; it was jammed with 125 fans on a three-day-weekend Sunday night. The guys who ran the show told me two things I needed to know. First, they said, Boston would never be a weekend comedy town. And second, they said that they liked my act, which was why they were paying me all of $8, but I mustn't tell the other performers they had been so generous. That was all I needed to hear: I knew the time was right to start a new comedy venue.

At about this time, the Springfield Street Saloon was sold to a man named Shune Lee. Shune was a classic with a rough story. As a small child he was left behind by his family when they escaped Red China. The thinking was that they would be less suspicious as they made for the border because no one would expect them to leave a son behind. A few years later, Shune was carried to freedom by "an old lady. I not even know her name!"

Shune and I hit it off. He was still booking a lot of the bands that had played at the club prior to his ownership, but they weren't drawing well and cost a lot of money. I asked how the comedy nights were, and he said, "Great. Good crowd, many come for dinner and they drink. Plus it cost no money, Comedy Connection just get door."

I am not demeaning Shune's speech, just quoting how he spoke. His English was far ahead of my Chinese. He kept the club's Western décor but changed the menu to Chinese and the name to the Ding Ho.

I frequented the Ding and helped Shune Lee by running errands and dealing with an unruly patron or two. One night the bouncer disappeared -- just split during his shift. I took over for the rest of the evening. The next time I came to the club, Shune offered me the bouncing job.

So I stood outside the bar and greeted customers. When people would ask if the band was good, I would say, "I work here; the boss is standing right behind me. No, the band sucks; I think you should go next door." The people would laugh, pay their $3, and enter. Shune was impressed. "That was good. Very good job."

The first night, Shune put me in charge of paying the band, which he hated doing. Within a few days I was booking the club. Within two months the Springfield Street Saloon had become the Ding Ho, Home of Constant Comedy. The Ding honored all its musical commitments, so for the first few weeks we double-billed music and comedy. But soon it became Greater Boston's first full-time comedy club.

These days in comedy clubs, you don't even see the headliner until the audience has suffered through at least two lowest-common-denominator acts. Then halfway into the headliner's act, just when the audience is showing signs of healing, the wait staff passes out the checks and sticker shock sets in.

We did it better at the Ding. The star hosted the show. If there was no host, we went tag team and had one comic introduce the next, the rookies brought on by the vets. To this day, I think this is the best way to do a show.

We began with shows hosted by Lenny Clarke, Don Gavin, Chance Langton, Mike Donovan, and Mike McDonald. Langton booked and produced his own shows on Saturdays and did a fabulous job. I produced the rest of the nights.

From the start, extraordinary acts and top-shelf hosts made for great shows. Bill Campbell, Jay Charbonneau, Ken Ober, Joe Alaskey, Paula Poundstone, Steven Wright, Bob (LaMotte) and Ron (Lynch), Lauren Dombrowski, John Ten-Eyck, Barry Niekrug, George MacDonald, Bob Lazurus, Warren MacDonald, Jack Gallagher, Bobby Gaylor, Jim Morris, Dave Barbuto, Bob Siebel, and the late Chris Collins are just the names that I can summon from memory without freebasing ginkgo biloba.

It didn't take a month for the Ding to start selling out shows. Lenny Clarke's Wednesday open-mike night was impossible to get into even a half-hour before he took the stage; he was a Cambridge boy who led his entire hometown through the Ding's doors and then knocked their socks off with his raw and explosive comedy. When I finally left the production end of things at the Ding, I turned my duties over to his brother Mike Clarke, who to this day is a very successful comedy producer and manager.

Young acts who worked the Ding's open-mike nights before graduating to paid gigs included Tom Gilmore, Brian Kiley, Dana Gould, Jonathan Groff, Joe Yannety, Denis Leary, Bill Braudis, Jim DeCroteau, Dan Margarita, Mike Bent, Linda Smith, Johnny Pizzi, and Jimmy Tingle. Tingle became the day bartender at the Ding and added to the genuine Cambridge character of the club. Eventually he would succeed Lenny as the open-mike host. After that, succeeding became one of Jimmy's habits.

Along the way, we gathered Bobcat Goldthwait, whom I had worked with in Syracuse. Kevin Meaney, Mike Moto, and Fran and Jan (the Solomita Brothers) from San Francisco, Ken Rogerson and Paul Kozlowski (from Chicago), and Bob Nickman and Phil Van Tee (from Cleveland) all became Ding stalwarts, keeping patrons in stitches until the bar closed.

Not that the bar closed very often -- except to the general public. The Ding stretched its liquor-license luck on a nightly basis. Nearly as much alcohol was consumed after hours as during the shows. The restaurant was in the back and windowless. So before it got too late, we'd move the party out there and, in the immortal words of that ringleader of ringleaders Don Gavin, "hurt ourselves."

At least our late nights put the dining room to positive use. As Sweeney used to say, Ding Ho in Chinese means "bad food." He wasn't kidding, but he always got a laugh.

Eventually the restaurant was put to an even better use as the auxiliary stage. By the late show, half the comics in town had found their way there. There were some mighty parties -- the biggest on the first anniversary of the Constant Comedy venue. Everyone performed at a gala show -- and then the frivolity really began. At 8 a.m. on Saturday, October 4, 1980, when it was again a legal hour to have the bar open, I counted more than 50 people coming back through the doors into the main room. Most didn't stay much past 11 a.m. After all, we had a show to do that night.

The secret of the Ding was that it was of, by, and for comics. The Ding treated all its acts like stars. Comics didn't pay for drinks -- ever. They could put anyone they liked on the guest list. If a comic's family came in, we wined and dined them (at least by Ding Ho standards), gushing about how talented and wonderful the comic was. There may have been nothing more important the Ding did for young comics than to make their show-business aspirations seem legitimate to parents and family.

We had almost no money for advertising, even after business got great, because Shune Lee's business skills and my comics-drink-free policy pushed the Ding to the brink of fiscal calamity. Fortunately, DJ Hanard (now legally changed to "Hazzard"), a local comic and art student I'd engaged to do the Constant Comedy logo, made memorable signs and fliers. A lot of places gave away two-for-one admissions. We gave out no-strings passes, knowing full well that most people would pay to come back to see their next Ding show.

Early on, DJ Hanard and I attached ourselves to WCAS radio in Central Square -- a gem of a low-power, low-budget community station specializing in folk-rock, country-mawk, and populist Cantabrigian public-affairs shows -- and began the Constant Comedy radio program. We offended everyone from Catholics (we did a "rush hour for Catholics" report on Sunday mornings from our Catholic Copter) to Iranians (this was hostage-crisis time; Lenny Clarke came up with Iranian Round-up Day). Steve Sweeney was a regular. Martin Olson, the Ding's legendary piano player, now a very hot writer in LA, was also a huge contributor to the radio show as both a writer and a performer. Some weeks it was hilarious, some weeks it sounded like a bunch of guys who had kept partying long after the midnight show. But we gave them a comedy once a week, and each time they did a promo they included a kicker about Ding Ho.

Steven Wright was the first Ding comic to hit it big. Peter Lasalle from the Tonight Show came to the Ding, and a few weeks later Steven got the call. Johnny Carson loved him; America loved him. Carson asked him back.

Since Steven busted the wedge and became a Grammy-nominated, Oscar-winning international comedy star, almost everyone who ever performed at the Ding has gone on to bigger things. If you watch television or movies, you can't go long without seeing Ding Ho alums on the screen or in the credits. A few weeks ago a friend rented There's Something About Mary, and there were Lenny Clarke and Steve Sweeney collecting the biggest laughs. The other night I watched a new fall show on NBC called Freaks and Geeks, and there was Bob Nickman listed as a producer.

On Labor Day about 20 New Yorkers e-mailed me to tell me that Kevin Meaney was tearing it up hosting the Big Apple portion of the Jerry Lewis Telethon. Lauren Dombrowski is the head writer for Mad TV. George MacDonald wrote and starred in a hit play. Brian Kiley writes Conan O'Brien's jokes. Jonathan Groff is Conan's head writer. Martin Olson just sold a screenplay to a major studio. Paula Poundstone is selling out concert halls and writing magazine columns, and is often a welcome guest at the White House. Don Gavin, Mike Donovan, and Mike McDonald are still performing in Boston when they aren't off taping a TV show somewhere. Jack Gallagher is touring with his smash one-man show Waiting for Declan.

As best as I can determine, the cause of death at the Ding was unpaid taxes resulting from Shune's gambling losses playing mahjong in Chinatown. The last time I ever saw Shune Lee was at the Ding Ho on a Saturday night when we sold out four shows. A few days later, when I dropped by the club to pick up a notebook, there were plywood sheets hammered over the doors.

Fortunately, the Boston comic scene had grown by then. I had moved across town and started Stitches in the front room of the Paradise, with the help of Don Law and Patrick Lyons. The Comedy Connection was thriving, Nick's Comedy Stop was doing big business, Chance Langton got things hopping at a club called Play It Again Sam's. There were regular good-paying gigs throughout New England, and Boston comics were welcome nationwide. The Ding had failed, but the Ding had paved the way. It proved that good comics, treated well in a good room, could find an audience almost every night of the year. It proved that comedy was here to stay. Most important, it proved that Boston was the home of some of the best comedic talent -- and some of the worst Chinese food -- in the world.

An all-star roster of Ding Ho vets will gather at the Somerville Theatre on Sunday, October 24, for a 20th-anniversary reunion show. See "Editor's Picks" for details.