Richie Tienken, comedy legend who discovered Eddie Murphy, dies

Comedians are in mourning over the information that Richie Tienken — founder and co-owner of famous Comedian Strip Stay comedy club — has died, Web site 6 has acquired.

Tienken passed absent on Saturday, “with his family able to say goodbye a person at a time because of to COVID,” Jeffrey Gurian, writer of a 2016 reserve on the club, “Laughing Legends: How The Comic Strip Improved The Facial area of Comedy,” verified to Web site 6. He added that, “His wife Jeannie was the past to see him, and then he remaining, like he was waiting around for her Alright. He was 75.”

The club was wherever Jerry Seinfeld and Eddie Murphy famously acquired their starts.

According to club historian Gurian: “The club opened on June 1, 1976, and on June 17, Seinfeld came in to audition. They rated him as ‘good,’ and explained he really should appear back again the subsequent week to start out accomplishing.”

Seinfeld returned to the club for a 2017 Netflix particular.

Murphy was infamously thrown out of the Upper East Aspect haunt when he very first showed up to conduct. Gurian explained to The Post when another of the club’s co-owners, Robert Wachs, handed away in 2013 at 73: “Eddie was a teenager at the time. He was a little cocky and acted impatiently about not having onstage correct away, so Bob threw him out. He told him if he didn’t like ready he could go away, and he did!”

Tienken then permitted the long run celebrity onstage when he returned and apologized.

Tienken managed Murphy for the 1st 11 yrs of his vocation, and was a producer on Murphy movies such as “Beverly Hills Cop II” and “The Golden Child,” as nicely as his classic specials, “Raw” and “Delirious.” Tienken also managed Adam Sandler, who wished to emulate Murphy’s occupation, the star has stated.

Gurian informed us, “Richie was a nurturer of expertise. In the early days, he fed [upcoming comics] with hamburgers, gave them T-shirts and Comedian Strip jackets to dress in and created certain they got stage time. He was the 1st of all the club entrepreneurs to build a program exactly where comics knew what time they were going on.”

Tienken at the time claimed in an interview, “Larry David came into me a person working day and asked me if he could have a hamburger … I reported: ‘What?’ And he explained: ‘Yeah, I have not eaten.’”

The club was also recognised as a home to performers such as George Wallace, Ray Romano, Paul Reiser and Colin Quinn. It is also wherever “SNL” stars such as Colin Jost and Pete Davidson came to perform and perform out new material. 

Chris Rock was also identified at the club and wrote an introduction to Gurian’s reserve. Yet another foreseeable future “SNL” star, Quinn, was a bartender at the comedy location, until he had to quit to conduct because staffers were not permitted on phase.

Gurian, who hosted a podcast from the club, also recalled to us that Tienken “was also a nurturer with close friends. When I was sick in the hospital with COVID double pneumonia past March, he called me just about every day, and basically supplied to occur and drive me house from the medical center. Then he identified as me each day in the course of my two thirty day period convalescence.”

Tienken still left house at 13, he reported in a 2019 profile, immediately after he’d been caught stealing a automobile and was fearful he’d be set into reform university. He afterwards returned to the Bronx to operate a Bingo corridor, which he in the long run parlayed into obtaining seven bars just before segueing into the comedy entire world.

The club proprietor had battled throat cancer.

“It was not quick for him to communicate,” Gurian mentioned. “We all imagined he’d be below permanently. He was a tower of toughness and an icon in the globe of comedy.”

The comedy club icon is survived by his spouse Jeannie, sons Jonathan and Richie Jr., daughters Jacqui, Dawn Marie and Christina, five grandchildren and two excellent grand-young children, Gurian claimed.