RIP Mitzi Shore

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For at least a dozen years, she was "all-powerful, during a remarkably fertile time for stand-up comedy — the 1970s and early '80s — when many of today's comedy stars showed up in L.A. to go onstage at the only place that mattered," Paul Brownfield, who covered comedy for The Times, wrote in 2003.
The first comedian to officially share her life was her husband, Sammy Shore, who founded the Comedy Store in 1972 with fellow comic Rudy DeLuca. When the Shores divorced two years later, Sammy gave her the club as a way of lowering his alimony payments.

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"Comics felt very belittled in those days — they always had to work with a singer," Shore recalled in 1993 in The Times. "I wanted it to be all comics. No jugglers and magicians. I wanted to give them respectability."

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The list of careers Shore influenced included those of Letterman and Leno as well as Jimmie Walker, Andy Kaufman, Robin Williams, Bob Saget, Richard Lewis, Garry Shandling, Elayne Boosler and dozens of other readily identifiable names.

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