CHAPTER 55

Lewis: So he calls me and he says, ‘Lewis, you’re annoying people. The show is going on and you’re sitting people in the front of the show. The comedian’s onstage and you’re sitting people.’ And it was like, I knew you had to sit people … If you’ve got five people, they’ve got to sit in the front row. If they walked in on their own they would sit all the way at the back and not be part of the show, and it wouldn’t help attract more people, and it wouldn’t be good for the show. So you had to sit them right around the stage. So I would go in and I’d lean over the customer and say, ‘You have to sit here’, when the comedian’s on stage, and they did not like that. It was disruptive to them. And they said to me, ‘You’ve got to stop’, but I knew that if you didn’t do that there wouldn’t be enough people to create a critical mass to attract other people. This is what I’ve learned from every single show that I’ve done since, you’ve got to get a critical mass. They’ve got to be sitting there. Even if two people are sitting in the front row laughing, it’s better than a hundred people all the way in the back … I don’t know, that’s too many for the Cellar. Anyway, thirty people at the back, just leaning against the back wall. So he called me up and said, ‘You can’t do it’, and I just started screaming at him.