A legacy of laughs

At the Ding Ho, the comedians made the drinks and answered the phone and mopped the floors. They also put on four shows a night six nights a week on two stages in this Cambridge Chinese restaurant, attracting packed houses with rapid-fire humor that was coarse, smart, imaginative, and dripping with working-class Boston flavor. The club was dark and dingy, with toilets that were known to overflow and food that was the source of many jokes.

But there was something magical about the place. And from 1979 to 1984, it was a launching pad for countless comedians, from Steven Wright, Denis Leary, Paula Poundstone, and Bobcat Goldthwait to comics who went on to tour the world and write for TV shows such as ''Late Night With Conan O'Brien" and ''Mad TV."

It was the kind of place where the comedians had the keys; they were the first ones in and the last ones out, and when other comedians made their way to the club at the end of the night after finishing up gigs around town, the Ding Ho regulars would lock the doors behind them and party till dawn.

Jimmy Tingle was the daytime bartender at the Ding Ho, now the Ol Mexican Grill. His first time onstage he wore a trench coat, played the harmonica, and sang the ''Test Tube Baby Blues." Tonight, his Off Broadway theater in Somerville begins a month of stand-up starring him and his fellow Ding Ho alums. It's been 25 years since the Ding Ho opened its notorious doors, and it's still a crystal-clear memory in the minds of the comics who worked there.

The stand-up scene was just beginning to take off around the country when comedian Barry Crimmins, hitchhiking from West Virginia to New York in late May of 1979, got a ride with a man on his way to Boston and decided to tag along. Before long, Crimmins was performing at the Springfield Street Saloon in Inman Square.

The bar was soon sold to Shune Lee, a native of China, who kept the wagon-wheel chandeliers and rough-hewn logs on the walls but changed the menu to Chinese and let Crimmins, who was also working as a bouncer there, take over booking the club, now renamed the Ding Ho.

Crimmins was homeless, camping out in Cambridge, and working odd jobs as a fish packer and a ship painter, and he didn't run the place like other comedy clubs. He paid more, for one thing, and had the star of the show act as host, introducing all the acts, instead of saving him for the end. He encouraged originality and inexperienced comedians, and within a month, the place was selling out. ''What I understood at that point was that we had to make comedy more viable," says Crimmins, 51, who now lives in upstate New York and writes for Air America radio. His new book, a personal and political history called ''Never Shake Hands With a War Criminal," has a chapter devoted to the Ding Ho.

''There was just a huge explosion of talent," Crimmins says. But other than dreaming of landing a spot on ''The Tonight Show," it wasn't about show business. It was about being funny. And when a ''Tonight Show" producer did show up in 1982 and plucked Wright from obscurity, the comics knew they were in the middle of something remarkable.

They didn't know there was a wider audience out there, so they didn't try to reach one, says Fran Solomita, who made a documentary about the early Boston comedy scene called ''When Stand Up Stood Out," which will be screened during the 25th anniversary celebration. In the film, Wright says, ''It was like being on an island, and the only thing [to do] there was to make people laugh."

In this isolated state, original styles blossomed. During Lenny Clarke's open-mike nights, on Wednesdays, a guy who called himself Mr. My Way had people bite onto his elbow skin; he would then lift them off the floor. Another guy came onstage with venetian blinds over his head.

Fights broke out; comics lit joints onstage. Kevin Meaney would sing the days of the week and the months of the year. Steve Sweeney once sent the piano player to the hospital after hitting him in the head with the microphone while impersonating Roger Daltrey. Sweeney was also known for his impressions of the Ding Ho cooks involving chopping motions and screaming cats.

''In Boston, a comedian looked like a guy who just wandered off an assembly line, had a couple beers, and got onstage," says Solomita, 44, who started performing at the Ding Ho when he was a teenager.

The club didn't have an advertising budget, but the comics did a weekly show on WCAS, a community radio station in Central Square. They would do bits such as a ''rush hour for Catholics" on Sunday mornings from the Catholic Copter, Crimmins writes in his book, and WCAS would plug the Ding Ho during promotions for the show.

''It was of the comics, by the comics, and for the comics," Crimmins says. They helped themselves to the liquor behind the bar and to the cocaine that the club became known for. Several of them lived together down the street in a place they called the Barracks, and comedians from out of town were welcome there, too. ''You almost felt like you were in a comedian's locker room," says Solomita, who also works for NBC writing and directing promotions for comedies.

DJ Hazard lived in the owner's basement in Allston for a time, and he was sometimes sent out with bags of cash in the middle of the night to pay the landlord or get an extension on the liquor license. Lee was often behind in payments and taxes, Hazard says, and suddenly one Wednesday in the winter of 1984, the comics found the place wrapped in police tape.

Some say Lee lost the Ding Ho in a game of mah-jongg, but the more likely reason was unpaid taxes. Comedy was booming around the country at the time, and if the money had been handled better, Hazard says, ''that place would have been a gold mine."

A reunion in 1999 drew many of the big names to the Somerville Theatre (where Goldthwait remembered the Ding Ho as ''Sodom and Gomorrah with a $5 cover"), but there won't be many this year. ''I think people are busier," says Tingle, 49. More than 25 comics are confirmed for the 15 nights of reunion shows, and surprise guests will be announced.

The Ding Ho gang has mixed feelings about today's comedy scene. It has become a big business, which means less room for originality. ''I never said to [the comics at the Ding Ho], 'Our audiences expect x, y, and z,' which is what you hear at the corporate clubs," says Crimmins.

Locally, says Hazard, 51, the scene has become ''bottom heavy" -- overrun by inexperienced comics with day jobs. The few full-time veterans who do still live in the area, like him, are often out on the road.

Crimmins was appalled by the ''glorified open mike night" material he heard at the Boston International Comedy & Movie Festival, but he says he has seen a resurgence of underground material that he likes, such as the Walsh Brothers in Boston.

It's safe to say, though, that there will never be another Ding Ho, where, as Crimmins puts it, ''the comedy was moving a lot faster than the chicken wings."