I’m attempting to write this sincerely and succinctly so if I should accomplish only one of those, this may still be worth reading. No proper send off of Grandma’s Basement can be stated without first remembering the wonderful man who had it all created…
Benny Boshnack: a tall, winsome, dimple-faced New York Jew was transplanted to our fair city by fate’s whimsy and a job at JAMN 94.5, Boston’s Number 1 station for hip hop and hit music. Somehow through the exact right or wrong collision of particles, Benny’s form would be thrust behind the counter of a dive bar nestled in a hobbled crook of a dilapidated Stonehenge with rooms for rent – mostly to hookers, drug addicts and poor travel planners – called Howard Johnson’s Inn.
The bar itself, encapsulated in the once ubiquitous hotel chain’s bowels, however, went by several names: Hong Kong, Chops Lounge, Tiki Hideaway and its most recent and notorious nom de plume – Grandma’s Basement. Rebranded so by Benny Boshnack after an older woman failed to seduce the chiseled barman one night. I would come to find out stuff like that was always happening to Benny. He was a real Adonis. If one judged him on looks alone, one might think he was nothing more than a beautiful moving statue, an archetype of an aesthetic-to-be that a museum had somehow magically and catastrophically misplaced in a squalid cellar that time forgot on purpose.
But Benny was intelligent, doe-eyed and damaged, depthful and detached, jovial and sincere, showing shades of naiveté which would quickly surrender and retreat from his face when he flashed that big grin of his with a laugh. And that was often. I liked him immediately.
Me and Benny looking good.
Later, a guy named Tom started working there.
He was okay.
Howard Johnson’s Inn. There it stood for over 50 years in the sanctimonious shadow of historic Fenway Park, Boston’s holiest temple, somehow even more resistant to change than the infamously unbending ballgrounds, tempting fate by merely existing for one more day as we all do til the end of things – unabashed and unaware of the roles we are about play.
The first time I showed my face at Grandma’s, as it would affectionately be truncated, was sometime in the fall of 2008. I had heard through the comic grapevine that there was a new open mic happening on Thursdays now that the Red Sox season was toast. When you’re relatively new to the stand up game, and this is most assuredly a game, the faintest whisper of place to perform is heard as loudly as a proclamation of faith. Comedy had existed there at least once before under a different helm and in the guise of Chops Lounge. I hadn’t been doing stand up long enough to have experienced that incarnation, so when I pushed open the swinging double doors that led from the hotel lobby into the lounge and laid foot on the faded, archaic patterned carpet floor, I was on new turf.
I carpooled that night with my best friend Ted. A bar near Fenway with its own parking lot is nearly unheard of and this was and would become a major boon about the place – so long as you’re not the type to consider drunk driving too grave a sin. I can’t remember if it was just the two of us and Benny that night, or if we were coincidentally accompanied by another crepuscular cretin of the twilight in a succubus search for stage time. Benny introduced himself and we talked briefly. He was welcoming and enthusiastic but seemed a little bummed that the turnout wasn’t better. It was his second week running the open mic. He served us drinks and started the show, doubling as bartender and host. He wasn’t very good at comedy then.
He generously let me and Ted take turns at the mic, both rambling for longer than we should have been allowed to ramble in front of any audience, let alone an audience of phantoms, ghosts of call girls now long gone.
We weren’t very good either.
After the “show” had ended, we talked with Benny again. He emphatically offered up the origin story behind the room’s name then frantically explained this whole mad vision of transforming the tiny lounge into a real comedy venue. He was hyper and aglow, not unlike a supervillain who has the epic hero in his grip just long enough to expound his brilliant scheme of global domination and enslavement, unaware that in the end, he would inevitably be thwarted.
I’m not sure if I believed he would succeed in his mission, but I knew right away that I wanted to help.
Ted and I spread the word of the new mic in town on the local comedy message boards and sure enough, each week more and more comics started making their visages seen and voices heard at Grandma’s.
That first year was an absolute circus, a funhouse replete with mirrors that bent light and reflected false images. Sometimes we appeared bigger and grandiose. Sometimes we appeared squat and plump. Other times we would be squished to stick figures, barely beings in the world. Nights at Grandma’s were long and boozy. So many of them piled up in my memory, jumbled about and out of order, retold in my mind as a disjointed stream of consciousness written by William Faulkner on psilocybin mushrooms and read aloud by Bobcat Goldthwait through a bullhorn. The performer list would routinely swell to over 40 comics. There were plenty of crazies. Lunatics shouting to be heard. Sane ones in a scramble to be understood.
The blasé, the bland and the borderline human congregated to watch each other perform verbal parlor tricks on a tiny, makeshift stage with the madman bartender juggling chainsaws behind the counter and behind the microphone.
Ted shirtless and blurry
It wasn’t long before Benny’s vision for the venue began metastasizing beyond Thursdays, spreading into booked showcases on Friday and Saturday nights. Benny hired the aforementioned Tom, a fellow comic and would be friend, as help with the influx of patrons the insanity fomented.
I have always felt that actual comedy clubs were a bit obscene. Comedy as an art depends on the element of surprise. Designating a venue a “comedy club” inherently takes away some of that mystery because you become immediately aware that you are about to be told jokes. Simply put, once you step inside a comedy club, you can expect the unexpected.
However, when you step into a darkly lit dive bar run by the Chinese in the ruins of a HoJo’s, you’re really not sure if you’re going to be grabbed from behind, held at gunpoint and sold into chattel slavery on some distant ship. The expectations of anything good happening there were checked at the door with so much unclaimed luggage from accidental suicides and drug overdoses in the guests’ chambers. Add to the mix that…
Benny and Tom were comedians, not businessmen, who really only cared about putting on shows they enjoyed and weren’t focused on making money, and you had the best possible anarchy.
That anarchy would last for 5 glorious years. There is too much memorable debauchery to be recounted in a single sitting or eulogy. I believe we saw the debut of Jeff Ferguson’s “Willie in My Chili” song at Grandma’s. On a whim Ted once told, word-for-word, a 5 minute Dan Sally bit for 5 patrons, only to have Dan show up, unexpectedly, to follow Ted and do that same bit completely unaware the audience had just heard it. It was the best. If you were there you know. Any time Chris Coxen took the stage as Barry Tattle, backed by a live jazz band, it was really something to see. Movie nights. Game shows. Holiday parties. I could go on for days.
What was at first empty and unknown became routinely packed with friends and familiarity.
Grandma’s was the place I chose to record my first comedy album, mostly because it was the only place that would have me, but also because it wouldn’t have felt right anywhere else, even if I had my pick.
Benny would eventually hand most of the responsibility to Tom. I left Boston for Los Angeles in 2012. Tom left for New York City. Benny defected to China. The venue was bestowed to Gary Petersen’s capable hands. He helmed it bravely until its inevitable fall this December when the owners announced the sale of the property.
I am honored to have had the pleasure of wasting my post-college youth there, making new friends, watching lunatics morph into actual comedians and watching lunatics morph into even crazier lunatics.
My personal philosophy on comedy is this: Jokes depend on misdirection. The world is full of lies and deception, whether accidental, intentional or just coincidental. There is no need to manufacture the misdirection into a joke, the world has already done that for us.
The truth then, when stated plainly, has no other option but to sound absurd and perverse. When the news of Grandma’s demise traveled 3000 miles over an unknowable about of cables from the East Coast through God’s Country to the post-apocalyptic corpse misnomered the City of Angels, and splashed across my computer screen, I felt myself, for the first time in a long time, hoping that I was being deceived.
I don’t want the place I consider my comedy home to leave me even though I have already left it.
So I mourn the loss of Grandma’s Basement, taking comfort only in the fact that my good friend Benny Boshnack, the madman who saw his crazy vision play out live before the entire Boston comedy community, can’t help but smile over the news.
– Shawn Donovan
I’m attempting to write this sincerely and succinctly so if I should accomplish only one of those, this may still be worth reading. No proper send off of Grandma’s Basement can be stated without first remembering the wonderful man who had it all created…
He generously let me and Ted take turns at the mic, both rambling for longer than we should have been allowed to ramble in front of any audience, let alone an audience of phantoms, ghosts of call girls now long gone.
My personal philosophy on comedy is this: Jokes depend on misdirection. The world is full of lies and deception, whether accidental, intentional or just coincidental. There is no need to manufacture the misdirection into a joke, the world has already done that for us. 
