Farewell to the old Goodnights, home to laughter, legends and lewdness
For almost 40 years, Raleigh found its biggest laughs inside a 100-year-old building with bad plumbing and slapdash wiring, sitting next-door to a prison.
Charlie Goodnights opened on Morgan Street in 1983, an era when hardly any comedy clubs existed outside of New York or Los Angeles, meaning every joke-teller in the country played a Tuesday-to-Saturday gig there.
Jerry Seinfeld. Robin Williams. Chris Rock. Ellen DeGeneres. All of them stood on the Goodnights stage, backs against a brick wall, so close to the crowd they could reach down and take a sip from their beers.
And now that Goodnights, with its name long-since shortened, is abandoning its storied joke barn and relocating to an underground spot in The Village District, a generation of comedians recall it as a legendary stop on the nationwide laugh circuit — a laboratory where they could try out new material, tinker with a punch line and slap together routines on the fly.
Sinbad played there, and he attacked the stage every night with a larger band than he had the night before, picking up musicians from around town.
Elayne Boosler played there, and she had the audience vote on every joke she told — thumbs up or thumbs down.
Patton Oswalt played there as a budding comic, opening for Bill Hicks, at the time perhaps the edgiest comic working. In multiple interviews and on his website, Oswalt describes coming out loaded for grizzly bears, throwing out his riskiest material to impress the more seasoned Hicks.
And when his act fell flat, Hicks consoled him backstage with advice he still carries: “You’ve got to walk them to the edge, Patton.”
The old building will be torn down to make way for a new housing development — 865 Morgan, a seven-story residential building.
Goodnights is set to have its last show July 31, and its new temporary space at the former K&W Cafeteria opens in fall or winter, The N&O reported.
But when it leaves Morgan Street, a thousand laughing ghosts will go with it — all of them squirting seltzer.
“I love and hate that building,” said Reven Macqueen, Goodnights’ senior manager of development and operations. “It’s not this high-tech experience you get at an amphitheater. It’s a little dirty. It’s a little fly-by-the-seat of your pants. That’s what makes it great.”
Almost Famous
Charlie Viracola told Goodnights’ first joke in 1983.
He can’t remember which, but it probably concerned the club’s decor. Then-owner Tommy Williams had bought patio chairs from Kmart at the last minute, transforming what had been a downstairs Mexican restaurant into the Triangle’s only spot for live laughs.
In those days, North Carolina frowned on foul language on stage, especially when combined with alcohol, and Viracola recalled Williams was convinced that state agents were infiltrating his club in disguise, waiting to catch potty-mouthed violators.
So he set up a traffic light for the comedians to watch. Green light: let fly with the four-letter words. Red light: Keep it clean.
Interviewed by the N&O at the time, Viracola quipped: “I thought Lenny Bruce had already died for our sins.”
In the early years, you could catch unknown comics at Goodnights and then see them on “The Tonight Show” six months later. Viracola recalled eating lunch with Seinfeld at Crabtree Valley Mall, or smoking cigarettes with Hicks behind the club.
“Stupid stuff with all those guys who weren’t famous,” he said from his home in Los Angeles, guessing he has headlined at Goodnights 100 times. “Kevin Hart. Nobody knew Kevin Hart. Steve Harvey. Nobody knew Steve Harvey. They’d go to the mall with you and try to do their thing.”
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Next to a prison
Goodnights’ geography helped cement its reputation.
In Philadelphia, comedians leave for New York the minute they get halfway-good, Macqueen said. But in Raleigh, with no competition closer than Atlanta, people stick around until their stand-up gets polished.
Many will remember Frank King, the Raleigh native and regular act who had an ill-fated morning show on WRDU. The stage at Goodnights took him to “The Tonight Show.”
“I think,” King remembered, “that one comic said one time, ‘Nice to be here. Charlie Goodnights is my favorite comedy club next to a prison.’ “
Jerry Carroll went from open-mic nights to headlining the club inside of a year, fashioning himself as “The Wild Man from Willow Spring” and once turning down a gig in Charleston because he had to wean piglets on his farm.
“I’m not a redneck, I’m a good ol’ boy,” he joked in 1994. “The difference between the two is about three Budweisers and two trailer payments.”
Actor Ken Jeong performed there while still a student at Duke University. Pauly Shore played there with his dad as an opening act.
Dave Attell raved about Goodnights, telling the N&O in 2004, “I love Raleigh. I’ve gotten drunk there so many times.”
Funny on demand
The new location in the Village District at 401 Woodburn Road will keep the club not far from downtown, and it revives the legendary underground scene that characterized Raleigh’s night life in the early ‘80s, when R.E.M. and The Go-Go’s played there.
But it robs the city of a red-brick icon on the Morgan Street bend — a hulking icon with leaky pipes, but likely more eye-catching than the apartments planned as a replacement.
“I’d like to have a brick,” Viracola said. “I feel spiritually linked.”
Before Raleigh had much going on around downtown, Goodnights offered an open door after dark. The portraits on the wall, all signed the brave few who dared to be funny on demand, echo with four decades of laughter.
This story was originally published May 23, 2022 at 5:55 AM with the headline "Farewell to the old Goodnights, home to laughter, legends and lewdness."