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Ten years after Chicago saw its first full-time comedy club open, the landscape was decidedly different. “Stand-up comedy has exploded in the last couple of years,“ a club owner told the Chicago Tribune in 1985. “That’s the only way to describe it: exploded.” It was truly a comedy boom, as many as 15 full-time clubs served 3 million people, and it lasted nearly a decade before fading, taking with it some of Chicago’s oldest clubs including the Comedy Cottage, Comedy Womb and Who’s on First. Still, stalwarts like Barrel of Laughs (south) and Zanies (north) persevered. That part of the story is known. Overlooked is the fact there was a comedy boom, period. The question of how stand-up comedy in Chicago went from nothing to what one Chicago Sun-Times writer called “Chicago’s atomic comedy blast” has never been asked. That is, until now.