#213: Mitzi's

The Bar

Mitzi's. 320 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78701

Visited 4/11/2025 @ 8:30pm.

The Drink

Rear naked choke. Ilegal rum, Cynar, Aperol, lemon. $18.

Named after the infamous martial arts move, this is one of their signature cocktails. I guess you could call it a rum negroni or a rum Aperol spritz. I generally think of pairing rum with sweeter mixers rather than more bitter/floral ingredients like Cynar or Aperol, but even with both, this worked for me. It did stand out to me as more of a sipping drink: obviously it's not like I'm chugging any of these cocktails, in these advanced years where college is but a distant memory, but some drinks are just more gulpable than others, and this was a drink to linger over.

The Crew

Aaron.

Notes

I will confine myself to this single sentence lamenting the pandemic-induced death of the Alamo Ritz theater that this establishment replaced; RIP. Anyway, there's a lot to say about Mitzi's, but as good a place as any to begin is to note that it is named after Mitzi Shore, a pivotal figure in comedy history as well as having incidentally birthed the infamous Pauly. The bar is tucked away in Joe Rogan's Comedy Mothership, but is separately accessible from the street should you want to go there without going to a show. I'm not sure what percentage of its patronage is independent of the performances; it doesn't open until 6pm, a mere hour before most shows begin, but when I visited in mid-set there weren't too many other folks there. That was just fine by me, since as you well know by now, a quiet bar is a good opportunity for me to chat with the bartender.

The main topic we discussed at length was the question of if Austin has become more of a comedy city since the Comedy Mothership came to town. It's tough to say; to use a music analogy, it's not like building a bigger arena in a city produces more musicians in and of itself, but the presence of the arena can draw bigger musicians to visit, which might encourage both more musicians moving to the city as well as more homegrown production due to clustering effects. In labor economics there's a fundamental difference between the intensive margin, meaning current workers, and the extensive margin, meaning new workers, and so you would have break out your analysis of how building a new performance venue affected the market by not only looking at how that venue might help existing artists' careers, but whether it helps create new artists, whether homegrown or newcomers from out of town.

Of course, many of Austin's most famous musicians were here well before the city had big fancy venues - which we still don't really have, COTA aside - and if anything Austin might be worse at producing musicians now that we're a more expensive city to live in, since the #1 thing musicians need is cheap rent while they work on their art (an especially vivid example of this is Townes Van Zandt's Clarksville hovel you can see in the wonderful documentary Heartworn Highways). There might be plenty of other reasons for comedians to move to Austin besides performance venues, such as the podcast ecosystem, but the parallels between comedy and music are worth pondering - in 2016, Patrick Reilly wrote a fascinating paper on the unique career paths of comedians, and how the lack of copyright protections for jokes helps segment the industry into superstars and have-nots, which is of even greater relevance in an era where social media is having vast effects on both the production and consumption of comedy.

Then again, the Comedy Mothership hasn't been open long enough to have much of a measurable effect on the local comedy scene anyway, so, as is so often the case, it's too soon to say. An unanswerable question is the best kind to debate over your fourth cocktail of the evening, so after noting that the interior is comfortably run-down and scruffy, and might make a good venue for small sets itself, I departed this pleasant locale for my final stop of the night.