Brash, nasal and opinionated, Mitzi Shore took a middling comedy club on the Sunset Strip and for a time made it the center of American comedy. That was the Comedy Store, which she won ownership of in her 1974 divorce. Before she died in 2018, the Comedy Store launched the careers of a bevy of stand-up comics, including David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jimmie Walker, Elayne Boosler and Sandra Bernhard.

Watching them all was her son, Pauly Shore. He gained notoriety as “the Weasel,” a lewd surfer character, and became a popular V.J. on MTV before appearing in 1990s movies like “Encino Man” and “Bio-Dome.” Today, at 51, he’s still a working stand-up and has begun performing a one-man show about his childhood called “Stick With the Dancing.” Backstage after a recent performance in Myrtle Beach, S.C., he shifted out of his Weasel persona and remembered his childhood as an eyewitness to the greatest minds in comedy. Looking back on that scene of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, he spoke about his mother’s influence — and the breakthroughs and feuds that surrounded her. Here are excerpts:

Mitzi Shore as a Force of Nature

My mom was very loving — but her first love was always the Store and the comics. She owned a limo — a weird-looking limo. Riding in it, I felt like we were the Addams Family. But Mom loved being driven around. She always had comedians drive the limo.

Hiding in the Lighting Booth

Around age 8, Pauly Shore became fascinated with stand-up and spent as much time as he could at the Store, hiding in the lighting booth to watch stars like Redd Foxx and George Carlin and little-known talents like Lenny Schultz.

Lenny Schultz was a P.E. coach with a beautiful body, but he was nuts. He would bring food onstage and say, “The Lenny Schultz diet, what I like to do is put food on the parts of my body where I want to lose weight.”