Lawsuit blasts legendary NYC comedy club as rat-infested dump

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The Manhattan comedy club where Eddie Murphy, Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock launched their careers is now a rat-infested dump that’s being run into the ground financially, a new lawsuit claims.

Tess Wachs, the widow of Comic Strip Live club co-founder Bob Wachs, who once managed Murphy and Arsenio Hall, is suing her late husband’s business partner, Richard Tienken, Tienken’s wife Jean and manager Thomas Latsch, claiming the trio regularly uses club coffers as its personal piggybank, splurging on jewelry, restaurants and golf rounds.

Teinken’s wife, Jean, and Latsch also treat the staff so poorly while they booze it up at the club that employees call them “the Devils,” Wachs says in her new Manhattan Supreme Court suit.

The Upper East Side institution is a shell of what it was, with holes in the bathroom floor, as “dead rats and mice [are] left for weeks on the premises,” the suit adds.

Richard Tieknen fired back to The Post, “It doesn’t have dead rats.”

He claimed Wachs is going after him because “Bob left her penniless.”

Bob Wachs died in 2003 of cancer.

Richard Tienken also called Wachs’ claim that his wife Jean and the manager, Thomas Latsch, regularly get sloshed at the club’s bar “ridiculous.

“If it wasn’t for my wife that place wouldn’t exist. She goes there every day even though she doesn’t get a salary,” he said.

Richard Tienken admitted that the club’s broke, even though Seinfeld recreated his original stand-up routine at the Comic Strip for a Netflix special just last year.

“There’s nothing there,” he said.

“The Comic Strip is an institution in New York. It’s crazy,” he lamented.

He said a decade-old dispute with the club’s third co-founder, John McGown, who has since died, plunged the business into debt.

Wachs is suing for unspecified damages and the appointment of a receiver to take over running the club.

Her lawyer did not immediately respond to messages.

Wachs’ attorney, Edward D. Altabet, said his client’s personal finances are “really neither here nor there.”

He said he’s confident the claims will be proven in court.

Latsch called the allegations “nonsense.” He added that the club received an “A” rating from the city’s Department of Health.

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