The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  THE

  COMEDIANS

  THE

  COMEDIANS

  Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels

  and the

  History of American Comedy

  Kliph Nesteroff

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2015 by Kliph Nesteroff

  Jacket design by Charles Rue Woods

  Jacket artwork by Michael Tedesco

  Author photograph © Jim Herrington

  Some of the material herein is based on Kliph Nesteroff’s work with WFMU’s Beware of the Blog and Classic Television Showbiz.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2398-5

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9086-4

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  For Marc M—

  thanks for the boost

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Introduction

  A Note on Sources

  Chapter One: Vaudeville Comedians

  Chapter Two: Radio

  Chapter Three: Nightclubs

  Chapter Four: Television

  Chapter Five: Late Night

  Chapter Six: The Emergence of Las Vegas

  Chapter Seven: Stand-up’s Great Change

  Chapter Eight: Percolation in the Mid-1960s

  Chapter Nine: Hippie Madness at Decade’s End

  Chapter Ten: The First Comedy Clubs and the 1970s

  Chapter Eleven: The Stand-up Comedy Boom

  Chapter Twelve: The 1990s

  Chapter Thirteen: The New Millennium

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  PREFACE

  I’m sitting in a greenroom across from Mel Brooks on a Tuesday afternoon in February. Here on the Warner Bros. lot he is idling, waiting to be brought onstage by Conan O’Brien for a taping of the TBS program Conan. The loss of his beloved wife nine years ago seems to have hushed his backstage tones, but in a half hour when his name is announced, Brooks will summon his unique comic energy and annihilate a young audience on the very lot where he made Blazing Saddles forty years ago.

  Jokes have been made about Brooks and his longtime comedy partner Carl Reiner gaining on the 2000 Year Old Man, but at eighty-eight and ninety-two, respectively, they remain astoundingly perceptive. Like time travelers, they have transitioned from one generation to another. Reiner’s first TV gig was in 1949 and Brooks had his in 1950, a time when owning a television was a luxury. Now Reiner has lived long enough to use Twitter as compulsively as a teenage girl and Brooks is hustling Blu-Rays and appearing on podcasts. Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner: seminal links to comedy’s past living in the world of the future.

  Today Brooks is wearing a white-collared shirt and a rumpled black blazer. He drags his right palm across his face like a washcloth, a nervous tic of sorts. Comedian Jimmy Pardo speed-walks through the greenroom, reknotting a necktie, preparing for the audience warm-up. Tonight’s episode of Conan is a tribute to Sid Caesar, the legendary comic actor who had recently died at the age of ninety-one.

  In the 1950s Caesar was not just a top sketch comedian, but a revolutionary one. His two programs, Your Show of Shows (1950–1954) and Caesar’s Hour (1954–1957), employed the most influential comedy writers of the twentieth century, including Brooks, Reiner, Larry Gelbart and Neil Simon. Conan O’Brien said Sid Caesar was the whole reason he got into comedy:

  When I was a kid growing up in Brookline, Massachusetts, my father took me to the Hearthstone Plaza in Brookline Village to see something called Ten from Your Show of Shows . . . He said, “You’ve got to see this.” He took me, lights go down, I watch this, and when it was over I thought to myself, “I don’t know what that guy is doing—but I want to do that.”

  Mel Brooks was the wunderkind behind the Sid Caesar sketches, and when the program went off the air in 1954 Brooks was a hot commodity. Over on a different comedy program, The Red Buttons Show, the ratings were plunging, and NBC thought Brooks might be able to help. Mel was hired to write and direct the sinking show. It would have been his directorial debut, fifteen years before The Producers. Instead Brooks quit after only six days. I had always wondered about the reason, and since we were both idling in the greenroom, I asked him.

  “Mel . . . I’ve always wondered . . . In 1954 you were hired to direct The Red Buttons Show . . . It would have been your directorial debut, but it never happened . . .”

  “Buttons, yeah. I don’t think I ever did it.”

  “He had a reputation for being difficult . . .”

  “Oh, yes. Yeah, there was only one comedian worse, only one person more difficult to work for.”

  “Who’s that?

  “Jack Carter.”

  Back in 1950 Jack Carter had been Sid Caesar’s Saturday night lead-in as the star of The Jack Carter Show. Another iron man of show business, Carter recently died at the age of ninety-three. He was a nightclub powerhouse during the 1950s and 1960s, and a ubiquitous TV personality on everything from The Judy Garland Show to The Odd Couple to the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts. Carter’s first stand-up gig was in 1943, and he still appeared on programs like New Girl and Shameless until his death in 2015. Mel’s suggestion that Jack could be difficult was accurate, and I knew it firsthand. Over the course of chronicling stand-up history I interviewed Jack Carter several times. I learned that his curmudgeon exterior masked a gentle but insecure man. Not long ago as I was leaving his home he shouted at me, “How does a total fucking nobody like you get a book deal?” It made me laugh. He was seldom happy about anything, but I couldn’t help but love the guy.

  I’d grown fond of many elderly comedians over the course of my research: some famous, some obscure, some funny, some cringe-worthy. I respected them all. I found their stories of Mob run-ins, hopeless bombs and triumphant evenings altogether fascinating. In the case of Brooks and Carter they were among the only men alive from whom I could get firsthand information about forgotten venues and faded comics.

  One month after Mel Brooks and I chatted in the Conan greenroom, we faced each other again, this time at the Cinefamily theater in Los Angeles. I’d convinced Brooks to join me for an onstage interview about Sid Caesar followed by a 35mm screening of Ten from Your Show of Shows, the sketch film Conan O’Brien cited as his primary influence. I was pacing backstage when my phone rang. “Hi, it’s Mel! We’re driving down the alley. Where is it? Is this it? Is that you? What? Where? Okay!” Brooks hopped out of a Town Car with his unlikely companion for the evening, the owner of Elvis Presley’s Graceland. We casually went over some talking points while he sipped from his ginger ale and vodka and conversed
about old, forgotten acts like Borrah Minevitch and His Harmonica Rascals. We were fully warmed up come showtime. The executive director of the theater welcomed the crowd and gave a preamble while we waited in the wings. Brooks whispered to me, “You gonna talk first?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll set it up and talk about Sid Caesar for three minutes . . .”

  “Do five,” said Mel.

  I laughed. “What—now I’m opening for you?”

  “Yeah, you’re opening for me!”

  “Ladies and germs!”

  INTRODUCTION

  Just tell the truth and people will laugh.

  —Jonathan Winters

  A comedian’s success is almost always the result of a long, arduous struggle. Whether it was at a vaudeville theater in the 1920s or a Mafia-run nightclub in the 1940s, a coffeehouse run by filthy beatniks in the 1950s or a comedy club used as a cocaine front in the 1970s, the comedian’s struggle was remarkably similar through the generations.

  An obstacle always seemed to lie in the way of achievement. Opium habits and corrupt managers plagued the vaudeville comedian’s life. Nightclub curfews, conscription, anti-Semitism and mankind’s impending doom hampered comics during World War II. In the 1950s there were comedians arrested for “lewd and obscene” material. In the late 1960s there were comedians listed as enemies of the state for their political opinions. No matter who you were or to which generation you belonged—you had to pay your dues. If you were launched into stardom without first putting in your time, you were sure to pay your dues later, when your career faded away.

  While the facts of struggle were a constant in comedy, the style of performance was not. The art form evolved and shifted shape over a hundred years, so much so that comedy fans of the current generation find it nearly impossible to relate to comedians who dominated only decades before.

  Familiar tropes have corrupted literature devoted to comedy. The “tears of a clown” idea has dominated comedy discourse even as giants like Johnny Carson and Jerry Seinfeld rejected the idea. “There are a lot of unhappy people driving bread trucks, but when it’s a comedian people find it very poignant,” said Seinfeld. “Some of them are in pain but I don’t see that as a thread.” Carson said, “There have been volumes written about why comedians are lonely, depressed, rejected, hostile, within themselves. They say you must be suffering. I don’t adhere to that philosophy.”

  Comedy writers were often more morose, miserable and angry than the comedians for whom they wrote. Philip Rapp spent decades writing for comedy stars like Eddie Cantor and Danny Kaye. He spoke bitterly in his unpublished memoir: “The dusty corners of comedy are littered with the trash of the stand-up comics who have fallen on their faces. The stand-up comic is a special breed of non-comedian who reads jokes, such as they are, to an audience who rarely pays to see or hear him. He is indigenous to television and nightclubs, borscht circuit hotels and weddings, places to which people would go even if he wasn’t there. His earnings may be microscopic or astronomical, depending on his ‘drawing power,’ which has nothing in common with talent. There are the talented few who are genuinely funny in their approach, but finding them is like looking for grapes in a field of thistles. In the main the stand-up comic belongs to a sub-literate group. The stand-up comics and their one-liners—they might just as well be reading from a joke book.”

  And for decades they pretty much were. Prior to the 1950s the vocation of stand-up comic was not far removed from being a door-to-door salesman. One learned the basics, memorized some routines, found an agent at 1650 Broadway and called himself a comic. “There were so many bullshit comics back then,” says Jack Carter. “Frauds! Just frauds! When I was coming up there were a million of them and there were lots of clubs for them to work.” A 1946 book called From Gags to Riches praised comedians who used lines like “I know there’s an audience out there, I can hear you breathing” and “Is this an audience or a jury?” It’s amazing anyone earnestly used lines now associated with Fozzie Bear, but the Willy Loman approach worked for decades. Eventually men like Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and Jonathan Winters came along and led a revolution by developing their own material, derived from their actual personalities.

  For decades, being funny was not even a prerequisite for a career in comedy. High Anxiety scriptwriter Ron Clark remembers a comedy writer named Buddy Arnold. “Buddy Arnold’s big claim to fame was that he was Milton Berle’s writer, but he was more like a researcher. Arnold was not a funny guy at all. He would remember an old joke and find a way to switch it. There were a lot of those guys. They weren’t funny, but they were good at piecing it together. It is amazing they earned a living.”

  For decades most stand-up comics relied on material written by others, seldom writing their own words. New comedians started to question that method for the first time in the 1950s. “If he’s a chap who needs writers, he’s not a comedian,” said Lenny Bruce. “He’s an actor—whom I respect as a craftsman.”

  It was a new attitude in comedy. By the time Robert Klein entered the business in the mid-1960s, the attitude was an accepted one. The William Morris Agency wanted Klein to write for London Lee, a regular on The Ed Sullivan Show, but Klein was adamantly opposed. “I have no respect for London Lee or guys that use writers. There was no way I would ever use writers.” It was a maverick change.

  Back then you could categorize the style of comics based on what they smoked. In the 1960s the new comedians like Dick Gregory and Bob Newhart chain-smoked cigarettes and hipsters like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin smoked pot. Established old-school giants wouldn’t go anywhere without burning a giant cigar. Milton Berle, George Burns, Sid Caesar, George Jessel, Ernie Kovacs, Groucho Marx, Red Skelton and Danny Thomas were cigar aficionados long before it became the trademark of an asshole. “It gave you time to think,” said Marx. “You could tell a joke, and if the audience didn’t laugh you could take some puffs on the cigar. Sometimes that would give the audience a chance to think about the joke and give them time to laugh before you went on to the next joke.” Mel Brooks nearly suffocated while working at Your Show of Shows. “Carl [Reiner] smoked a cigar, Sid [Caesar] smoked a cigar, [staff writer] Mel Tolkin smoked a cigar. I think [staff writer] Lucille Kallen smoked a cigar! I couldn’t stand it.” Comedian Alan King started smoking cigars because he was told he had to. “Milton Berle chided me, ‘If you’re gonna be a comedian, you gotta smoke cigars.’ So I started smoking cigars in my act [and] didn’t stop until they took out half my jaw.”

  Plagiarism, stolen jokes and lifted ideas have been another familiar narrative in the history of stand-up. Jack Benny’s early years were plagued by threats of lawsuits after he plagiarized from better-known vaudeville performers like Phil Baker and Ben Bernie. More recently were the disputes between Denis Leary and Bill Hicks, Dane Cook and Louis C.K. Producer Robert Morton said the program Mind of Mencia was canceled because Comedy Central didn’t want to jeopardize its reputation among comedians after Carlos Mencia was accused of widespread joke thievery. It’s an unresolved issue that goes back to the earliest days of stand-up.

  It’s common to hear older comedy fans complain that comedians used to be funny. In comedy, generational considerations are everything. As time passes, the comedy from another era fails to resonate with the new generation. Key and Peele fans are laughing at something relevant to them, whereas the sketches of The Carol Burnett Show are mostly relevant to those who were weaned on such comedy. George Carlin influenced Louis C.K. and Lenny Bruce influenced George Carlin—yet very few Louis C.K. fans connect to the material of Lenny Bruce. It’s not a matter of one being funny and the other not, but a relation to one’s time. Veteran comedian Jan Murray said, “Comedy—every era—as it dies, people bemoan it. ‘Oh, these new comics aren’t like those guys!’ But it’s wrong, because every generation breeds its own generation that talks to that generation.” Shecky Greene agrees. “People say to me, ‘You guys were better in the o
ld days.’ Fuck the old days!”

  Vaudeville comedy now seems out of date and out of touch, incapable of creating reflexive laughter. To our modern sensibility the jokes are little more than an intangible abstraction. Epes W. Sargent, a veteran critic who died in 1938, predicted that vaudeville comedy was not going to age well: “It must be remembered that old vaudeville was more a matter of style than material. It was not so much what they said and did—as how they said and did it. The compiler can give the words. He cannot add the saving grace of personality.” Viewed through a contemporary prism, vaudeville comedy can be rather painful, but this doesn’t mean it wasn’t legitimately funny in its day.

  And yet the actual experience of the comedian remains similar to that of the vaudeville comic, transcending the generations. Then as now, countless stand-up schleppers toiled in the trenches, learned their craft, bombed before hostile audiences and killed in front of anonymous drunks. The struggle of the funny performer has remained a symbiosis of drive, jealousy, heartbreak and triumph—existing then as it exists now. Perhaps the only other constant is comedy’s unfailing popularity. Phyllis Diller once said, “There will never be enough comedy. Comedy is at a premium always.”

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  The show business trade paper Variety was the most important source for showbiz news for nearly a hundred years. Likewise it was the most important source for this book. In many instances its reviews and editorials—which were published six days a week—are the only surviving accounts of many comedians, radio performers and television shows. For this reason Variety is cited in these pages frequently.

  More than two hundred interviews were conducted for The Comedians. Where a quote is derived from an original interview, it is indicated with the present tense “says.” Where a quote is derived from a preexisting source, it is indicated with the past tense “said.” Some quotes have been condensed for length.