“What he did was so shocking,” says comic Dick Curtis. “He stood onstage naked, no clothes. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce our next dancer . . . I’ve been following naked girls onstage all my life—for once I want them to have to follow me.’” He emceed at every strip joint that would have him: Club Mandalay on the Pacific Coast Highway, Club Cobblestone on San Fernando Road, the Colony Club in Gardenia, the Cup and Saucer in Downey. Most seminal was Strip City in the middle of Los Angeles. “Strip City was on the corner of Western and Pico,” says proprietor Maynard Sloate. “There were always comedians, none of them famous: Jerry Moore, Dick Kimble, Joey Carter, Slick Slavin and Lord Buckley. Redd Foxx played Strip City. And our drummer, Bill Richmond, wrote all the movies with Jerry Lewis.”
Agent Lou Dorn introduced Bruce to him, Slaote remembers. “Dorn booked all kinds of people in strip joints. All the comics were doing pretty much the same act; the ‘army routine’ was the number one piece of material. Lou took me to the Cup and Saucer. Lenny was different from the local comics, so I hired him. He played Strip City six nights a week.”
Bruce derived subject matter from the depths of his personality. Jonathan Winters in New York and Mort Sahl in San Francisco were doing likewise at the same time. These three comedians—Bruce, Sahl and Winters—performed material that was by its very nature theft-proof. To take a Jonathan Winters improvisation, transcribe it and put it in the mouth of another man would have been futile. For Norm Crosby to recite the lines of Mort Sahl would have been pointless. For a guy named Jackie to improvise in a strip club in the style of Bruce would have been an embarrassment. “You could learn nothing from these [new] guys,” says comedy writer Marshall Brickman. “It could not be learned and could not be taught.”
The comedy came from honesty and original thought. Old comedians continued in major supper clubs, but there was now a new scene in Greenwich Village venues, which attracted a different kind of crowd. “As the nightclubs go out of business, so go into business the coffeehouses,” wrote a Variety editorial. “There’s every indication this newly created atmosphere will become an important spawning ground for new show business entities. It already has happened in San Francisco where a young comedian-satirist named Mort Sahl first found an audience.”
Sahl took credit for the circuit. “I constructed a network of theaters where people can speak—they happen to be saloons, and people said it could not be done—in complete freedom . . . The whole climate has been changed.”
Two beatniks in berets—Enrico Banducci and Big Daddy Nord—moderated the brick cavern in San Francisco called the hungry i. Nord used the lowercase name long before minimalist signage was a hipster staple. He said the letter i stood for “id.” Spelling the venue’s name in lowercase was “to show we weren’t white bread.”
The hungry i opened in 1950, but it wasn’t until Sahl emerged in 1953 that it made its mark. Sahl had been indulging in experimental theater at the University of Southern California. He took the school name and did his first stand-up gigs under the name Cal Southern. He did impressions. He developed material around current events, but it bombed in traditional clubs. His act seemed to work only when he played to college crowds around Berkeley. Hoping to find educated audiences in a larger market, Sahl went to San Francisco. Comedy writer Larry Tucker told Banducci about him, but he resisted, telling Tucker, “I don’t do comics.” Eventually Tucker wore Banducci down. Sahl’s first show went well, as the crowd was full of his friends. His second show was a disaster. “I thought I was really home free,” said Sahl. “Then I got up onstage without my audience. People started throwing pennies and peanuts onstage. I was shaken.”
Sahl spoke nervously, at a clipped pace. His fast patter was bred out of fear. “I was afraid no one would laugh and I wanted to pretend I wasn’t noticing the audience. I was afraid to pause, afraid of silences. I didn’t take that risk. I kept talking through it, kept filling up the gaps—that’s where the verbosity comes from.” His style was different from that of comedians of yore. “In my case it took about three months to get a laugh because I was speaking in a strange language. The audience didn’t know what to make of it.” It was a transitional period in which the crowd had to adapt as much as the comic. Banducci kept Sahl for a year and allowed him to grow. Little by little people got used to him. There were jokes buried in his delivery, but they didn’t follow the traditional rhythm. In the words of San Francisco’s Examiner, he was “funny without being much fun.”
Sahl was one of the first to break away from the tuxedo uniform. He wore a red sweater vest that became a trademark, but when he was booked on television he was forced to wear a suit provided by a wardrobe department. Eddie Cantor told Sahl to ditch his red sweater because it gave off “the wrong associations.”
He was influential for a new generation of fans turned performers. “Sahl was our god,” says Marshall Brickman. “He was sensational, knocked everybody out. He found a whole new area of life that could be funny.”
“He was the best thing I ever saw,” said Woody Allen. “There was a need for revolution, everybody was ready for revolution, but some guy had to come along who could perform the revolution and be great. Mort was the one. He was the tip of the iceberg. Underneath were all the other people who came along: Lenny Bruce, Nichols & May, all the Second City. Mort was the vanguard of the group.”
To less refined old-time comedians like Buddy Lester, he was a pariah: “Who wants a comic you gotta have a dictionary on your lap so you can figure out what he’s saying, and even then he ain’t funny.”
He gained a cult following. Thanks to Sahl the hungry i was a moneymaker by 1954. Banducci invested and expanded. He bought the space next door, signed the Vince Guaraldi Trio, and called it The Other Room. After nearly a year with Sahl, Banducci booked other comedians for the first time. It became a contentious issue. Sahl wanted to be the only one. He and Banducci quarreled, and Sahl fled to New York.
Sahl had made the hungry i chic and in the years to come it featured comedians Shelley Berman, Dick Cavett, Irwin Corey, Phyllis Diller, Dick Gautier, Charlie Manna, Bob Newhart and Ronnie Schell. By the end of the 1950s jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason said it was “as important in the history of American entertainment as the Palace was during vaudeville.” It was profitable, but Banducci was bad with finances. Cavett says, “He was wonderful, but your check would always bounce.”
The Los Angeles equivalent was Gene Norman’s Crescendo at 8572 Sunset Boulevard. It booked comedians with jazz musicians and the manager of Strip City had a piece of it. “Gene Norman was a radio announcer who owned the Crescendo with Maynard Sloate,” says comic Dick Curtis. “Maynard insisted on putting Lenny in, and that was the beginning of his great meteoric rise.” The Crescendo presented two simultaneous shows, one on the ground floor and one upstairs in a room called The Interlude. Sometimes Bruce would be on the ground floor while Sahl worked upstairs or vice versa. “The days of Lenny Bruce and me at the Crescendo were pretty great days,” said Sahl. “One night through the ventilator I heard him playing a prom—three or four hundred high school kids—and he had them chanting, ‘Lynch Mort Sahl!’”
“When Lenny worked for me at the Crescendo, it was his most creative period,” says Sloate. “That is when he was writing. Between Strip City and the Crescendo he was unbelievably brilliant.” Gene Norman says, “Maynard told me about Lenny and brought him into the Crescendo. It was his idea, and I wasn’t too happy about it. It was a little bit raw for me.” Sloate says, “Gene had no sense of humor. He’d watch Lenny and then ask me if he was funny.”
During the spring of 1957 Bruce’s jazz cred was solidified during a four-month Crescendo run. He shared the bill with singers June Christy, Herb Jeffries, Mel Torme and the Hi-Lo’s. The Dave Pell Octet backed him each night, providing saxophone-induced bubble sounds for his closing bit about Lawrence Welk. The premise had Welk conducting a job interview with a pot-smoking jazz hip
ster. Welk threatened Bruce with a lawsuit.
Future filmmaker Paul Mazursky followed Bruce into The Interlude. At the time Mazursky was part of a comedy team with playwright Herb Hartig called Igor & H. “He was brilliant,” said Mazursky. “His act was a mixture of showbiz humor, great imitations, and strong social comment. He talked about jerking off. I didn’t know if I was square or yesterday’s news, but it shocked me.”
The year 1957 was a fertile one for Bruce. He hosted a game show pilot with Carol Channing, sold a treatment to Alfred Hitchcock Presents and appeared on The Steve Allen Show for the first time, defying skeptics with a clean set. His television shots suffered a problem similar to the one his LPs did: Mainstream media required censorship—Lenny diluted. Turning a modern audience onto his so-called genius is difficult for this reason. “Seeing him live, he was incandescent,” says writer Carl Gottlieb. “The records are only snapshots.”
On Thursday, July 18, 1957, Bruce became the first act to play the new Slate Brothers nightclub on La Cienega Boulevard. The engagement was a highly anticipated affair. Opening night was crammed with celebrities. “At that time Lenny and I were living together,” says Frankie Ray Perilli. “Opening night in the audience were the Ritz Brothers, the Marx Brothers and all these hookers with George Raft. But that night it was too noisy. They wouldn’t stop talking. Anyone would have bombed that night, because you couldn’t get anyone’s attention.” Bruce struggled through the first of two shows. Despite his reputation, he delivered a clean set for an apathetic crowd. By the time he got onstage for the second show, he was fuming. “Lenny went onstage angry—because the audience wouldn’t be quiet,” says Perilli. In rebellion, he opened with a street joke. “Kid says, ‘Daddy, what’s a degenerate?’ Father says, ‘Shut up and keep sucking.’”
The Slate Brothers pulled the plug. “He insulted everybody from the stage and swore and everything else,” says Perilli. “We ran, because they said the Slate Brothers wanted to beat the shit out of him.” At the exact same time Don Rickles was playing Zardi’s at Hollywood and Vine. Maynard Sloate says, “I went to Zardi’s to see Don Rickles. I had made arrangements to see Lenny [perform] the next night. I got a call in the morning and Lenny told me the story of telling the audience to go fuck themselves. Who did they get to replace him? Don Rickles.”
“The Slate Brothers was full of celebrities,” says comic Jackie Curtiss. “Don Rickles came over and he knew a little bit about every star and nailed them. Insulted them. They loved it. It made him.”
Bruce went back to the Crescendo, where news of the incident made him more popular. He found a niche as the so-called dirty comic and it made other comics jealous. “Lenny became the envy of everyone,” says comedian Van Harris. “He became a star with his nebulous reputation, and you’d hear comics in Hanson’s Drugstore grumbling, ‘How do you like that son of a bitch? He made it and I didn’t! With his dirt! His filthy jokes!’”
Bruce and Sahl were the hottest comics of the 1950s and were hated for it. “Those guys tried their hardest to make it our way,” complained Joey Bishop. “When they couldn’t—they switched.” Bruce responded, “As opposed to Mr. Bishop, who has been doing the same thirty minutes of café comedy for the last ten years. I’ve done thirty minutes on The Steve Allen Show that I’ll never do again . . . Anyone who is still doing [the same] jokes . . . will make a good Lodge Commander in the American Legion.”
Much of the press was on Bishop’s side. Time magazine complained in its July 13, 1959, issue that Bruce “merely shouts angrily and tastelessly at the world.” Sahl was dismissed because he “rambled.” Time, taking its cue from the established appellations “beatnik” and “Sputnik,” dubbed coffeehouse comedians “sickniks.” The magazine said they were purveyors of “sick comedy,” and “sick comedian” became a description without definition.
Progressive cartoonist Jules Feiffer thinks his Village Voice comic strip was partially responsible. “Through the title of my Voice strip—Sick, Sick, Sick—I had helped make current the media phrase ‘sick humor,’ which referred, misleadingly, to what was now a rising generation of young writers and comedians, from Terry Southern, Joseph Heller and Bruce Jay Friedman in fiction to Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Shelley Berman and Lenny Bruce in clubs.”
Variety put down Bruce with regularity. As part of the old showbiz establishment, the trade paper was hostile to his approach. It reviewed him at the Blue Angel in March 1960. “Opening night witnessed . . . open protestations at his unfunny technique. A comic’s shortcomings are more to be pitied than scorned. But an ineffectual comic’s would-be attempts at humor, which is downright gutter conversation, deserves little sympathy. His lingo makes B. S. Pully sound like a tomboy. He is undisciplined and unfunny.” Billboard was more sympathetic when jazz chronicler Jack Maher caught him at the Village Vanguard: “He continues to preach against suppression of the individual liberties in its many forms. Through it all Bruce remains in a league by himself, a man with lightning wit, graphic imagination, and a deep sensitivity for humanity.”
Lenny Bruce was able to capitalize on his reputation, but Jonathan Winters had no such luxury. Winters was the final piece of the new comedy trifecta. Sahl spoke politically. Bruce broke down boundaries of language and subject matter. Winters was the comedian as a free-form artist.
Television executives objected to him improvising on the air and insisted he perform material provided by writers. It crippled the very thing that made him notable. “Everybody has to have some gimmick and our gimmick—at least mine—was to get away from jokes,” said Winters. It was something the television industry couldn’t understand.
The most successful Jonathan Winters television spots were his talk show appearances, in which he free-associated with hosts like Jack Paar. He was the earliest of the improv comics. “Not that I invented it,” said Winters. “But I was in the race so to speak.” The Los Angeles Times wrote, “He was a revolutionary who, with a can opener, opened up the 1950s. He was best when he was live. The joy was in the moment.”
But the lifestyle of performing live—late nights, lousy hotels, access to booze—caused trouble. Winters had a family, but in order to support them he had to be far away. Gene Norman remembers his May 1959 Crescendo engagement: “Every night he became more disconnected. He was kind of unraveling onstage. He’d start talking to himself.” Columnist James Bacon wrote, “He came out and was hilariously funny for five minutes and then abruptly left the stage. As we left the club we viewed an astonishing sight. There was Jonnie out in the middle of Sunset Boulevard, directing traffic.”
A week later Winters was at the hungry i. He mentioned President Truman and was berated by hecklers. Banducci had to call the police. The next night Paul Mazursky was in the audience. “He began the show by telling the audience that he missed his wife and kids. It wasn’t funny, but the audience figured it to be the prelude of a new bit. Winters seemed more and more depressed as the minutes ticked by. Then he took out his wallet and showed the audience photos of his family. There were real tears in his eyes. We all knew that Jonathan Winters was having a nervous breakdown.”
A waiter escorted Winters to his hotel room. He didn’t stay long. He wandered to the wharf and reportedly climbed the mast of a moored ship. Frightened locals called the cops. When police arrived Winters insisted he was “the man in the moon.” Winters’ manager assured the press he was only joking, but Winters said otherwise. “It was a mental breakdown. Actually put me in the psycho ward. I was drinking twenty-five to forty cups of coffee a day and wondering why I never slept. I couldn’t even get my best friends to believe that it was a mental breakdown. They all thought it was the booze. They didn’t know what working in nightclubs did to me. It just got to me.” Sick comedy had no real definition, but Winters was literally a sick comedian.
Two years later it happened again, and he spent eight months in psychiatric care. James Cagney came to visit and joined Winters for
meditative painting sessions. Doctors suggested Winters accept electroshock therapy, which he refused.
Winters never returned to live stand-up. His comedy records were done in a studio with an invite-only audience. He did talk shows and variety television, but never again faced drunks in the darkness. “You gotta say goodbye to some cash, but I didn’t want to say goodbye to my kids.”
The generation that followed would cite Bruce, Sahl and Winters as their primary inspiration. Lenny Bruce led to George Carlin. Mort Sahl led to Woody Allen. Jonathan Winters led to Robin Williams. The influence of Bruce, Sahl and Winters cannot be overstated. They created a new approach to stand-up. They were the New Wave.
Meanwhile network radio plodded along in a way reminiscent of the dying days of vaudeville. Scripted programming still existed, but listenership had plummeted and sponsors fled as television grew in popularity. By the end of the 1950s the disc jockeys and their rock ’n’ roll records had ultimately replaced radio’s big-budget comedy shows. In this climate, a satiric and acerbic program made its way onto CBS Radio while few were paying attention.
Stan Freberg had a series of hit parodies in the early 1950s. The most successful was a takeoff on the Jack Webb program Dragnet. Freberg’s recordings for Capitol Records sold big. Having his own radio program was a natural extension of that. CBS Radio green-lit The Stan Freberg Show in 1957. It featured sketches biting, bizarre and bleak. It was the very last of the network radio comedy shows, debuting at a time when the others were already dead.
The first episode of The Stan Freberg Show satirized the way Las Vegas cashed in on personalities in the news. The premise of the sketch “Incident at Los Voraces” had the Gaza Strip being imported to a Vegas showroom. Showgirls sang:
Gaza Strip!
[machine gunfire]
The Comedians Page 20