The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

Gaza Strip!

  [machine gunfire]

  Everybody’s doing the gah-gah Gaza Strip!

  Man get hip!

  Then you’ll flip!

  You’ll go gah-gah when you do the gah-gah Gaza Strip!

  Freberg then addressed a pressing American anxiety—The Bomb.

  The Rancho Gommorah

  Proudly Presents . . .

  For One Time Only . . .

  Onstage . . .

  . . . the Hydrogen Bomb!

  Yes, everybody who thought he was anybody was there that night. In fact, there were a million people in the room . . . until it came to rest on that grim, specter object. I wonder if the boys were still counting their profits when time ran out. And the man . . . pushed . . . the button.

  [sound of desolate wind]

  This was the time slot during which listeners had previously heard Jack Benny. To hear a radio comedy end with the annihilation of mankind was pretty wild. “CBS went into shock,” said Freberg. “What kind of a comedian was this? They seemed to forget they had hired a satirist, if indeed they had ever known it. It was like they were expecting maybe Henny Youngman.” There was no reason for them not to have. The Stan Freberg Show was formatted in a way comparable to the way radio comedies of yore were. The parameters were similar to those of the old-time comedy shows, but its content was closer to the New Wave tone of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce.

  Not surprisingly, the program aired without a commercial sponsor. The reason was not so much corporate disgust as Freberg’s refusal to allow sponsors he considered immoral. “As a result, CBS had to turn down two different cigarette companies that wanted to sponsor me. That did not put them in the best frame of mind, considering that in 1957 radio was fading fast on the network level and most sponsors were putting the big bucks in television.”

  Freberg’s program lasted fifteen episodes. He walked away from satire and joined the ranks of those he ridiculed—Madison Avenue. He became a profitable purveyor of humorous commercials. He printed business cards celebrating his shift. They read, “Ars gratia pecuniae.” Translated, it meant “Art for money’s sake.”

  Radio comedy was dead and stand-up comedy was transformed. At the same time, sketch comedy left the domain of innocuous Broadway revues and entered a new world of subversion with Chicago’s Compass Players. Formed in 1955, it was the group with which a number of significant names like Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May got their start. Frustrated thespians from the University of Chicago took their McCarthy-age anxiety and applied it to sketch comedy. The Compass was a seed from which all improvisation-based theater collectives sprouted. Former members seminated show business commercially, culturally and politically for the next forty years.

  Cofounder David Shepherd helped shape the Compass’s progressive point of view. Initial members Roger Bowen, Severn Darden, Barbara ­Harris and Paul Sills were all progressive actors, and early cast member Mark Gordon joined the group after he was blacklisted in Hollywood. Shelley Berman, Andrew Duncan, Ted Flicker, Elaine May and Mike Nichols joined shortly thereafter. As the first pangs of social relevance were appearing in stand-up coffeehouses, the Compass brought social commentary to sketch comedy. Duncan remembered, “Suddenly there was this place called The Compass. My God, what an incredible opportunity! To get up and start expressing the things we were thinking about and feeling at that time, with all those repressed political, social, psychological feelings. We were doing some very outspoken things on sex and politics, saying ‘shit’ onstage. We struck a responsive chord in our audience.”

  Shelley Berman developed material at the Compass before taking it to stand-up stardom. Andrew Duncan said, “He had a tremendous sense of an audience, but he didn’t work our way. He wouldn’t give an inch. You really had to fight him. I was one of the few who could get along with him.” With a devoted sense of self and an insecurity typical of comedians, Berman was a natural for stand-up. Duncan said the Compass fell apart because of Berman. “The wedge was Shelley. We did scenarios that put us all together, obviously, but in the free-form time we broke up into little groups. There was some strife between Mike [Nichols] and Shelley over Elaine [May]. The Compass didn’t last long after that. It ran downhill.”

  Ted Flicker opened a new Compass in St. Louis, and many notables came through the unlikely bohemian hub in Missouri. Improvisation guru Del Close was one. “I taught Del to improvise and I brought him out,” says Flicker. “Elaine May came. She was sitting on the floor and said, ‘Where does a girl get laid around here?’ I thought, ‘Oh no, not me.’ She was a very strong, fascinating, brilliant woman, but I would just as soon stick my dick in a garbage disposal. I said, ‘You can have Del!’ And the next day Del was skipping around.”

  The Compass Players of St. Louis included, at various times, Close, Darden, May, Alan Arkin, Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller. Berman was absent. “I didn’t bring him from Chicago because he was a greedy, selfish performer,” says Flicker. “Severn would come onstage, ‘Look at my rabbit.’ Shelley would commit the cardinal sin of improvisation and make a fool of Severn because there was no rabbit. I said, ‘When it’s my company, he ain’t going to be with it.’ He was talented and he was funny, but I didn’t like him. He was a mean man.”

  “It was not a very happy time,” said Alan Arkin. “It wasn’t a well-matched group.” Personality conflicts were a daily detriment. “We had an unfortunate event take place,” says Flicker. “I was out of town trying to raise money to bring us to New York. Elaine May called and said if I didn’t fire Mike Nichols she was going to quit because Mike was trying to take the theater away from me. So I called him up and I fired him.” Within months Nichols was reworking his Compass material for a nightclub act that would become the rage of Broadway.

  Nichols & May and Shelley Berman found solo success, and it made the others crave similar stardom. David Shepherd went solo, and failed. He explained, “I wanted to make as much money out of it as other people had done.” Del Close was next. “I thought I might as well get a nightclub act too. So I took some material from the Compass days, put together some new stuff, and I had an act. It took me two years to get a single going. Two years of absolutely humiliating defeat.”

  St. Louis seemed like an unlikely city for progressive comedy, but it had a venue called the Crystal Palace that was the equivalent of the hungry i. The Compass called it home. “St. Louis was where we learned ‘pad’ meant where you lived,” said Jerry Stiller. “St. Louis was a very hip town.” The hipness was strictly because of brothers Fred and Jay Landesman and Jay’s wife, Fran. They published the beat journal Neurotica and became the nexus of a bohemian scene. “Fred Landesman had this mansion and he put us on the top floor,” says Flicker. “I had one bedroom and Elaine May had the other. Below was a guesthouse for the rest of the cast. Fred was incredibly charming, very capable in terms of business and had barrels of Czechoslovakian crystal with which he built chandeliers.” Fran Landesman made excellent royalties as the lyricist for the song “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” which was written for the Beat Generation musical The Nervous Set. Those royalties sustained the club. “That broke her into the ranks,” says writer Carl Gottlieb. “They conducted the only salon in St. Louis. It was a very conservative town, and this was the bohemian enclave. My very first high was in St. Louis—morning glory seeds, hanging out in this oasis.”

  When the Compass went under, the Crystal Palace became a full-time nightclub. It was a smart but difficult room. Paul Mazursky played it with his comedy team. “We performed for fifty hipsters standing up drinking martinis and talking, talking, talking. Many of them were destined for greatness, but it hadn’t yet happened. Among the throng were Norman Mailer, Buckminster Fuller, Jack Kerouac, Gershon Legman, Allen Ginsberg and John Clellon Holmes.”

  One of the more interesting future stars to come through the Crystal Palace was Fred Willard. He played it in 1960 as part of a tw
o-man comedy team. In the early 1960s Steve Allen called Willard “brilliantly clever” and “one of the funniest young comics around.” Jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason called Willard and his partner “lineal descendants of the Marx Brothers.”

  Willard left his native Ohio for New York in the late 1950s. He enlisted in a course that gave amateur actors experience in front of a live audience. His class mounted a production of Desperate Hours at a local YMCA and he befriended fellow cast member Gus Mocerino. “He had a very good sense of humor,” said Willard. “We joked around and had a lot of fun.” They formed a team and soon stumbled across a trade advertisement for George Q. Lewis, an old joke book hack who preyed on amateurs looking for a break. He moderated workshops on how to be funny and ran a makeshift organization called the “Gagwriters Institute.” He hosted meetings at a local restaurant and handed out copies of his book—The Dictionary of Bloopers & Boners.

  Lewis charged inexperienced comics for his advice. Mocerino and Willard enrolled. “There were fifteen or twenty guys in it,” says Mocerino. “One of them was Vaughn Meader and another was Ron Carey.” Willard recalled, “Every week we would write a sketch and come back and perform it. After about eight or nine weeks the guy loved our material so much he said, ‘We’re going to do away with our sketches and just do a show of your material.’ We did our show and eventually we started getting jobs in the Village.” Mocerino changed his name to Vic Grecco and they hit the circuit as Willard & Grecco.

  Cue magazine attempted to describe Willard & Grecco’s “innate sense of the absurdity that passes for normality—superbly funny. Like the skit on a nearsighted baseball player. On a comic who does not wish to be funny . . . unique and ultimately indescribable.”

  They played the typical Village spots like the Bitter End and the Gaslight. They opened for Carmen McRae at the Village Gate. They mostly did characters in short sketches, although for the finale Willard addressed the audience. “We had an ending piece where I came out very seriously and said, ‘I have this very valuable letter. It’s called the Lincoln letter. My grandfather had written to Abraham Lincoln and Abraham Lincoln replied. It’s very valuable—but for this audience—I want to read what Mr. Lincoln said from his heart . . .’ I’d start to read and my partner in the background you could hear, ‘cough cough.’ He was a little short guy. He had a cigar. He came up, looked at me, grabbed the Lincoln letter, spit into it, threw it on the floor and walked off. The audience would laugh for three or four minutes. I would stand there and say, ‘Goodnight, everyone.’”

  “Willard & Grecco were hilarious,” says screenwriter Buck Henry. “They did a truly surrealistic act. I knew them from The Garry Moore Show.” Variety television made many familiar with Willard & Grecco. They were semiregulars with Steve Allen and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show four times. “Ed Sullivan was tough,” said Willard. “One time we were on and Billy J. Kramer was a big pop star. Sullivan would come out of commercial and say, ‘Are you ready for Billy J. Kramer?’ And the audience would scream. ‘First—Grecco and Willard.’”

  The Dean Martin Show, The Mike Douglas Show and The Woody Woodbury Show all welcomed them. “We did several Tonight Shows and did a tour of different coffeehouses around the country,” said Willard. The gigs included the Inquisition in Vancouver, the King’s Club in Dallas, the Ash Grove in Los Angeles, the Blue Angel in New York, the Shadows in Washington, D.C., and the hungry i in San Francisco, where they shared the bill with Barbra Streisand. Variety reviewed them at the Gate of Horn in Chicago: “A wildly funny comedy duo . . . off to an advantage because they look funny. Vic Grecco, the shorter of the two, looks like a dark visage used car salesman with a troubled conscience. Husky Fred Willard could be a young matinee idol. Done in blackout style, their material is hip. Among their many risible skits are a takeoff on a beauty school with Willard lecturing cheerfully on pimples and hairy legs and a radio interview on a comic who is violently serious about his comedy. Pair had the auditors howling and would seem to have a great potential for TV.”

  They were gaining momentum, but when Willard had the chance to join Second City he took it and the team temporarily broke up. Willard had more stage experience than his fellow Second City members Robert Klein and David Steinberg, and as a result was more focused. “I was kind of the weird guy. The original Second City guys all had beards and sat around smoking dope, and I heard stories of when the thaw came in the spring, you’d go out in this garden next door, and there were all these hypodermic needles and drug paraphernalia, but I was never into drugs.”

  Willard & Grecco reconvened after Willard’s yearlong spell of Second City training. They landed a guest role on Get Smart in which the entire plot was to revolve around them. It was meant as a pilot for a Willard & Grecco series. However, their agent held out for more money and the production company said forget it and the opportunity was lost.

  Willard & Grecco were offered another major television gig as supporting players on a new sketch comedy series, but Grecco didn’t want Willard along for the ride. “My partner decided he wanted to go out on his own,” said Willard. “This kind of threw me.” The series turned into one of the longest-running sketch series of all time—The Carol Burnett Show.

  Willard recalled, “My manager called and said, ‘Vic has decided he’d like to get another partner and do this Carol Burnett show. Would you have any objection to that?’ I said, ‘Yeah! I would! I wrote all this material!’ ‘Well, if you want to, why don’t you get another partner and audition and they’ll choose?’” They each got new partners and auditioned separately. Neither got the gig. “We broke up a couple times,” says Grecco. “The problem was, I wanted to promote the hell out us, and that was resisted by Fred. My wife was a graphic artist, and we sent out promotional cards. Fred resisted that, and we had some knockdown arguments.”

  They broke up in 1968. Carl Gottlieb operated lights for the boys at the Gaslight in the early 1960s. He says, “Vic Grecco was a very odd duck. Vic sat down with six different pens and wrote pretend fan mail. They did a Smothers Brothers [Comedy Hour] and Vic wrote, ‘Have these guys back again. They’re so funny.’ The girls who read the fan mail—they could tell it was all written by the same person. Whatever chance they had, he blew it.”

  Another cerebral comedy team making waves in many of the same venues was Burns & Carlin. Jack Burns would enjoy a long career as an actor, writer and director, but it was his coffeehouse partner who became the enduring star. George Carlin may have been the only comedian who could count both Doris Day and Lenny Bruce as fans. For forty years he reveled in great creative bursts and suffered long, self-frustrated famines. Inspired by LSD and stunted by cocaine, he mastered multiple styles while contemporaries struggled to master just one. He was capable of crowd-pleasing impressions at one show and subversive routines that would have alarmed the FBI at another. Carlin delivered innocuous observations about refrigerator contents one decade and ranted about the futility of America’s two-party system the next. His trajectory, perhaps more than any other comedian’s, demonstrated the evolution of an artist.

  When Carlin enrolled in the air force in 1954, it wasn’t out of patriotic fervor. He enlisted to capitalize on the G.I. Bill and cover the cost of broadcasting school. While he was stationed in Louisiana, his air force record was pockmarked with multiple arrests and reprimands. He charmed a local radio station manager at an off-base party. When a newsreader got sick, Carlin filled in and eventually earned his own KJOE drive-time program with a Brill Building pop music playlist. The program, Carlin’s Corner, gave him his first taste of fame. KJOE advertised his show on bus stop benches and Carlin was a local star, even if his face was frequently obscured by Shreveport’s not-so-wonderful winos. “I was eighteen and I had the advantage of having a car,” said Carlin. “I could go out at night and tell a chick, ‘Hey, you wanna hear a song tomorrow? I’ll dedicate it to you.’ It was magic!”

  Carlin was interested in a larger market and
accepted a job at WEZE Boston in 1959. The news reporter at the station was Jack Burns, who influenced Carlin’s way of thinking. “At that time George was fairly conservative,” said Burns. “I always had a progressive agenda. I thought it was the duty of an artist to fight bigotry and intolerance. We had long, interesting conversations, good political discussions.” Carlin said, “I kind of learned my politics and liberalism from him.” They became roommates and considered doing a comedy act, but Carlin’s stay in Boston was short-lived. WEZE fired him after he took the station’s van on an unauthorized drive to New York to buy a bag of pot.

  He found a vacancy at KXOL in Fort Worth, Texas. It was good practice—seven to midnight, nightly. Burns came for a visit and for the next several weeks they improvised on air. They decided to go onstage at a local coffeehouse. “It wasn’t a very good act, but people laughed,” said Carlin. “We probably had fifteen minutes. We felt secure enough to quit, and the guy said, ‘Oh, you’ll be back. Others have quit this station and thought they were going to Hollywood. You guys will be back.’” Eight months later they were on The Tonight Show.

  Burns & Carlin arrived in Los Angeles in February 1960. They got jobs at radio KDAY and one of their coworkers, Murray Becker, got them a gig at a small venue called Cosmo Alley that Lenny Bruce, Herb Cohen and Theodore Bikel all had a piece of. Bruce used the spot at 1608 North Cosmo as a workout room. A caged mynah bird was part of the club’s decor, and Bruce supposedly taught it to say “The pope sucks.”

  Cosmo Alley introduced Carlin to major players. “Mort [Sahl] came to see us,” said Carlin. “He called us ‘a cerebral duo’ and later recommended us to Hugh Hefner for the Playboy Clubs.” Becker recorded Burns & Carlin at Cosmo Alley. Hefner let them use the Playboy name, and the performance was deceptively released as Burns & Carlin at the Playboy Club Tonight, with a pair of Playboy bunnies flanking them on the cover.

  Lenny Bruce was their biggest influence. “Lenny was incredibly important to me,” said Carlin. “The defiance inherent in that material, the brilliance of the mimicry, the intellect at work, the freedom he had. I wanted to emulate it in any way I could. Jack and I, for its time, were very topical. We took stands. We took positions. We did jokes about racism, about the Ku Klux Klan, about the John Birch Society, about religions. We had a routine about giving kids heroin kits.”