The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  On October 10, 1960, Burns & Carlin did The Tonight Show with guest host Arlene Francis. It gave them a bump on the nightclub circuit. They got a bigger boost shortly thereafter when Bruce finally caught their act. “Murray Becker knew Lenny from the navy, and I used to do an impression of Lenny in the act,” said Carlin. “So he brought Lenny in to see the impression, hoping Lenny would like us. Lenny called [talent agency] GAC the next day. We got a telegram. They want to sign us, all fields, based on Lenny Bruce’s reaction.” Bruce predicted, “George Carlin will one day assume the throne as king of the social comics.”

  GAC sent Burns & Carlin on tour. The first stop was the Tidelands in Houston, a club used to test new acts. A few months earlier Bob Newhart had been booked there and emerged a star. Burns & Carlin were too subversive to explode in the same way, but they were a hit nonetheless. Variety warned they were “too hip for general run of nitery patrons who don’t have the marijuana habit.”

  Carlin went solo for the first time in February 1961. They were booked at the hungry i when Burns suffered a “kidney attack” and Carlin had to do the act on his own. A few months later Carlin laid over at the Racquet Club in Dayton, Ohio, where his future wife, Brenda, was a waitress. “Peter, Paul and Mary were scheduled to come in where she [Brenda] worked. Peter had some illness and they couldn’t make it and they had two nights open and I was pressed into service. I took material of Jack’s and mine and managed to get through two nights of it [as a solo]. That’s how I knew I was ready.”

  Burns & Carlin broke up. Jack Burns joined Second City in Chicago, met future partner Avery Schreiber and briefly became Mayberry’s deputy sheriff when Don Knotts left The Andy Griffith Show. Carlin became a regular on the Playboy Club circuit and at Howie Solomon’s Café Au Go Go in the Village. “When Jack and I broke up, I took over these Playboy dates. Then I hit kind of a dip. 1963–64. The Café Au Go Go on Bleecker Street, I stayed there for two years on and off, just trying to work, work, work, work.”

  Much has been made of Carlin’s transformation from mainstream TV act to underground scion, but his political viewpoint was evident from the start. A review from September 1962 said, “His texts are generally from the newspapers from which he has formed a viewpoint, which he readily expresses. He doesn’t mind being political, which may be a handicap in some places. The conservative side loses out on this exchange. However, the total effect of his efforts is exceedingly strong.”

  There was an undercurrent of subversive things to come in the new comedians, but many of them also accepted gigs that would seem out of character for them today. In the early 1960s Woody Allen was working on Allen Funt’s practical joke show Candid Camera, as were Marshall Brickman and Joan Rivers. Allen was on-screen posing as a bookseller who spoils endings for his customers and as an executive who dictated inappropriate letters to unwitting stenographers. Allen called it one of “the degrading things I had to do when I started. I did the show for career advancement. Now I’m trying to do Dostoyevsky trying to live down this shit.”

  It was at the behest of his managers, Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe, that he entered nightclubs. Allen had already won an Emmy for writing a Sid Caesar special. He wanted to make movies. Rollins said stand-up success would be the bargaining chip to help him achieve this dream. Allen reluctantly took his advice and entered three torturous years of nightclub gigging before seeing results.

  Allen observed one of the hottest new comedians in the ­country—Bob Newhart—and appropriated his style. “When he first started at the Bitter End he was the opening act for my group The Tarriers,” says Marshall Brickman. “He did premise stuff. ‘What if Russia launched a missile and it was coming toward New York and Khrushchev had to call Mayor Lindsay?’ He then did a phone bit like Bob Newhart.”

  When he seemed structured enough, Rollins booked him at the Blue Angel as an afterthought to Shelley Berman. Rather than have the amateur go first, which was standard procedure, Berman went first and handed Allen a hot crowd. Larry Gelbart was in the audience and said Allen emulated Nichols & May, calling it “Elaine May in drag.” It continued to be hit and miss. “He knew zero about the art of performing,” said Rollins. Charles Joffe said, “He was arrogant and hostile. If the audience didn’t get it, he had no patience . . . The pain in those first years was terrible. Woody was just awful.”

  At the end of 1960 Allen told his management, “This is crazy. It’s killing me. I’m throwing up. I’m sick. I shouldn’t be doing this. I know I can make a big career as a writer. We’ve tried it with me as a stand-up and I’m not good. I can’t handle this anymore.” Despite the anxiety, he conceded to his managers and continued. Jay Landesman booked Allen at the Crystal Palace. “Woody was terrified of an audience. He used to pace the dressing room floor muttering, ‘I hope they like me. I hope they like me.’ They didn’t.”

  His first year was the toughest. “It was the worst year of my life,” said Allen. “I’d feel this fear in my stomach every morning, the minute I woke up, and it’d be there until eleven o’clock at night. I thought of myself as a writer and when I was onstage all I could think about was wanting to get through the performance and go home. I wasn’t liking the audience. I was petrified.”

  After the Bob Newhart and Elaine May approaches, Allen tried emulating Mort Sahl. “When I first started out, I was such a great fan of Mort Sahl’s that his delivery crept into me.” But despite the influence of May, Newhart and Sahl, he felt the strongest kinship with the previous generation of comics. “People have always thought of me as an intellectual comedian, and I’m not. I’m a one-liner comic like Bob Hope and Henny Youngman. I do the wife jokes. I make faces. I’m a comedian in the classic style.”

  By 1962 he hit his stride. Lines formed where he played. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen wrote, “Woody Allen is such a hit at the Bitter End that he had to do four shows on Friday and Saturday to keep his admirers satisfied, and over the weekend more than 400 customers had to be turned away.” One of Jack Paar’s writers came to see him. “I was sent to check out this comedian,” said Dick Cavett. “I recognized immediately that there was no young comedian in the country in the same class as him for sheer brilliance of jokes.”

  Cavett booked Allen for the Paar show and Allen did it several times—even though he infuriated the host. “Jack was very upset with a piece I did about an island that didn’t think sex was dirty but they thought food was,” remembered Allen. “He was quite outraged. When they went through the piece to cut something, they couldn’t find anything to censor. So they took one word out—‘God’—just to pacify Jack.”

  Allen next got into a dustup with Ed Sullivan. During the afternoon run-through Allen used the phrase “orgasmic insurance.” Sullivan stopped the rehearsal. “He apologized to the audience for me,” said Allen. “He got me into his office afterward. He hit the ceiling. He was just enraged. It was humiliating.” Sullivan pointed a stern finger and yelled, “It is because of you this whole Vietnam thing is happening. It’s an attitude like yours that is responsible for young men burning their draft cards.”

  Marshall Brickman, along with Allen’s childhood friend Mickey Rose, helped craft Allen’s stand-up. Brickman cowrote Allen’s vodka ad routine, and they became longtime collaborators. “The plan was to give him maximum exposure on television as soon as possible, so Charlie Joffe suggested we collaborate,” says Brickman. “Together we wrote a lot of his early stand-up act, which he ultimately recorded.” Brickman and Allen walked through Manhattan and found that conversation led to material.

  Brickman says, “I would back into premises and ideas logically and he had a way, an instinct, of jumping to some absurd place. One day we were walking down the street and there was a guy coming toward us, a fashion designer. I said, ‘Isn’t that Roland Meledandri? He looks terrible.’ Woody said, ‘He’s just gone through a very bad divorce.’ I said, ‘Didn’t he used to have a mustache?’ Woody said, ‘His wife sued for the wh
ole face, but settled for the mustache.’ It just came out of him. That would happen a lot.”

  He was enjoying stand-up success, but when he performed outside his Manhattan comfort zone, he had trouble. He went to San Francisco and bombed at the hungry i. Some claim he used material belonging to more crowd-pleasing comedians in order to get by. A Playboy Club comic speaking under condition of anonymity says, “Woody generated his own material but—when he went out to do certain gigs, if he really wanted to be a hit, he would steal. His stuff was low-key and over some heads and a lot of audiences just didn’t get it. I opened at the London Playboy Club when Woody was over there. I got him to go up because Hugh Hefner asked me. The son of a bitch got up and did half of Will Jordan’s act.” In hearing this anecdote, Brickman says, “I believe it—but I can’t verify it. I can believe that he might have done that, sure.”

  Later the same evening the anonymous comic got into a fight with Allen. “In between shows I am standing in the foyer—unseen by Woody, who was around the corner talking to the press. They asked him why he was in England. He said, ‘Oh, Hefner flew me over because the comedian here is so bad he had to have me as backup.’ I walked around the corner, grabbed him by the throat and held him over the balcony. I said, ‘Schmuck, take it back!’ The press was taking pictures and Hefner stood there and forced them to empty the film.”

  By the end of 1962 Allen had come into his own and was anointed by comic legends. “He’s one of the most amazing men I’ve ever known,” said Jack Benny. “It’s very tough to use the word ‘genius,’ but I don’t know anyone who is as clever and funny and has the knowledge of what to do in his writing. No one compares with him.”

  Dick Cavett had a respectable job at The Tonight Show, but the ­Rollins-Joffe management firm applied the same philosophy to him as they had to Allen: Establish yourself as a strong stand-up and you’ll have a jockeying position for television and film. Cavett wrote an act and tried it out at the Bitter End. “The Bitter End was pretty good usually—a hip crowd and a young audience,” says Cavett. “I bombed the first night, but I didn’t really bomb after that.” Bitter End manager Paul Colby gave a contradictory assessment: “Dick Cavett came in 1964. Stayed for six months and bombed for six months. Audiences hated him with a passion. I mean with a passion. It wasn’t even neutral hatred. It was like they wanted to kill him. He was very offensive onstage and he just couldn’t help coming off snotty. He did six months of dead silence in the middle spot.” Cavett responds, “I have no recollection of Paul Colby. He sounds like a distorted and witless creep. He’s full of shit.”

  Jack Rollins booked Cavett at the standard New Wave venues, but he never really made it as a stand-up. As a writer for The Tonight Show, however, Cavett was considered one of the best. “The monologue writers were responsible for a four-page monologue, about twelve jokes, every day,” says Brickman. “You had to deliver the monologue by three-fifteen. Dick used to come in at two forty-five and knock out his monologue. It would be submitted with the work of three or four other guys. Eighty percent of the monologue that night would be Dick’s. He was phenomenal.”

  Rollins-Joffe handled Allen and Cavett, but when Joan Rivers tried to sign with them, they refused. Rivers started at the same time as Allen and suffered the same humiliations. Initially she performed under her birth name, Joan Molinsky, and the moniker Pepper January. In the summer of 1960 she used the surname Rivers for the first time, in a one-woman show called The Diary of Joan Rivers. She was looking for something—anything—to click. She tried out for Second City. “They auditioned sixty ladies and I was sixty-first. I waited five and a half hours at William Morris, where they were holding the auditions, and when I went in I was angry and aggravated and upset by the whole thing. Paul [Sills] was there and he said, ‘Describe what happens in this room.’ And I said something like, ‘A lot of fat, middle-aged men won’t give people a chance in this room.’ And I got the job right away.”

  Rivers was with Second City for one year. “I was never truly happy at Second City, but it made my whole career. By working with those people, I found out for the first time in my life that what I thought was funny, other people thought was funny also. I suddenly found out I didn’t have to talk down in my humor, that there were a lot of people who could understand what I meant.”

  During the summer of 1964, Rivers formed a comedy team with Jim Connell and Jake Holmes. They had all played the Bitter End individually when co-owner Fred Weintraub put them together as Jim, Jake and Joan. He envisioned them as a modern-day version of Adolph Green, Judy Holliday and Betty Comden, who—as the Revuers—were the Village Vanguard’s sophisticated parlor room act of the 1940s. “We definitely didn’t get along, but it was a good formula,” says Holmes. “Joan couldn’t sing. If we had another person as funny as Joan that could sing—which we never would have found—we would have done better. I was the straight man with the guitar. Joan didn’t like Jim because they were competing for the comedy. They were at each other’s throats.”

  Jim, Jake and Joan played the Playboy Club in Miami Beach on a practice run. When the act seemed passable, Weintraub booked them in Chicago to open for Trini Lopez at Mister Kelly’s. “The topical comedy trio of Jim, Jake and Joan not only overcame the restlessness of the Lopez-anticipating patrons, but soon had the crowd in their palm,” wrote Variety. “Visibly nervous at the start, they rapidly caught their comedic stride and kept the house in an uproar with their refreshing humor. Their act is one of the more cleverly written and artfully presented turns to come along in some time. It moves with expresso [sic] speed and never misses a comedic trick. Their satire on such subjects as toothpaste commercials, a Nazi rocketeer at Cape Kennedy, and Playboy mag has bite, but doesn’t leave a permanent wound.”

  Joan came offstage and accused Jim of jingling change in his pocket while she was on. Jim would make misogynistic comments under his breath. They did things to intentionally anger each other. “We were playing a ‘[Robert] Kennedy for Senator’ rally when it went real bad,” says Holmes. “She showed up wearing a [U.S. senator Kenneth] Keating button. Jim said, ‘Take that Keating button off.’ She said, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ He said, ‘Well, who needs you anyway!’ She never spoke to us again.” Jim, Jake and Joan broke up, but the pressure taught Rivers how to write. Holmes says, “When you got down to the writing—she was great.” Connell became a character actor. Holmes made folk-rock records and successfully sued Led Zeppelin for plagiarism. Rivers went solo and worked twice as hard.

  One night while Rivers was bombing at the Duplex in the Village, Lenny Bruce walked in and caught her act. He sent a note backstage: “You’re right and they’re wrong.” From then on whenever she doubted herself she looked at Bruce’s note. “That kept me going for a year a half.”

  Rivers came of age during a time when there were few female comics. Vegas comedienne Totie Fields did not believe there was enough work to go around. She treated Rivers with contempt. “I could not understand why major clubs around the country refused to book me,” said Rivers. “I learned later that Totie Fields was spreading the word that I was dirty and vicious, and not funny.”

  Gender was a stand-up obstacle. Because of it she fought harder than her male counterparts. “Joan was determined to win,” says Dick Cavett. “You knew she was going to. She was so damn smart and could assemble an act of rapid jokes. Her smarts and her ambition to make it were awesome.”

  Sometimes her ambition overrode ethics. “I was signed with [manager] Irvin Arthur,” says comic-turned-actor Dick Gautier. “Irvin said, ‘Come up to the rehearsal studio. I’m looking at a bunch of young comics and I want your input.’ I’m sitting in the back and Joan Rivers walks in. She goes on and she does my act. Really—my act, word for word. She said, ‘Well? What do you think?’ Irvin said, ‘It’s funnier when Dick does it.’ He pointed to me in the back of the room and she went, ‘Ah, shit.’”

  Arthur signed Rivers despite not having much c
onfidence in her ability. “I never believed [she] would make it. But she had this perseverance that went beyond the limit. I would go see her at the Duplex. She’d use some of Woody Allen’s material, some of Henny Youngman’s, she didn’t care.” But like Jack Benny decades earlier, she hired writers to develop material. Marshall Brickman was one of them, and they worked on her act from his Candid Camera office.

  She became the house comic at Upstairs at the Downstairs at 37 W. 56th Street. Impresario Julius Monk ran simultaneous shows on two floors and the club was alternately referred to as the “Upstairs at the Downstairs” or the “Downstairs at the Upstairs,” depending on which room you were playing. Will Jordan watched Rivers evolve in the venue. “Joan Rivers was bad, just terrible, but she got writers and every single day she worked. She is an example of intense hard work.”

  Stand-up comedy was tough for women. It was even harder for those who were Black. During the supper club era, Black comedians played primarily to Black audiences, ignored by white show business even if they were major headliners along the Chitlin’ Circuit. The phrase “Chitlin’ Circuit” was a takeoff on the alliterative “Borscht Belt.” But while the Borscht Belt referred to a predominantly Jewish area, the Chitlin’ Circuit was a vague catchall referring to black theaters and clubs all across the country. Major white comedians had the luxury of playing elaborate hotels and upscale supper clubs, but Black comedians of equal ability endured a second-tier experience. “Some were theaters, but the Chitlin’ Circuit was mostly Black nightclubs,” says comic-ventriloquist Willie Tyler. “These were the places where Black acts could perform for Black crowds. B. B. King called them ‘Buckets of Blood,’ because there was always someone fighting.”