The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, made some comedians feel that their vocation was irrelevant. Bill Cosby was playing Kansas City but walked off in the middle of his act, overwhelmed with emotion. Richard Pryor was playing Mister Kelly’s in Chicago. “By the second show, the National Guard had surrounded the club and closed us down,” said his manager, Jerry Wald. Pryor and Wald drove through Chicago smoking a joint, observing the anger in the streets. “There were troops and people shooting, rioting, and he was crying. He was supposed to do The Ed Sullivan Show the following week, and he didn’t do it.”

  George Carlin said he was unaffected. “I didn’t respond with rage to any of what was happening in 1968. Dr. King’s murder in April was depressingly predictable. There was a sinking feeling: that something good was ebbing away and being encouraged in that direction by its usual forces. The establishment was winning—its war, its assassins, its secret government—and that fact overpowered and debilitated me more than it enraged me.”

  The assassination hardened Dick Gregory’s commitment. He would never return to full-time stand-up, instead accepting speaking engagements on the campus lecture circuit. Each appearance opened with forty-five minutes of comedy followed by a tonal shift to activist oration. He opened the second half shouting, “In case you don’t know it, America is the number one racist country in the world! Brother, I’m going to tell you straight and true, this nation is insane!”

  Other African American comedians benefited from the popularity of Dick Gregory as white booking agents saw a new opportunity for profit. Redd Foxx was one of the greatest beneficiaries. For years he was considered too salacious to book in mainstream white nightclubs. “I never really got in trouble with the sheriff for Lenny Bruce,” said Crescendo proprietor Gene Norman. “The one I always got heat about was Redd Foxx. His stuff was kind of blue and the sheriff used to object to his material.” But after the success of Gregory, Foxx was booked into white venues with regularity. In spring 1966 he was booked at the Aladdin and became the first African American comedian to headline a Vegas hotel. He made great money, and in February 1967 he took his fortune and purchased the Slate Brothers club on La Cienega. He renamed it the Redd Foxx Club and made history as the first African American club owner on “Restaurant Row,” along the border of Beverly Hills.

  While Foxx was thrilled to have some of Gregory’s residual prosperity, other old-timers resented Gregory’s success. Stepin Fetchit, longtime scourge of the NAACP for his stereotyped portrayals in old movies, claimed Gregory wasn’t doing anything he hadn’t done years before. “[I was] doing social commentary at the Orpheum Theatre in Memphis as early as 1932 and I’m still doing it.”

  Slappy White carried the largest grudge. It was the success of Gregory that led to White’s Playboy Club contract. Up to that point he had played only Black venues, but he resented anyone’s pointing it out. “I was playing white audiences before Dick Gregory was colored,” said White. He also circulated a rumor that Gregory was stealing his material. White appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and opened with a dig: “I don’t tell racial jokes because they don’t solve anything.” He then produced a white glove and a black glove from his pocket, put them on, clenched his hands and went into an “animated plea for racial brotherhood.” Gregory saw the performance and called it “an insult to comedy.”

  Motown was the most successful Black-owned business in 1960s showbiz, and comedians were part of the operation. The Motortown Revue traveled the fading Chitlin’ Circuit with acts like the Contours, the Four Tops, Little Stevie Wonder, the Marvelettes, Martha and the Vandellas, the Temptations and the Supremes. It also featured African American comedians Bill (not from Ghostbusters) Murry and Willie Tyler as the revue emcees. There was also the occasional appearance from Tommy Chong, who was a member of the Motown group Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers.

  Murry was fired from his job at a Chrysler plant in the mid-1950s. With no job prospects, he went onstage at a Detroit venue called the Vogue, homeroom of blues legend T-Bone Walker. Walker dug him and hired Murry for all his local gigs. Murry used Pigmeat Markham routines until he developed his own act. “I was doing slapstick comedy, with the baggy pants, the wine bottle and the big floppy hat. I was tagged Winehead Willie after the song ‘Winehead Willie, Put That Bottle Down.’ He [T-Bone] treated me like a son more or less and would look out for me if things threatened to get rough.” Eventually Murry was hired as the emcee at the Fox Theater in Detroit, where the biggest Black names in show business appeared. Murry’s stand-up act is lost to time, but his voice is immortalized on Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips Part I and II” as Murry shouts, “Let’s hear it for him! Little Stevie Wonder!”

  Tommy Chong, comedy’s marijuana icon, had his first taste of big-time showbiz doing the shows. “I was in heaven, living my dream: touring America with a soul revue. Playing legendary places like the Fox Theater in Detroit, the Regal Theater in Chicago, the Uptown Theater in Philly and the Apollo Theater in New York City.” Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers charted with a hit song called “Does Your Mama Know About Me,” cowritten by Chong.

  Comedian Willie Tyler logged hundreds of hours of stage experience with Motown. Tyler was ubiquitous in 1970s television with his ventriloquist dummy Lester, but in the 1960s he battled tough crowds that wanted soul music, not ventriloquists. “I signed with Motown and was with them for eight years. I traveled the road with the Motortown Revue, one-nighters all over the place. Greenville, Knoxville, Nashville, Louisville—all the ‘villes.’ We’d drive through the night and get to the hotel in the morning, shower, go to the venue, check out and drive to the next one. Lester had a big Afro; you could smell that cigarette smoke in his hair. We worked a place called the Carter Barron in Washington, D.C., a Saturday night with the potential for a rowdy audience. There was something about the place . . . not a good feeling. The leader of the band for the Motortown Revue was Choker Campbell. Martha and the Vandellas were on and all of a sudden way up in the balcony—four shots. Campbell grabbed all his sheet music and walked off the stage—as did everyone else. I was the emcee.”

  Controversial urban renewal projects changed the look of Black communities throughout the 1960s. It led to the erosion of the Chitlin’ Circuit, and increasing integration made the Black-only venues irrelevant by decade’s end.

  Bill Cosby was the first African American comedian to emerge a star after Dick Gregory, a comic for the post–Chitlin’ Circuit era. When he first tried stand-up his subject matter dealt with race, in an obvious attempt to emulate Dick Gregory. Cosby started in a small Philadelphia venue called the Cellar. It was an informal space, and there was no limit to the amount of time he had. Without time constraints, he developed his elaborate storytelling style.

  Sam Levenson, a folksy storyteller who joked about childhood and child-rearing in the 1950s, influenced Cosby. Levenson had also inspired comedian Alan King, another Cosby favorite. Cosby wrote Alan King a letter, asking for show business advice. “This kid was writing to me and I wrote back and I developed a pen pal,” said King. “He wanted to be a stand-up comedian. I said, if you’re ever in New York, come see me, and all of a sudden one day my secretary says there’s a black man outside.”

  Cosby went to Chicago in July 1962 and played the Gate of Horn. It was his first gig outside Philadelphia. He opened for Marshall Brickman’s group The Tarriers. His confidence was at an irrational level for an amateur. “He stepped forward like Aphrodite—fully formed,” says Brickman. “He was very confident and very funny—and even funnier then because it was new.” Variety caught the show. “The Tarriers are a sparkling vocal trio and young Bill Cosby, a Negro newcomer, almost cops the show with his polished comedy. Bill Cosby is an astonishingly self-assured monologist.”

  Comedian Adam Keefe said, “It was like he’d already made it. Like he had an air of success about him. Of not only success, but social position.” His confidence rubbed some the wrong
way. “I thought he was arrogant,” said manager-producer Jack Rollins. “I didn’t want to be near an arrogant comedian. I had to at least start off liking people I was trying to manage. He was too slick, and a little corny. There was no substance.”

  Cosby moved easily into the Village scene, but the material was too Dick Gregory–esque for some. Fred Weintraub managed the Café Wha when Cosby became a regular. “He was a poor imitation of Dick Gregory. He was bitter but was trying desperately to be nice. Gregory was ahead of him and was much more brilliant than Cosby, and much more racial.” Cosby agreed. “When I first began telling racial jokes, the Negroes looked at the whites, the whites looked at the Negroes, and nobody laughed.”

  Cosby and Woody Allen emerged as potent stand-up comics at the same time, coincidental in light of the sexual accusations against them decades later. Together they walked around the Village comparing notes between shows. “Woody Allen, a flesh-and-blood walk-on from the Jules Feiffer casebook, is holding forth at the Bitter End, while Bill Cosby, at the Gaslight, is riding in the back of Dick Gregory’s bus, although pursuing a different route,” reported the Village Voice. “Allen and Cosby are both in their mid-twenties, find their material in the all-too-real world, are sophisticates with broad appeal. Cosby is joining that wave of Negro wits with integrity who are burying the ghosts of Stepin Fetchit and Amos ’n’ Andy.”

  On August 6, 1963, Bill Cosby did The Tonight Show for the first time, with guest host Allan Sherman behind the desk. His routine about karate was a hit and he was at home sharing the panel with columnist Art Buchwald, comedian Milt Kamen, singer Kaye Stevens and actor Jim Backus. It was a career-making moment. NBC signed Cosby for five more Tonight Show spots and an appearance on the premiere of The Jack Paar Program. Most important, he signed a recording contract with Warner Bros., and by 1967 had five simultaneous comedy albums in the Billboard Top 100.

  Cosby was one of the last stars to emerge from the coffeehouse scene of Bruce, Sahl and Winters. During Cosby’s first wave of success Lenny Bruce was still alive, but Bruce’s life was falling apart. In the last six years of his life he was charged with obscenity on a regular basis. The charges were almost always thrown out, but his addiction to drugs complicated his legal status. Opiates constipated his career, and everything else. Friends were at a loss what to do when Bruce devolved from a charming hipster into an irrational tweaker.

  Buddy Hackett abandoned Bruce after his first drug bust. “The first time that Lenny got busted in Philadelphia, I called Buddy,” says comic Frank Man. “I said, ‘You hear what happened to Lenny?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I heard.’ I said, ‘What can we do to help him?’ He said, ‘I’m not going to do anything to help him! He’ll probably stick a needle in my kid’s arm!’ That was the end of the friendship between Buddy Hackett and Lenny Bruce.”

  Gene Norman stopped employing Lenny at his club. “He played the Crescendo for the last time around 1961. He was really unpleasant. He was mean and nasty. It was a tirade, just a vulgar tirade, [and] the sheriff’s department was on the Sunset Strip.” Angry cops busted him in the Crescendo parking lot, but found nothing incriminating on him. Not willing to let him go, they jailed him for the track marks on his arm.

  Mort Sahl remained a supporter. “He’d take advantage of the one phone call under the law and he’d call me. And I’d do the show. And I’d get paid. Then I’d go to his lawyer, who’d get him out on a writ.” The vice squad also harassed Sahl, simply because he was friends with Bruce. “I became associated in the popular mind with him. Then they started to record me, the police. They would sit in the front row and I was recorded eighty-four times. Never arrested.”

  Variety correctly predicted trouble the next time Bruce played Chicago. “Chicago is the largest Catholic archdiocese in the world and an attack on the church is considered an attack on the city. While a conviction might be considered highly unlikely, an onstage arrest would satisfy the bluenoses.” As Paul Krassner explains, “There was no law against blasphemy, so they had to use obscenity as an excuse.” Indeed, Bruce was arrested at Chicago’s Gate of Horn. Captain McDermott of the Chicago Vice Squad told the owner, “If he ever speaks against religion, I’m going to pinch you and everyone in here. Do you understand? He mocks the pope—and I’m speaking to you as a Catholic—I’m here to tell you your license is in danger.”

  It was week two of Bruce’s engagement when the cops came in. George Carlin and Marshall Brickman were both present. “He was taken offstage by the cops,” says Brickman. “There was a drum set onstage and he picked up a drumstick and started to riff on one of the cymbals, ‘Did you come good? Did you come good?’ Two cops in raincoats escorted him offstage.”

  Patrons were asked to remain seated while police did an ID check of all in attendance. “Carlin refused, and they dragged him by the pants and threw him in the same paddy wagon as Lenny,” says Krassner. The Gate of Horn’s license was revoked. Hugh Hefner paid Bruce’s legal expenses. Hefner said, “In the days that followed, I gave Lenny my lawyer to defend him and I gave him a necktie to wear. He didn’t own any ties.”

  The trial started with no mention of obscenity. “You will hear the mockery of the church, not just any church, not just the Catholic Church, not just the Lutheran Church, but the church per se.” The prosecution was immediately reminded that this was ­immaterial—but the point had been made. There was no hope for Lenny Bruce in this environment. He was sentenced to a year in jail. He challenged the conviction, but the Illinois Supreme Court upheld it. It took the Supreme Court of the United States to have it overturned. Old comedians who never counted themselves Lenny Bruce fans were outraged at the conviction. An angry Henny Youngman said, “Where do you stop with this kind of thing? I think Lenny is a brilliant performer and he advertises himself fairly when he says, ‘Let the buyer beware.’”

  Bruce was busted at Doug Weston’s Troubadour on his return to Los Angeles. The crime was titillating Yiddish. The offending words noted in the police report were “fressing, schmuck, putz, schtup and tuchas.” Bruce was busted so often that comedian Herkie Styles started traveling to his gigs as an emergency understudy.

  At the end of 1962 Bruce was arrested for drug possession three times in four months. The third bust found him tweaking in a taxi cab, a pile of needles spread across the backseat and a gram of heroin knotted in a balloon.

  Frank Laro of the Los Angeles Times foresaw Bruce’s demise in March 1963. He observed the “signs of growing obesity, his face lined by traces of physical illness and perhaps past excesses . . . What is dismaying about the man is his façade of self-assurance: a soaring, if uncertain, egotism rooted in the eroded soil of unlettered knowledge, snippets of cliché liberalism, borrowed erudition, and a conviction he has a Messianic message.”

  Bruce turned paranoid, obsessed with his persecution, and according to friends he lost his chops as a funnyman. Paul Krassner was ghostwriting Bruce’s autobiography when the dope-sick comic turned on him. “He got sick. He sent a telegram to one of his sources saying he needed Dilaudid. The telegram said something like, ‘De Lawd is in de Sky.’ I mentioned how he had to stop everything to have a fix and he said, ‘Oh, you’re going to write an article about how I’m in the gutter vomiting and you helped me? You’re gonna tell the story at cocktail parties?’ There was an unspoken agreement between us that I would not write about his drug use. He said, ‘I want you to take a lie detector test.’ I said, ‘If you can’t trust me, then there’s no point.’ I went back to New York and he sent a telegram, ‘We’re divorced.’”

  Bruce trusted no one. When his screenwriter friend Terry Southern offered him a part in two seminal dark comedies—Dr. Strangelove and The Loved One—Bruce turned him down, certain he was being exploited.

  Frankie Ray Perilli remained with him even as Sally Marr told him to keep his distance. “Sally told me not to go with Lenny. She said, ‘You don’t know junkies. They change their mind real fast.’ I got on a
plane with him. We went to St. Louis. He was with me nine weeks and never got loaded. He said, ‘When I’m with you I don’t think about it.’ Finally we went to Chicago and some asshole gave him a pill. Lenny comes into the hotel and sees me. He says, ‘Frank! What are you doing in Chicago!’ I said, ‘I’m packing my bags.’”

  Friends watched as Bruce’s world imploded. “Twelve days before Lenny died in 1966 Brenda and I went up to his house in Hollywood,” said George Carlin. “He didn’t appear in clubs anymore—the Irish cops and judges had indeed shut him the fuck up. He was just about bankrupt, having spent all his income and intellect trying to vindicate himself.”

  “He was pretty well out of his mind,” says comedian Slick Slavin. “It looked like he didn’t eat. And he was very paranoid. Shecky and I took him to a Chinese restaurant to get him a little food. His ankles were as big as his kneecaps. He couldn’t take it. While Shecky was trying to get us a table, he hugged me and said, ‘I can’t stay. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t handle this.’ Eight days later he was dead.”

  “We had a conversation two days before he died,” said Sally Marr. “I’ll never forget, he wore a gray and white shirt and he was in such pain. They’d taken away his cabaret license in New York and everyone knew he was losing the Hollywood house. He said, ‘I really think I failed at what I tried.’ I said, ‘Don’t say that; I think you’re a big success because you stuck to what you believed in.’ He said, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking about. Only a handful of people would go along with me.’ Lenny lived—so that old ladies today can talk like he talked.”

  On August 3, 1966, Lenny Bruce died of acute morphine poisoning. “Some people thought it was suicide because his house had just been foreclosed and he couldn’t get work,” says Paul Krassner. “He told his girlfriend, Lotus Weinstock, ‘I think I’m going to die this year.’ The tea was still boiling on the stove and his electric typewriter was still on—mid-word. The word was ‘constitution,’ only typed as far as C-o-n-s-t. The machine was still humming.”