“It was like The Tonight Show,” said Michaels. “Done every day. Full orchestra. We were hired as the writers and performed once or twice a week. At a certain point, five or six months into it, the producer of the show met with us. He said, ‘The show’s not working. We’re not sure if it’s you guys or Russ. So, we thought we’d start with you guys.’ We were let go.”
They had garnered national exposure and made a comedy LP, but remained dead-broke amateurs. Phyllis Diller was known to accept solicitations of freelance jokes, so they devised some gags, shoved them in an envelope and sent them to her manager. Diller was in the process of prepping a new series called The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show. The producer was Saul Turteltaub: “When we were staffing the show, Phyllis gave us a pile of jokes different writers had sent her. We went through them and there was one written by Michaels and Pomerantz. ‘I was driving through the Catskill Mountains. I knew I was in a small town when I saw a sign that said, “Sam’s Hospital . . . and Grill.”’ We hired them on that joke alone.”
The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show was an attempt to re-create the runaway success of Laugh-In. Michaels and Pomerantz were brought to Hollywood, and Michaels felt at home immediately. Future SNL contributor Tom Schiller said, “My father, Bob Schiller, was working on this show called The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show. He said there was a junior writer on the show that he’d love me to meet. I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Well, he knows all of the best restaurants in L.A.’ So one day Lorne comes over. Lorne lit up a joint right there in the house.”
The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show lasted thirteen episodes, but Michaels made an impression. Backstage he chatted up Bernie Brillstein, who was managing one of the show’s cast members, Norm Crosby. Their chat led to Brillstein’s taking on Michaels as a client, and he managed his career for the next thirty-five years. Brillstein immediately got Michaels and Pomerantz their next job—a position as staff writers on Laugh-In.
Michaels was thrilled, but the thrill didn’t last. “It wasn’t at all the romantic idea of what I thought being in show business would be,” he said. “The writers would write and then it would be edited by a head writer. We wouldn’t go to the read-through, we were at a motel in Burbank. On one level it was the greatest credit you could have. It did wonders for self-image and career—but it wasn’t fun.” Still, it was a lucky break. An episode Michaels worked on was nominated for an Emmy. Laugh-In writers lost the Emmy to Steve Martin and the scribes from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, but nonetheless, the nomination opened every door for Michaels.
The new Hollywood credits of Michaels and Pomerantz made them a commodity at the very network that had fired them. In 1968 the Canadian government implemented an official “broadcasting policy.” It required, by law, that a high percentage of television programming be Canadian in origin. Suddenly there was a great need for seasoned professionals who could create original content in Toronto.
Variety said Canadian comedy was “a field which the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. has allowed to shipwreck and sag to abysmal depths,” so the CBC began courting Canadians working in Hollywood. In order to lure them back from the glorious sunshine to the unbearable cold, Canadians in Hollywood were offered unprecedented creative control at the CBC. “I got a call from the head of the CBC asking what it would take,” said Michaels. The boys were handed a series of comedy specials that they would write, produce and star in.
Their initial contract was for a quartet of hour-long specials during the 1969–1970 season. Barry Cranston, a producer for Wayne & Shuster, and Bob Finkel, another Canadian lured back from Hollywood, produced. The four Friday night specials—That’s Canada for You; Today Makes Me Nervous; The Students Are Coming, the Students Are Coming; and I Am Curious (Maple)—were very much inspired by Michaels’ and Pomerantz’s previous gig. One critic described the duo as “Laugh-In North” and the CBC placed them in the very time slot in which it had been airing Laugh-In. Finkel said there was no choice but to emulate the American program because “the influence of Laugh-In has created an impatient audience.” All four specials were successful, and the CBC green-lit a Sunday night series, to air the following season, called The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour.
Toronto was going through a hippie renaissance. Its Yorkville district was a Canadian version of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, with musicians Joni Mitchell and Neil Young regulars in the neighborhood. Michaels plucked musical guests from its scene. Lighthouse, Melanie, The Sugar Shoppe and blues legends Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee broke up the sketch comedy. It was the same theory later adopted for Saturday Night Live. “We would shoot in front of an audience,” said Michaels. “It was an ensemble with a musical guest; James Taylor was on one. Cat Stevens was on one. There was a real form then called comedy-variety, but mostly it was built in the editing room the way Laugh-In was.” Pomerantz said, “Hart and Lorne was the matrix for Saturday Night Live. If you look at The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour, he [Michaels] used that as a model to sell himself to NBC.”
Under the tutelage of CBC editor Ron Meraska, Michaels learned how to cut and paste. “I spent a huge chunk of my twenties in an editing room. We came out of the first show with sixteen hours’ worth of tape. I met with the editor. I had no experience. I was still thinking script. I wasn’t in any way thinking visually. He actually saw it. He said, ‘I can teach your eye to see.’ He did. I learned how things are put together and what to look for in composition. What I learned then about myself is that I am much more interested in the production than in the performing.”
The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour was the bridge between the Laugh-In quick-edit style and the Saturday Night Live template. The specials and subsequent series featured Michaels and Pomerantz as the stars, supported by a recurring cast that included Paul Bradley of the classic Canadian film Goin’ Down the Road, actor Paul Soles of animated Spider-Man fame, and Canadian perennial Alan Thicke (whom Bob Finkel eventually fired). The program also featured the genesis of “Weekend Update” with a fake news segment called “The Lorne Report.”
Even with the success of Michaels and Pomerantz, the CBC needed far more Canadian content to adhere to the government’s broadcasting policy. When The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour became a success, the CBC hired the twenty-five-year-old Michaels to train Canadian comedy writers. “We’ve been pleased by the great concern Hart and Lorne have shown in encouraging new talent,” said a CBC spokesman. “We want to continue to develop this balance between new and more experienced artists and at the same time, we want to [be] constantly trying new ideas and styles. Hart and Lorne will be available as consultants for this purpose.”
At the end of the season, CBC waffled about renewing The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour. Brillstein called Michaels asking him to return to Los Angeles and write on a summer replacement show starring the comedy team of Jack Burns and Avery Schreiber. “It was thirteen shows in ten weeks,” said Michaels. “I went to the head of the department at the CBC and I said, ‘I have this other offer, but I will stay here [if you renew].’” The CBC hemmed and hawed, while Michaels waited and waited. The decision never came, and Michaels left Canada, a twenty-seven-year-old comedy veteran.
The Burns and Schreiber Comedy Hour paid Michaels five hundred dollars a week, but his ambitions made him restless in the writers room. After contributing a sketch for a Perry Como Christmas special, he received two new offers. “I brought him the first,” said Brillstein. “A TV special with Mama Cass, Jackie Gleason and Art Carney for ten thousand dollars. The other [offer] was to write on Lily Tomlin’s second comedy special for CBS, Lily, for thirty-five hundred dollars.”
The hour-long Lily was a vast departure from typical variety television. Its themes were urban poverty and substance abuse. It was the kind of social relevance Lily Tomlin would become known for and the type of subversion that appealed to Michaels. However, when Michaels and Tomlin first started working together, there was conflict. Producer
Irene Pinn said, “About ten days into Lorne working on the show Lily came into my office and said, ‘I want you to fire him.’ I said, ‘Okay, but what’s the problem?’ She said, ‘Well, as you know, he comes in late every day and then he talks to everybody so none of the writers are writing, they’re all talking.’” Pinn summoned Michaels and gave him an ultimatum: Work harder or leave. Michaels sat with her for three hours, talking and charming, arguing that his role was to broaden the audience, to gently subvert without alienating. His confidence was astounding.
“When Lorne worked with me on my specials he would spend too much time editing and be too fanatical about everything,” said Lily Tomlin. “[Cowriter] Jane Wagner would say, ‘You’re going too far and you’re spending too much money and the show needs to be rougher.’ Lorne and I would get into the editing room and get too perfectionist, you know. I must say I think some illegal substances had something to do with it.” Cocaine was rampant. Its use only accelerated when Richard Pryor was hired as the guest star.
The cocaine-induced fanaticism had Michaels scouting America during the casting process. Michaels went to Bleecker Street, North Wells Street and Melrose Avenue. He saw Laraine Newman for the first time in Los Angeles at a theater founded by her sister and The Committee’s Gary Austin. “He had come to see me when we had just formed the Groundlings,” said Newman. “They really were looking for men for the Lily Tomlin special, they didn’t need any more women. But they ended up hiring me.”
The fanaticism paid off. Lily was an enormous success. It boosted Tomlin to a new echelon, impressed those skeptical of Richard Pryor’s professionalism and turned Michaels into a celebrity producer. “It got nominated for an Emmy and it was a pilot special for a series,” said Michaels. “I coproduced with Jane Wagner and we spent forever on it. In the end it didn’t get picked up. But Dick Ebersol, who was the newly appointed head of late night, had this idea of doing many pilots in late night. Using late night as a testing ground for prime time. I agreed to do one for Dick.”
Ebersol green-lit the idea he felt had the most potential, a sketch comedy program with musical guests. “I was excited by it,” said Michaels. “[NBC executive] Herb Schlosser, who had a very romantic notion of production in New York, thought it should be live. For me live meant ‘no pilot.’ Somewhere in the process of doing a pilot all your most conservative instincts come out. It’s what you think will get you on the air. So the idea that I could do a show in which the audience would see it at the same time as a network was thrilling.”
Michaels again scouted underground comedy shows for a cast. Meanwhile, in order to sustain himself financially, he accepted two other writing gigs. One was the special Flip Wilson . . . Of Course in October 1974. Michaels said, “I’d been offered four Flip Wilson shows, four specials, for a little over a hundred thousand dollars. I said I would do one. It wasn’t a show I was terribly proud of.” His final gig before Saturday Night Live was writing a John Davidson special. Davidson’s polished personality appealed to middle America, along with his bland renditions of pop songs like “Little Green Apples.” For a man with such a toothy smile, his television personality was completely toothless. It was the antithesis of what Michaels wanted to do. Completely distracted by his SNL dreams, Michaels phoned it in, and reviewers could tell. Variety observed, “Writing was zilch and originality absent.” Michaels was focused on more important things—like changing the face of American variety television.
CHAPTER TEN
The First Comedy Clubs
and the 1970s
What constitutes the first comedy club is a matter of definition. The earliest comedy clubs took their cues from supper club culture, where comedians shared the bill with a singer and a band. In the 1950s Billy Gray’s Band Box in Los Angeles presented shows top-heavy with comics, as many as five stand-ups on the same bill, but crooners and orchestras still shared the show. New York gets credit for the first comedy club, and two venues in particular, but they too had a format initially no different from the rest.
Pips opened in Brooklyn at 2005 Emmons Avenue in 1962. The Improvisation opened at 358 West 44th Street in Manhattan in 1963. The clubs were run by George Schultz and Budd Friedman, respectively, and showcased singers along with comedians. But as the concept of dressing formally for a show withered away, the comedian would soon supersede the crooner. The supper club format was that of your parents’ generation. Pips and the Improvisation were for the new generation. The tastes of nightclub patrons changed in the 1960s. The singers were phased out and the first stars of the coming comedy club era emerged.
George Schultz had done stand-up under the stage name Georgie Starr in the 1940s and 1950s. He was unsuccessful, but his experience gave him an inherent bond with the struggling comedians at Pips. “George Schultz was this crazy comic that didn’t make it,” says Richard Lewis. “But he really knew what great comedy was. He hung out with Lenny and Rodney. They called him ‘The Ear.’ He walked me across the street and said, ‘You got it. And you have to eat, shit, suck and fuck this career if you want to be a star.’ Pips was important because of George Schultz.”
Pips was the first paying gig for a generation of comedians in the early 1970s. “It was a tough, hard room, but for many of us it was the first room,” says comedian Paul Provenza. “A lot of people cut their teeth there, and it had a lot to do with the New York style of comedy that emerged. The place was pretty rough and it was a very tough neighborhood. By the time I got there George had let his sons, Seth and Marty, take over. Seth was kind of a cool guy, but Marty was fucking nuts. He would pull out a gun and point it at the comedians onstage.”
David Brenner was an early Pips product. He was one of the first comedians to regularly start his jokes with “Did you ever notice,” informing the style of the many observational comedians to come. Brenner rode a wave of success in 1970 and became the first of the comedy club generation to emerge a star because of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Flush with cash, Brenner sent money back to Pips and paid for its renovations.
Budd Friedman’s Improv was initially a folk music venue in 1963. Friedman credits a forgotten comedian named Dave Astor for turning it into a comedy venue. “He was well respected by other comedians. They would all come to see him at the Blue Angel and he’d bring them over to the Improv.”
Robert Klein remembers his first time at Friedman’s joint. “The atmosphere was amazing. I did it and this guy came up to me, ‘Hey, I tell ya! You were fucking brilliant—and I am a tough cocksucker!’ I didn’t know who this guy was and whether or not I should call the police. It was Rodney Dangerfield.” What Brenner was to Pips, Klein was to the Improv: a new star who put the joint on the map. He had an observational perspective not unlike Brenner’s and a free-form style not unlike Lenny Bruce’s—a bridge between the two. An entire generation of comedians who came later, Jerry Seinfeld among them, cited Klein as their primary influence. His Grammy-nominated LP Child of the 50’s was transcribed word for word by future comedian Bill Maher so he could study the anatomy of a stand-up act. Jay Leno said Klein was the first comedian he could relate to. “Robert Klein came along. Here was a guy [with] the same kind of upbringing. Here was a guy that was kind of talking to me.”
By 1969 it was clear that the Improv and Pips had succeeded with a comedian-centric mandate, and the country’s third comedy club was opened at 1118 1st Avenue by Rodney Dangerfield. “Rodney was getting hot, but he wasn’t by any means a superstar,” says Robert Klein. “It cost him $220,000 to open the club. He borrowed money from the Franklin National Bank, from an aunt and from me. I had eleven thousand dollars in the bank and I lent him five. He paid me back in a year, but he had to borrow it back one more time because they did so well that they owed money in taxes.”
In Los Angeles most of the supper clubs were gone or at least seriously frayed by 1969. The cultural revolution eroded the tuxedo class, and hippies dictated the new showbiz. If you wanted old-time show busin
ess, you went to Las Vegas, not Hollywood, and the former coffeehouses of Shelley Berman and Mort Sahl were no longer hip. The primary comedy venue on the Sunset Strip, the Crescendo, had been replaced with a psychedelic venue called The Trip. The places for a new comedian to play were limited.
The new comedians played the stages of the hippie country- rock scene. The Byrds, Kris Kristofferson, Gram Parsons and Neil Young headlined the stages where new comedians like Albert Brooks, Steve Martin and Cheech & Chong appeared. The venues included Ledbetter’s in Westwood, the Ice House in Pasadena, PJ’s on Crescent Heights and, most important, the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard. “The Troubadour was part of that David Geffen scene,” says comedian Franklyn Ajaye. “You’d find Steve Martin, Albert Brooks and Robert Klein there. Richard Pryor did an album there.”
The new comedians performed on what was known as Hoot Night. “Hoot Night was when the regular acts were off,” says Robert Klein. “Today they call it an open mic, but back then it was called Hootenanny Night because it was almost exclusively folk singers.” Tim Thomerson entered the stand-up scene on a Hoot Night. “There were not many comics back then—1970. The first time I saw Cheech & Chong was at Hoot Night and the first time I saw Steve Martin was at Hoot Night.”
The comedy records of Lenny Bruce, Nichols & May and Tom Lehrer inspired Steve Martin. While his act ridiculed traditional showbiz, he idolized elder statesmen like Steve Allen, Jerry Lewis, Don Rickles and Jackie Vernon. Martin was a regular at the Ice House and Ledbetter’s. Comic-musician Gary Mule Deer was playing the same venues. “Steve Martin and I met at Ledbetter’s when John Denver was hosting under the name John Deutschendorf. It was half comedy and half music, Steve Martin to Gordon Lightfoot.”
The Comedians Page 33