Steve Martin was writing for Sonny & Cher’s television series, but questioning the reason. “It was a lot of fun for a while, but I started to feel that what I was writing was very far away from me. I thought, ‘I’m wasting my life.’” Martin performed onstage as a bad magician with a cocky attitude. It often confused the crowds, and only his fellow television writers lent moral support. “We’d go to see him at the Troubadour and sometimes it would just be me and four other people in the audience,” said Sonny & Cher writer Chris Bearde. “He’d ask me afterward, ‘Do you think I should keep doing this?’”
Old comedians told Martin to quit being so weird. Once, as he sat beside veteran comedian Morey Amsterdam during an appearance on The Steve Allen Show, Amsterdam told him he would never succeed with an arrow through his head.
Albert Brooks had early appearances on The Steve Allen Show, and he too mocked showbiz clichés. Brooks had encountered old-school showbiz types through his father, Harry “Parkyakarkus” Einstein. He befriended the children of Joey Bishop and Carl Reiner and discovered his comic instincts while in high school. “At Beverly High, there was a parent-student talent show. Beverly High—a lot of the parents were famous. You had Tony Curtis, you had Carl Reiner, Rod Serling. I was the host of the evening—and I was this kid. I wrote jokes and made comments. One of the kids, for their talent portion, did those batons—you twirl them around and around—and I still remember, because it was an ad-lib. ‘Wasn’t she wonderful? Do you know, in practice, a 707 accidentally landed on the football field.’ People roared.” Larry Bishop said Brooks “had the rhythms of a professional comedian in place at the age of fifteen.”
Rob Reiner and Albert Brooks were neighbors, and they bonded. Brooks left California to perform at assorted summer theaters around the country, and Reiner joined him for a show in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Brooks enrolled in the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama in Pennsylvania and did a number of plays. When he appeared in a revue called Is There Anyone We Haven’t Offended? the local paper wrote, “Al Einstein is still not experienced enough for this strong competition, but shows an excellent flair for comedy.”
Brooks returned to Los Angeles. He and Reiner moved in together and Brooks got a job helping radio personality Gary Owens, the announcer from Laugh-In. Owens says, “I created Albert Brooks. He worked for me at KMPC in Hollywood. Albert, working in the sports department, would come in and hand me scores for my radio show in the afternoon. On the bottom of the scores he would always have some little one-liner. At that time [the sponsor slogan] was ‘With a name like Smucker’s, it’s got to be good.’ So Albert writes down, ‘Gary, how about this? “With a name like Smucker’s, it better be good.”’”
Owens got Brooks his first television shot, wherein Brooks played an inept ventriloquist. “This guy Bill Keene had a little talk show at noon and Gary Owens took over for a week,” said Brooks. “He knew about this dummy bit I used to do, this ventriloquist thing, and I was on Keene at Noon. From that I got an agent and I got three Steve Allen shows in 1968. Almost nobody laughed, but Steve Allen laughed so hard and that was the laugh you needed. From that I was offered a spot as a regular on a Dean Martin [summer replacement] show.” Producer Greg Garrison cut and pasted Brooks into four Dean Martin summer shows between 1969 and 1971. One episode also featured comedy team Hart Pomerantz and Lorne Michaels.
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Brooks went on television without ever having tried his material in a nightclub. He got his first stand-up experience only after Neil Diamond’s manager saw him on TV. Brooks started working as Diamond’s opening act and was soon headlining on his own. He created something new for every appearance. At the Bitter End in November 1971 he told the audience his act was three-dimensional and handed out polarized glasses for them to wear. At an honorary dinner for Carol Burnett he played ignorant and delivered a tribute to Carroll O’Connor. ABC-Paramount signed him to a recording contract and he released an innovative comedy LP with material written specifically for the audio medium. The debut record, Comedy Minus One, developed a cult following and the label booked him at the Troubadour to promote it. Brooks started his act from backstage, reading a tragic Dear John letter over the amplification system. A critic who saw his show that evening wrote, “His best moments suggest he will be one of the great comedians.”
Brooks was a success in comedy from the start. He was totally confident as a teenager. He mastered television appearances immediately. It was only when he was firmly established that he experienced the anxiety typical of new comedians. It all came to the surface at the Boston jazz club run by Paul Vallon called Paul’s Mall. Richard Zoglin wrote about it in his book Comedy at the Edge: “When Brooks showed up for the first night of his weeklong engagement, he found a surreal scene: the audience was filled with people in clown suits, part of a promotion for his opening act, singer Leo Sayer.” Brooks told Zoglin, “I had to come out to that. It was like, wait a minute. I got shit on as an opening act, and now I’m a headliner. How did this happen? And I just sort of reached the end of my rope . . . the most painful hour I’ve ever endured in my life. I never, ever got nervous, and it was really unnatural. I had to catch up with all those emotions. And then it was like I was examining everything. Who are these people and where am I going and what am I doing? I hit a brick wall.” He never did stand-up again.
Hoot Nights accommodated the new comedians in Los Angeles, but there was still a vacuum. At Fairfax and Beverly the nightclub known as Billy Gray’s Band Box—where three out of five acts were comedians—closed in 1966. Notably, the last comedian to ever play the Band Box was Sammy Shore.
Sammy Shore opened the first actual Los Angeles comedy club on real estate that had hosted many comedians over the decades. From 1941 until 1957, 8433 Sunset Boulevard was home to Ciro’s, an enormously successful supper club featuring major acts. It is said that its managers—Hollywood Reporter publisher Billy Wilkerson and his point man Herman Hover—made monthly payments to mobster Mickey Cohen to keep things running smoothly. There were famous anecdotes about the night when stripper Lili St. Cyr was raided by the vice squad and the evening actress Paulette Goddard fellated director Anatole Litvak right at his table. Comedians Jerry Lester, Joe E. Lewis, Larry Storch, Danny Thomas and the team of Martin & Lewis headlined Ciro’s in its prime.
In 1957 Ciro’s was severely damaged by a fire while opposing fire departments argued about whose jurisdiction it was. “Part of the building is on city property and part on county,” said Wilkerson. “While the two outfits were trying to decide who had jurisdiction, Ciro’s practically burned down.” The expense was too great for Wilkerson to rebuild, and he owed money to his creditors. The property was foreclosed, sold at public auction to a bank and turned over to Frank Sennes, a former Vegas booker and local impresario.
Sennes reopened it as The New Ciro’s and showcased the female singers he was sleeping with. The incarnation didn’t last, and Sennes became landlord to an endless succession of losers over the next fifteen years. It reopened in 1961 as Le Crazy Horse, with dance contests and “European showgirl types.” Next was The Bed-Room, advertised as “Hollywood’s most intimate lounge,” featuring an assortment of singers and hypnotists. By 1964 it was called Le Disc and bragging about its new casual dress policy in which male patrons were no longer required to wear neckties. It was renamed and remodeled as Lou Young’s Living Room, but closed after only two months. Rockers like the Bobby Fuller Five arrived in 1965 under new club name It’s Boss, which succeeded by admitting teenagers as young as fifteen. City authorities shut it down, claiming the underage policy resulted in delinquency on the Sunset Strip.
In 1967 the old name was resurrected and it reopened as Ciro’s, booking Black acts exclusively, including Count Basie, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding and—at 8433 Sunset for the first time—Richard Pryor. By 1968 it was known as Spectrum 2000 and featured “Gary Berwin’s Mad Mod Parties.” In 1970 it was renamed Ciro’s Jr. by singer Duke
Mitchell, former member of forgotten comedy team Mitchell & Petrillo. It was an exhausting turnover of business models, and everyone was sure the space was cursed.
In 1972 comedian Sammy Shore leased the lot, and a new phase of stand-up history began. Shore was a journeyman comic with limited success in the 1950s and 1960s. Longevity introduced him to every comedian in the business, and he had a lot of contacts. Shore wanted to exploit those contacts by opening his own venue, one loosely based on the Billy Gray’s Band Box model. For once, he wanted to see a venue where the roster consisted of comedians—and only comedians.
“I was with Sammy Shore when he decided to open it,” says comedian Jeremy Vernon. “He said, ‘We oughta get a storefront and make it a club. You and me and [comedians] Jack DeLeon and Howie Storm can all work there, at our own club, and we can alternate. When one guy is doing the road, the other three will be there. We can get producers to come and see us.’ I remember how I laughed when he said ‘producers.’ Lou Alexander said, ‘We’ll call it . . . we’ll call it—the House of Comedy!’ I thought to myself, ‘Jesus, this is corny, wow.’”
It was the genesis of an idea. Among those who needed to be seen by “producers” were future actor Craig T. Nelson, future screenwriter Rudy De Luca and future film director Barry Levinson. They would be the first to stand on the Comedy Store stage.
De Luca, Levinson and Nelson performed at the Ice House in Pasadena as the Three Bananas, doing a series of short, fast sketches. Penny Marshall caught their act and told them about Lohman and Barkley, a sketch program starring a pair of disc jockeys on the regional NBC affiliate. De Luca, Levinson and Nelson got the gig and wrote on the program long enough to amass a body of work they could submit elsewhere. It wasn’t long before they were staff writers on The Tim Conway Comedy Hour.
De Luca, Levinson and Nelson were influenced by the recent success of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and wanted to make the Conway show an American equivalent. “We read some of their material, and it was wonderful,” says Conway producer Sam Bobrick. “They were writing outrageous sketches—Hitler giving a football team a pep talk, a sketch with mountain climbers trying to climb a floor.” Levinson says, “We opened the season with the Christmas episode. If we got canceled too soon, we may never do a Christmas show, so we did it right up front.” It was perhaps a little too weird. The Tim Conway Comedy Hour was canceled after thirteen episodes. Staff writer Ron Clark says, “It had an interesting following of college kids—but there weren’t enough of them. It was a little ahead of its time.”
De Luca started writing for nightclub comics. “I was writing for Sammy Shore’s act in 1972. Sammy wanted to take over Ciro’s. He said, ‘Gee, I’d like to call this the Sammy Shore Room.’ I said, ‘Sammy, who the hell is going to go to the Sammy Shore Room? No one even knows who you are.’”
Shore would not be deterred. He knew that by having his own room he could work with impunity. Comedy had changed, but Shore had not. Shore was rarely booked in Los Angeles, and some of his contemporaries were surprised he worked at all. “Sammy didn’t have the best taste in the business,” says comedian Dick Curtis. “I’d say to club owners, ‘Do you actually like what Sammy does?’ They would shrug.” With a room of his own it wouldn’t matter: Shore could be the star.
De Luca and Shore joined forces, and they implemented the Budd Friedman model. “I said to Sammy, ‘There’s a place in New York called the Improv and there’s no club in Los Angeles for comics. Let’s make it an Improv type place.’ And that’s what we did.” April 12, 1972, marked the opening on the Sunset Strip, and Shore told the press, none too humbly, “It is my gift to the industry.”
Murray Langston remembers coming by the first week. “I went over with [comedian] Jackie Gayle. He was pissed because Sammy hogged the stage most of the night.” Gary Mule Deer was also there. He’d just finished his stint at Ledbetter’s as part of his new comedy team Mule Deer and Moondog and intended to leave for Colorado that evening. “We were driving down Sunset and we see this sign—‘Comedy Store.’ There were four guys at the door—Craig T. Nelson, Barry Levinson, Rudy De Luca and Sammy Shore. They had nine people in the audience and no acts. So we went in, performed and walked to the parking lot to drive back to Denver. Two of the nine people in the audience were John Byner and his manager, Harry Colomby. They came up to us: ‘We’re replacing Carol Burnett for the summer on CBS. Would you like to be regulars on The John Byner Comedy Hour?’ Then we got all of these shows—David Frost’s Madhouse 90, The Burns and Schreiber Comedy Hour—all of this stuff out of the Comedy Store.” It was the first of many times an act would go from the Comedy Store to television success. It was blind luck, but Sammy Shore had delivered on his promise.
The Comedy Store quickly established a reputation for gimmicky prop acts. Comedians from New York stuck their noses up at what became the Comedy Store style. “When Sammy Shore opened the Comedy Store he wouldn’t call on standard acts,” says Jeremy Vernon. “He preferred to call on young amateur people who were goofy. There was a girl who came onstage holding a bunch of celery for no reason. Somebody else came on with a carrot in their ear. There was this guy Charles Fleischer who came on swinging a rubber tube around his head that made a noise like ‘Whrrrrr, whrrrrr, whrrrr.’ Someone else came out with a toilet seat around their neck. Sammy Shore, by doing this, attracted a crowd that made it impossible for him to break in his material. So when Sammy wanted to break in material he had to go to The Horn [nightclub] in Santa Monica!”
The idea of a venue that booked only comedians took some getting used to. Dick Curtis was invited to check out the new club. “I went over and after I’d seen three comics he said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s all wrong. You need to have variety, not a bunch of comics all in a row.’”
It was precisely this new format that started attracting a crowd, although De Luca and Shore failed to turn a profit. Their strength was not as businessmen, and they failed to take note of the missing receipts. “There was always a big audience,” says De Luca. “But we didn’t make money because the bartender and the waitress robbed us blind.” They devised new business schemes, and in 1973 they incorporated Four Star International with Barry Levinson and comedy writer Pat McCormick. The plan was to produce TV shows using Comedy Store talent, but just as Four Star International formed, De Luca and Shore had a falling-out. “As the months progressed, Rudy and I had our differences about running a nightclub,” said Shore. “There were nights when we were literally at each other’s throats. He told me to ‘take the club and shove it’ and left.”
Shore was accepting gigs in Las Vegas at the time, and with De Luca gone there was no one to run the club. The keys were briefly handed to actor Jack Knight, but the club lost more money than before. When Knight left to join the sitcom Lotsa Luck, Sammy Shore’s wife, Mitzi, took control. She immediately implemented changes and turned it into a proper business.
The Shores broke up, and John Gregory Dunne’s novel Vegas played a part in it. Dunne based a character on Sammy Shore, portraying him as a pathetic old comedian addicted to prostitutes. “When Mitzi read the book, our marriage was already in trouble,” said Sammy. “Vegas clinched it. She cried for two days and I have never forgiven John Gregory Dunne.”
They brokered a deal in August 1974. In lieu of alimony, Mitzi Shore got the Comedy Store. Profits were maximized and presentation emphasized. “With Sammy, any comic could walk in and do forty-five minutes,” says comedian Tom Dreesen. “Mitzi streamlined it. Each comic got eighteen minutes and she’d put on four or five.” Comedian Paul Mooney went so far as to call Sammy’s absence “the best thing that ever happened to comedy in Los Angeles.”
Sammy Shore felt all washed up. Staving off irrelevance was increasingly difficult for older comedians during this time. Some of the biggest comedy figures of the early 1960s—Dick Van Dyke, Andy Griffith, Jack Paar and Danny Thomas—attempted comebacks. But most pretended the so
cial revolution of the late 1960s hadn’t happened—and suffered because of it. Comedy was unkind to those who refused to adjust to a new generation.
Danny Thomas could have retired a wealthy man, but instead grew a pair of long sideburns and starred in a new sitcom called Make Room for Granddaddy. It was a relic of another era that resembled an advertisement for Mennen hair coloring. Sitcom director John Rich was there on the first day. “Gathering for our first reading of the script, I had taken my normal position at the head of the table, with Danny sitting immediately to my left. To my surprise, he was chewing tobacco as we read, and had brought along an empty coffee can to use as a cuspidor, sitting just a few inches from my left leg. Some ten or fifteen expectorations later I asked Danny if he would mind moving the coffee can a little further away. In response, he reached into his briefcase and pulled out a revolver. ‘I keep this handy so I don’t have to move anything.’”
Milton Berle spent the 1970s fighting age with plumes of cake makeup. According to his son William, every day he painted over his wrinkles like a crazed embalmer. “It was a strange sight to see unnatural shades of thick paint applied to a sagging, tired face. Various coats of thick makeup, blackish gray spray paint over bare skin and old hair alike, crusty wax pencil streaks in front of a faded and thin hairline, all sort of poured and arranged over a wrinkled, sagging head. He didn’t look younger, just a painted version of the same elderly man. The sight up close was almost frightening.”
Jack Paar came out of retirement for a new program called Jack Paar Tonite on January 8, 1973. It was one of four rotating shows under the catchall of ABC’s Wide World of Entertainment. Other programs under the banner included Good Night America, with Geraldo Rivera; ABC Comedy News, featuring members of Second City; and a scaled-down version of The Dick Cavett Show. Jack Paar Tonite was ninety minutes of opposition to a post-Woodstock America. Reviewing the first episode, Variety wrote, “He [Paar] was ensconced in his world of the past, but should understand what worked in that era does not necessarily work today.” During its brief run it gave comedians Freddie Prinze and Jimmie Walker their television debuts. Comedian Kelly Monteith also had one of his first shots on the program. “It was his heralded return to television, but it was like he had been in a coma and didn’t realize everything had changed,” says Monteith. “I went up to the Paar offices in the Plaza Hotel and he said, ‘I carry a gun, you know.’ He showed me his gun. Jesus, what do you even say to that?”
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