The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  Eventually the legal hassles took their toll and Laff fell into receivership. David and Lou Drozen got into a fight and ended up suing each other. Laff Records documented countless African American comedians, and to dip into the discography is to be transported into a parallel comedy netherworld that is otherwise lost. “I liked Lou a lot,” said Richard Stanfield, the Laff Records ventriloquist act. “They knew how to sell records. They knew how to run radio ads across the country. They got my records moving. He might have screwed me, but . . . he ran a good company.”

  Johnny Carson moved his Tonight Show from New York to Burbank on May 1, 1972, and it created a West Coast comedy boom. Comedians in New York realized that if they wanted their big network television break, geography was going to be an important consideration. Everyone started moving to California. Murray Langston says, “If Johnny Carson hadn’t decided to move his show to L.A., the Comedy Store would not have survived more than a couple months.”

  David Letterman was watching The Tonight Show from Indiana: “In those days, if you wanted to go to California and become a comic or get involved in comedy writing, performing, whatever, the blueprint was laid out in front of you every night on The Tonight Show. They would have brand-new comedians. ‘That was Steve Landesberg. You can see Steve Landesberg every night of the week at the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard here in Hollywood.’ Pretty soon you realized that was an instant connection: the Comedy Store.”

  Letterman was doing sketch comedy as part of an Indiana trio that included Joyce DeWitt, best known today as Janet from Three’s Company. Their biggest gig was a local bank’s Christmas party, and Letterman warmed up the crowd. It was his first stab at stand-up, and it went poorly. Letterman worked in regional radio and television, hosting late night movies and doing the weather. His quiet ambition was vindicated when Betty White and her game show hosting husband, Allen Ludden, came through Indianapolis. They were promoting their syndicated radio program, which was carried on Letterman’s station. They found him witty and charming and suggested he move to Hollywood.

  Letterman arrived in Los Angeles in a beat-up old truck. He went onstage at a North Hollywood bar managed by Murray Langston. “Langston had a little place in the Valley called the Showbiz,” says comic Bill Kirchenbauer. “It was nowhere near show business. It was at the corner of Lankershim and Victory and it was just a little hole-in-the-wall. There was never much of a crowd.” Langston remembers Letterman being good from the start. “He lived one block away on Oxnard and was so damn good onstage, with a natural sarcastic ability.”

  As soon as Letterman went onstage at the Comedy Store, he was considered unique. “Usually when a new guy came into the Comedy Store, the guys stood in the back and wouldn’t pay attention,” says Gary Mule Deer. “David went onstage in 1975. He had just been a weatherman and the first thing he said was something like, ‘The management of WNAS would like to take this time to state they are diametrically opposed to the use of orphans as yardage markers at driving ranges.’ Boy, did that get me. I went and sat in the front row.”

  Letterman had written six spec scripts in hopes of landing a sitcom job, but without a proper agent it was impossible to sell them. He decided stand-up was the best way to get attention. “I started working at the Comedy Store because it seemed like a more direct means of showing my work than printing up six truckloads of scripts and driving them all over town trying to get somebody to read them.”

  Letterman was a master at working crowds and much preferred the grind of hosting to a ten-minute set. “He never wanted to be the middle act or the headliner,” says Mule Deer. “David always wanted to be the emcee.” Comic Denny Johnston says, “We were amazed that he wanted to emcee all the time. We always wondered, ‘Why would he want to do that?’”

  He did the road, opening for singers like Lola Falana and Tony Orlando. The latter said Letterman was the worst opening act he ever had. Letterman admitted, “I can’t tell jokes very well. A good joke is such a well-constructed piece of writing, and writing a joke is just not natural for me.” Tom Dreesen says it was apparent Letterman had a different calling. “He didn’t enjoy stand-up, but he had an energy about him when he went onstage. David Letterman was a broadcaster being a stand-up comedian. He was destined to be a talk show host. I went with him the first time he hosted The Tonight Show. He walked out and I said to myself, ‘This guy is home.’”

  Jay Leno memorized George Carlin’s Class Clown in 1972 and did early gigs in Boston strip clubs reciting the material. He eventually developed original material, opened for Linda Ronstadt and earned experience working for the Massachusetts state government. “I used to do these psychiatric homes. This is not to make fun of psychiatric patients, but you’d go out there, ‘Hi, everyone, how you doing?’ And in the middle of your act there’d be a guy in the corner going, ‘Yeeeeee! Aiyeeeee!’ Orderlies would come in.”

  In 1975 Leno made his way to Los Angeles, hitchhiking from the airport to the Comedy Store. He embodied the 1970s with his wide collars and large glasses, smoking a pipe. He bought a car, parked it behind the Comedy Store and lived in it.

  It was no longer irrational to think one could go from vagrancy to stardom. The Improv and Comedy Store showed it was possible. Jimmie Walker was a regular at the Improv in New York when Norman Lear brought him west at the end of 1973 to star in the sitcom Good Times. Just like Leno, Walker did his first stand-up sets reciting material from comedy records, like those of Clay Tyson, an opening act for James Brown. Good Times made Walker an enormous star, and his path made comedy club regulars determined to emulate it.

  Freddie Prinze started at the Improv in New York and became one of the Comedy Store’s biggest acts. “He was so good-looking and so charming that you could not help but like him,” said Jimmie Walker. “He had enough chutzpah to get on stage and do forty-five minutes despite having almost no act.” David Brenner helped Prinze with the little material he had. Comic Billy Braver says, “He was special. He was twenty years old but it was as if he were Milton Berle. He acted like a guy with forty years’ experience.” Robert Klein agrees. “Prinze was virtuosic as a stand-up. He had command. This kid was really advanced for his age.”

  James Komack cast Prinze in the sitcom Chico and the Man. Komack had been a minor coffeehouse comedian at the Blue Angel twenty years earlier. He was accused of co-opting Chico and the Man from Cheech & Chong. “The show Chico and the Man was from a bit Cheech and I did called ‘The Old Man in the Park’ and from our record bit called ‘Pedro and the Man,’” said Tommy Chong. “James combined these two bits into his show. I talked to him after the show came out and he acknowledged he took our bits.”

  Prinze was the youngest comedy star of his generation. He felt a kinship with Lenny Bruce and looked up to Richard Pryor. “Freddie Prinze’s success was so big and so quick,” says Franklyn Ajaye. “The moneymaking potential was huge. He idolized Pryor. He started hanging with Richard, who is a great influence on comedy, but if you’re a candidate for self-destructive behavior, he’s the worst person to hang out with. Once Freddie started hanging out with him, it meant there was going to be a lot of cocaine.”

  Prinze dated Lenny Bruce’s daughter and supposedly had sex on his grave. Robert Klein says Prinze sometimes used Bruce’s material verbatim. “I was resentful that he was doing Lenny Bruce’s material without representing it as such. He said, ‘Oh, I have permission from his daughter.’ Whatever.”

  Prinze had a fetish for guns. When he stayed with Jay Leno in Boston he shot a wall full of holes. Soon he would do the same thing to himself. Prinze was with comedian Alan Bursky and a bottle of Quaaludes. Prinze was playing Russian roulette when he shot himself in the head. The warning signs of destructive behavior had been there. “I don’t know why Komack didn’t just shut down the show,” says Ajaye. “This was a kid. I always thought it was very sad. No one interceded.”

  David Letterman got what seemed like a big break in l
ate 1977 when former Comedy Store manager Rudy De Luca wrote a television pilot with Christopher Guest. They created a satire of 60 Minutes called Peeping Times. Mel Brooks appeared in one segment and the program was the first directing job for Barry Levinson. De Luca explains how Letterman got cast. “This agent called me up and said, ‘Would you hire this guy David Letterman? He’s going to be very big.’ I said, ‘Bullshit. They all say that.’”

  The famous Letterman tooth gap was a network concern. Letterman was told he would have to go get dental surgery and have his teeth fixed before things could proceed. Letterman fought for himself and won a compromise to wear fake inserts. “Which was fine,” said Letterman, “except that when I wore them, I couldn’t speak.”

  The network played Peeping Times for a test audience, and Letterman didn’t do well. Levinson was told he would have to replace Letterman if the project were to move ahead as a series. Levinson recalls, “It didn’t go forward, and that was the end of it. We had him under contract for five thousand an episode if it turned into a series. He went on Johnny Carson a few months later and NBC signed him to a million-dollar holding deal. We had him for five thousand dollars, and they didn’t even want him in the show!”

  The Comedy Store was a nightly casting session. It was hard to turn on a variety show without spotting a Store regular. Tom Dreesen rattles off a list: “Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, Dinah Shore, Midnight Special, Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, Soul Train, American Bandstand. Every night—every night—the talent coordinators for those shows were in the Comedy Store.”

  Robin Williams got his first television gig because of it. George Schlatter sat at Mitzi Shore’s table while planning a 1978 summer replacement, a six-episode reboot of Laugh-In. Robin Williams had just completed an acting course with former Sgt. Bilko cast member Harvey Lembeck when Schlatter hired him. “Robin Williams hung the microphone over the audience and said, ‘I’m fishin’ for assholes.’ I said we’re doing this show and whenever you stop saying ‘fuck’ and ‘asshole,’ you’ve got the job.”

  Williams unnerved fellow comedians with his fast style. “We were all accustomed to doing it one way, in which you stood at a microphone and told your jokes,” Letterman told Richard Zoglin. “And he not only didn’t stand at a microphone; he didn’t stand on the stage. He made us all feel pretty insecure.”

  Williams improvised so quickly that his manager, Buddy Morra, hired a court stenographer to transcribe each performance. Williams was immensely likable, even as he gained a reputation as a joke thief. Robert Klein says, “Robin was very nice and talented, but he had a tendency to absorb a lot of people’s material—and then apologize.” Comic Johnny Witherspoon says, “He would do people’s material on television and take their best lines. When he’d come back to the Comedy Store they’d be waiting for him.”

  While George Schlatter asked Williams to drop the cusswords, a new television venture would allow comedians to keep their profanity intact. On New Year’s Eve 1975, Home Box Office broadcast a Robert Klein concert in what was the very first HBO stand-up special. “A call came in from a guy named Harlan Kleiman,” says Klein. “He was programming Home Box Office; nobody called it HBO. He said, ‘We want you to do a comedy thing and you can say anything you want.’ This was going to be something—but I had no idea how big, had no idea what it was.”

  Klein’s special was used as a pilot of sorts to gauge response to the new idea. “The ballpark [of viewership] was somewhere between four and six hundred thousand subscribers,” says Klein. “It was a fledgling thing that people weren’t sure about. You must understand the restrictive television climate [at the time], censoring this and that and what you can and cannot say.” The subsequent HBO specials were dubbed On Location. A press release said, “Home Box Office is spending some six hundred thousand dollars to produce twelve separate comedy shows.” The new genre—the televised stand-up special—was news.

  The follow-up special used an anthology format with multiple comedians. On Location: Freddie Prinze and Friends was the first program to utilize the template adopted by most stand-up shows in the 1980s: that of several comedians doing short sets, bridged by an emcee. Hosted by Prinze, the lineup included Elayne Boosler, Gary Mule Deer, Tim Thomerson and the first significant television exposure for Jay Leno. HBO spent 1976 taping several more hour specials and aired them along with Freddie Prinze and Friends in an all-night marathon on December 31, 1976. Most Comedy Store comedians did not possess an hour of material, and as a result the majority of the On Location specials starred veterans like Myron Cohen, Rodney Dangerfield, Mort Sahl and Henny Youngman. The two youngest comedians starring in On Location for the marathon were David Brenner and Steve Martin. Martin said that his special, taped at the Troubadour, made him as a stand-up.

  David Steinberg hosted the next On Location anthology, in September 1977, a sequel to Freddie Prinze and Friends featuring Ed Bluestone, Andy Kaufman, Bobby Kelton, Bill Saluga and Robin Williams. HBO’s Michael Fuchs approached Bernie Brillstein to get Steinberg for the project. “He walked into my office and asked me to give him the comedian David Steinberg for a half-hour comedy special,” said Brillstein. “So I did, without telling him that I’d been having big trouble getting Steinberg a job and that he really needed the twenty grand. Fuchs seduced me with his passion. He painted a compelling picture of HBO’s potential. Uncensored comedy would be a major part of the equation.”

  George Carlin did his first HBO special in September 1977. He had done a pair of comedy specials for ABC four years earlier. ABC hired him to do a late night talk show pilot in January 1973. Sitting behind a desk in a tie-dyed shirt, Carlin interviewed Shelley Winters and writer Jimmy Breslin. The network followed it up with a stand-up special in August 1973 called The Real George Carlin featuring performance footage from the Bitter End, Columbia University, the Montreal Forum and a club called Grant’s Tomb.

  Carlin’s On Location was done at the University of Southern California. It had more bite than previous On Location specials, and it made HBO nervous. “People in the company were afraid of it,” said Michael Fuchs. “We sort of muscled it on the air.” It contained an on-screen warning: “We respect your decision about whether you want to see it. It contains language you hear every day on the street, though rarely on TV.”

  Comedy Store comedians dominated variety TV in the late 1970s. They made up the cast on The Richard Pryor Show, an unlikely program for network television. Three years earlier NBC had put the kibosh on a potential Pryor series, considering him too risky, but since then he’d become bankable box office. With dollar signs in its eyes, the network changed its mind. Initially NBC suggested Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca as Pryor’s recurring players. Pryor and writing partner Paul Mooney dismissed that suggestion and instead hired Sandra Bernhard, Vic Dunlop, Jimmy Martinez, Tim Reid, Marsha Warfield, Johnny Witherspoon and Robin Williams, all from the Comedy Store.

  The Richard Pryor Show debuted at 8 P.M. Tuesday, September 13, 1977, and lasted only four episodes. There was some daring material, pieces about censorship and references to cocaine, but according to Mooney its quick cancellation had nothing to do with content. Pryor pulled out of the series in protest when NBC announced it wanted its Tuesday 8 P.M. time slot to be family-friendly. “Richard freaks,” said Mooney. “The Richard Pryor Show is over before it ever gets started.”

  The Gong Show was another program loaded with comedy club kids. David Letterman was an occasional panelist and unknown sketch comic Paul Reubens was a regular contestant. The campy talent contest made Murray Langston one of the hottest comedy stars of the era. “I needed some money,” says Langston. “My club the Showbiz went out of business and I was broke. I didn’t want my friends to see me on The Gong Show, but I needed the money and they paid you whether you won or lost. I came up with this idea of putting a bag over my head.”

  “The Unknown Comic,” delivering one-liners in disguise, was an immediate suc
cess that he was not prepared for. “I created the Unknown Comic, but I had no act. I was offered a job in Las Vegas for five thousand a week. Since I had no act I hired a band, put bags over their heads and called them the Brown Baggers. I hired a line of dancers and called them the Baggettes, and that filled out the show.” The Unknown Comic was a large draw for the next four years, but as with most gimmicks the novelty wore off. Regardless, Louis C.K. cites him as an influence. “The Unknown Comic, I loved him. I was addicted to watching that. At that point, sixth grade, I was like, ‘I want to be a comedian.’”

  While stand-up comedians made appearances on a number of programs and HBO’s On Location broadcast hour-long specials, there had yet to be an actual stand-up series until Norm Crosby’s Comedy Shop came along in 1978. It was created by Joe Siegman, who was also known for cheap programming like Celebrity Bowling and Celebrity Tennis. Over four seasons Norm Crosby’s Comedy Shop syndicated comedy unknowns like Brad Garrett, Michael Keaton, Nathan Lane and Kevin Nealon. It had typical 1970s aesthetics: a glittering gold curtain, a rotating stage and comedians in bellbottom pants. Host Norm Crosby stood on a phony living room set and introduced the acts. He’d be interrupted near the end of the show by a knock on the door. “Oh, what’s that? It’s time for our mystery surprise guest!” With the turn of a doorknob a television actor materialized. “Why, it’s Vic Tayback! Vic, what in the world are you doing here?” Tayback squinted at a cue card. “Well, Norm, I’m here to introduce a real funny young kid who has done some writing for my Alice show. Here he is—Garry Shand-a-ling!”

  “I did Norm Crosby’s Comedy Shop for a lot of years,” says Crosby. “There were hundreds of comics on that show. They would come in the morning, do five minutes, and we would tape them all day long, one after another. Then we would tape the mystery guest one after another. Then the editing people would go at it and take four comics and a mystery guest, snip it and put the show together. That’s why I always wore the same jacket.”