Comic Bill Kirchenbauer says, “It was just a marathon taping, just a conveyor belt. They probably recorded twenty comedians a day, and Norm would tape his little wraparound.” The show came to an end when producer Siegman violated FCC law. “The people that owned the show were bartering it, making deals that were not legitimate,” says Crosby. “I had a friend who ran a television station in Las Vegas and he said, ‘I want Norm Crosby’s show.’ They said, ‘Well, if you want Norm Crosby’s show, you have to take our cooking show and our fishing show and our javelin-throwing show and whatever.’ You’re not allowed to do that, and that’s what they did. We were all ready to go five days a week, and then we lost it.”
It was great exposure while it lasted. Syndicated programming could boost comedians’ standing in smaller markets, generating interest when they came through town for a stand-up gig. Such was the case with a syndicated comedy–game show called Make Me Laugh, essentially an infomercial for the gimmicky acts of the Comedy Store. Civilians were placed on a chair and subjected to an in-your-face comedy routine. The contestant’s goal was to keep a straight face. If you cracked a smile you lost and if you stayed firm you won a prize.
“Make Me Laugh did more for me than any of my Tonight Show appearances,” says Franklyn Ajaye. “Make Me Laugh was on five straight nights, and those five nights had far more impact on my career than talk show performances. Talk shows were always spaced out, and even if you had a really good one, you didn’t return for another three months. You couldn’t build momentum the same way. Make Me Laugh made more people aware of me, and I was able to get better bookings.” Bill Kirchenbauer agrees. “It was in many ways better than a Tonight Show because you did a week of them. When it aired in syndication around the country you were on five nights a week and got huge exposure. You’d go into towns where the show aired, places like Cleveland, and people loved you.”
Make Me Laugh performer Roger Behr believes the show brought about the Comedy Boom of the following decade. “It was a great boost for a lot of comedians’ careers. It was nationally syndicated and very popular. The next thing you know a comedy club would open where the show was airing. Make Me Laugh was the reason for the comedy club explosion around the country.”
The initial impetus for new comedy clubs was the success of Budd Friedman and Mitzi Shore. Businessman Rick Newman purchased a defunct New York dance club called Fiddlesticks in 1972, and it became Manhattan’s hottest comedy club, under the name Catch a Rising Star. “Catch was on the East Side and it was trendy,” says comedian Tim Thomerson. “Rick Newman was a really good guy. You could hang out there more than the Improv, and physically they just looked like two different places.” David Brenner walked into Catch a Rising Star hot off The Tonight Show and made it a happening.
In 1974 a second branch of the Comedy Store opened in the space of the now-defunct Ledbetter’s while Jimmie Walker invested his money in Budd Friedman’s new Los Angeles branch of the Improv. It made Budd Friedman and Mitzi Shore immediate rivals. They had similar business models. Their shows were a rotation of young, unpaid comics with the occasional paid name like Shelley Berman or Jackie Mason. Two different clubs in the heart of Hollywood forced stand-up comics to choose sides, and Walker was put in a difficult position. “When Budd opened the Improv here in Los Angeles, I was working the Comedy Store. I went to work at the Improv because Budd asked me to, and Mitzi went berserk. She said, ‘If you keep going to the Improv, then you cannot work here.’ I was already established at the Store. It was nothing personal against Budd, but Mitzi made it tough.”
The emerging Comedy Boom was helped along by the publication of The Last Laugh, a 1975 book by journalist Phil Berger. It was the first book about the art form of stand-up and the only book on the subject for many years. It chronicled the struggles of Rodney Dangerfield and beatnik comic Lord Buckley, and illustrated the rise of Robert Klein and Lily Tomlin. It inspired a generation of funny people to try comedy, serving as a blueprint for those who didn’t have a clue. “It was the crucial book of my generation,” says comedian Wayne Federman. “It was like, ‘Oh! There’s a road map for this.’” Comic Scott Blakeman gifted copies to fellow comedians. “I bought a whole bunch of The Last Laugh by Phil Berger and gave them out. To this day I recommend it.” Jerry Seinfeld said, “It was a book about stand-up, which I had never seen before. And it was a serious book. It just lit me up. I read that book and I was gone. I became a comedian that day.”
The Comedy Store and the Improv demonstrated the business model. The Last Laugh demonstrated the artistic model. HBO discovered an existing audience. Syndicated stand-up programming created a new audience. Together they caused the Comedy Boom.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Stand-up Comedy Boom
On October 19, 1976, Budd Friedman’s Hollywood Improv celebrated its anniversary with a marathon show. Rob Reiner, entering his seventh season on All in the Family, was the celebrity emcee. He took to the stage and said, “This is a good way for Budd Friedman to capitalize on people for cheap talent for nothing. Budd Friedman has been able to exploit people on their way up to his own end.”
Reiner was making a joke, but it was essentially true. The seats were full at the Improv and the Comedy Store, but the performers didn’t get paid for their services. Tom Dreesen couldn’t understand why the wealth wasn’t spread at the Comedy Store. “They paid the waiters, they paid the waitresses, they paid the valet, they paid the guy who cleaned toilets. They don’t pay the comedians?”
Comedians knew they needed a united front in order to get paid. The Comedy Store was targeted rather than the Improv, as it was the most profitable. Meetings were hosted in the homes of Elayne Boosler and Jimmie Walker, but it was tough to get the comedians to engage in serious discussion. “Jay [Leno], bless his heart, couldn’t sit still,” said David Letterman. “He was behaving like a hyperactive child. Jumping up and down, being funny and distracting, to the point where everybody sort of thought, well, maybe we shouldn’t tell Jay about the next meeting.”
“Jay Leno was a loose cannon,” says Dreesen. “I’d say, ‘Jay, Jay, Jay! Be quiet!’ Gallagher was yelling, ‘We’ll burn the fucking place down!’ They were all in disarray. I began to take charge of the meetings so they could get something done.” Kelly Monteith says, “It was hysterical—comedians at a union meeting. People were in the bathroom doing cocaine.”
They drafted a proposal for the club to raise the cover charge one dollar and then split that amount among the comics. Mitzi Shore rejected the idea. She told Dreesen, “They don’t deserve to be paid. This is a showcase. This is a college.” Comedian Bill Kirchenbauer countered, “Tell me what college charges people to come in and watch students.” The Comedy Store occasionally booked legends and they always got paid. Paul Mooney observed, “Shelley Berman works the main room and he draws half crowds, but he gets all the money from the door. Then Dave or Jay come in and pack the place and they get nothing? What kind of shit is that?”
Dreesen believes it was Shore’s acrimony toward her ex-husband, Sammy, that kept her from paying comedians. “Mitzi had been married to a comedian that wanted to control her for years. Now she was controlling comedians. That’s when I realized we’re in deep shit now: The strike is going to last a long time.” Fifty-nine comedians formed a picket line. The club closed until Shore assembled scab talent—Mike Binder, Argus Hamilton, Howie Mandel and Biff Maynard among them. Tensions heightened as comedians started crossing the picket line. “Eighteen guys and one girl crossed the picket line,” says Dreesen. “If those kids had not crossed, that strike would have been over in twenty-four hours.” After a couple of weeks Alan Bursky and Garry Shandling crossed.
It was a blow, but then David Letterman joined the picket line immediately after guest-hosting an episode of The Tonight Show. It gave the strike a new level of legitimacy. Media attention followed and everyone took a side. Bob Hope sent a letter of support. Buddy Hackett den
ounced it on television. Richard Pryor sent a letter of endorsement and David Brenner called it “the biggest joke to ever come out of the Comedy Store.” George Carlin contributed money to the strike fund and Jackie Mason announced he would open his own club, operated by and for comics. Jerry Van Dyke, less famous brother of Dick, opened a restaurant in Encino and paid forty-eight striking comedians to perform. The Plaza Four restaurant in Century City quickly streamlined a comedy room to capitalize on the vacuum and Jamie Masada, a teenage dishwasher at the Comedy Store, got the idea to open a comedy club called The Laugh Factory.
Violence erupted around the Comedy Store. “Mitzi sent her thug punk comics to harass Elayne Boosler,” says Dreesen. “They punched a gay comic in the face and gave him a black eye. A lot of ugly shit went down.” Mitzi Shore met with her supporters. She was concerned that her contingent of star comics would abandon the Comedy Store and work the Improv. A picket-crossing comic said, “Well, what if there was no Improv?” A week later a Molotov cocktail hit the Improv’s roof, and half the building burned to the ground.
On May 10, 1979, the two-month strike was resolved. After three days of negotiations with a federal mediator, a deal was hammered out. Comedians would be paid twenty-five dollars per show, with amateur nights exempted. Friedman put on a public front that he was noble compared with Mitzi Shore, but he held a quiet respect for Shore’s methods and was just as reluctant to negotiate with comics. “I’m a little leery about the business now,” he told the press. “Once the unions are involved they can kill everything. I have alternate plans. Maybe it’s time for me to move on to something else.” The National Association of Comedy Club Owners was formed to create a united front against collective bargaining with comics.
The Comedy Store reopened, but there was residual anger. It was an uncomfortable atmosphere for new stand-ups, and some say the Comedy Store has had bad vibes ever since. “Mitzi Shore was greedy, and I think it affected the quality of what goes on at the Comedy Store to this day,” says Bill Kirchenbauer. “It’s just greedy evil.” Comedian Marc Maron spent his early career working the door at the Store. “It feeds on hate. You feel the walls wanting you to lose it.” Jerry Seinfeld said the Comedy Store was “kind of a sick culture. Unless you were kind of a broken-wing bird, they had no interest in you. It wasn’t a healthy environment. There’s a darkness about the place.”
Seinfeld was part of the New York scene in the late 1970s, emceeing at the Comic Strip, the final comedy club to open in New York that decade. Catch a Rising Star’s nouveau chic made stand-up feel like rock ’n’ roll. The Comic Strip felt suburban, as if your mom managed it. “Catch was the cool place,” said Seinfeld. “The Comic Strip was lame.”
Those who consider Jerry Seinfeld the epitome of clean comedy would probably find one account of his early act rather surprising. Comedian Paul Provenza remembers, “Jerry used the word ‘fuck’ so liberally in the early days. He would say, ‘What’s the fucking deal? What the fuck is up with that?’ He used it all the time and then one day he just stopped. He said it was a challenge to stop using it.” Cleaned up, his observational powers shone. Jackie Mason caught his act and told him, “You’re gonna be so big it makes me sick.”
Seinfeld’s future collaborator was spending time at the original Improv. Larry David leaned on the bar and watched comedians like Richard Lewis bring down the house, thinking he could do the same.
David and Lewis had met years earlier, but didn’t realize it. “Larry was born two weeks after me and we were in the same ward,” says Lewis. “In 1961 I went to a sports camp in Upstate New York. Larry was at the same camp. He was the most obnoxious asshole. I really hated his guts. And he hated my guts. If we played baseball, I tried to bean him. I despised him. We got in fights. He was so obnoxious.”
Camp ended and eleven years passed. Standing at the Improv bar, they befriended each other. “Larry lived a block from the Improv. I’d come to his place. He’d make halibut steak for us. He used to barter with a guy at the fish market on Ninth Avenue, and it was horrible to watch: ‘How dare you charge me a dollar eight a pound for this fish! This fish looks demented!’ One night at the bar I was a little drunk. We were already best friends. Inseparable. I was looking at him and said, ‘There’s something that’s satanic about you, and I don’t like it.’ We traced our childhoods for some reason, and we got to the camp—and it hit us. ‘You’re that Richard Lewis!’ ‘You’re that Larry David!’ We almost came to blows.”
Across the hall from David’s bachelor pad was a pot smoker with big hair and a prominent mustache. His name was Kenny Kramer, and he was the basis for the Kramer character on Seinfeld. Kenny Kramer did stand-up as a lark in the mid-1970s. One reviewer wrote, “Kenny Kraemer [sic], a gangling New Yorker who looks like he should be playing for the Knickerbockers, is a very funny rock comedian. Being a rock comedian means being selective about audiences and working on the bill with Lou Rawls doesn’t guarantee all the right people for Kraemer. But he gets most of them, and given his material and delivery he should be a biggie on the rock concert scene, where young people won’t have to discuss his lines to know they’re funny.” The premise of his closing bit was “What if Sly Stone was president of the United States?”
Larry David tried stand-up as a last resort. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he said. “I had a series of jobs. Cab driver, paralegal, private chauffeur, stuff like that and I’m lost. I’m a lost soul. Parents beside themselves, I would overhear conversations that were heartbreaking, terrible. ‘Oh, what are we going to do?’ They sent me to a psychiatrist. Then, I don’t know how or why I thought of this, I decided to take an acting class. This one time I had to speak in front of the class as myself and there were laughs. That was the moment for me. I knew somebody who was doing it [stand-up] and I had coffee with him. He said, ‘Here’s what you have to do. You have to write some material and you can go on here, you can go on here, you can go on there.’ He gave me a list of places and I started.”
He became a frequent sight at Catch a Rising Star, the Improv and a music venue called the Bottom Line. He did a bit about pickup lines, going to a bar and yelling, “My name is O’Banion—and I want a companion!” He rattled off a list of similarities between pancakes and Samoan people: “Round, flat, nice brown golden color, fit six to a plate. If you’ve ever been to the Polynesia Islands you see statues of Aunt Jemima everywhere.” He had a routine about how he yearned to have plastic surgery so he could look like a famous star—Howdy Doody. Other subject matter included baldness, pornography and “Oriental yodeling.”
Jerry Seinfeld said David was very fragile onstage and that any sign of disapproval could set him off. Comedian Kevin Nealon saw Larry David chase a heckler “right out into the street and slug it out with him.” He was just as contemptuous of an audience that was too supportive. “One night he did his set and the audience was screaming and applauding,” says comic Mike Rowe. “He was crossing into the bar and I said, ‘Larry, they’re still applauding!’ He said, ‘Yeah . . . but listen to how they’re applauding.’”
“He would storm off the stage after only a minute,” says Richard Lewis. “He would do that even if The Tonight Show people were there. He didn’t care. He was a purist. If people were ordering, [he would yell] ‘How dare you!’” The next comic always had to stand by, knowing that David could bail at any moment. “You’d hear plunk-pluh-plunk-plunk-plunk,” says comedian Rick Overton. “That was him dropping the mic.”
David did the occasional road gig, but remembers it as a nightmare. “Occasionally I would do some of those terrible Jersey clubs. The Gong Show was on at the time. So when people would come to comedy clubs they would gong you. They’d just yell it out, ‘Gong!’ I didn’t quite have an act that was going to work on the road.”
Despite the many stories, David killed quite often and became a cult favorite. In 1977 a makeshift organization called the Association of Comedy Artists named Richard
Belzer the city’s Best Emcee and awarded Larry David the title of Most Promising Comic.
Tom Dreesen was the opposite of Larry David, with a toothy smile and optimistic disposition. “I went to the Improv and watched Larry David. I said, ‘You’re very funny, I really enjoyed your set.’ He just stared at me and walked away. Next night I went to Catch a Rising Star and he did another set, a different fifteen minutes. I said, ‘God, you’re really funny, I really enjoyed you again tonight!’ He went, ‘Uh-huh,’ and walked by me. The next day I’m coming out of the Stage Delicatessen and I turn left and I walked into Larry David! I didn’t know what to say. I said, ‘Gee, I just want to tell you I really enjoyed you both nights.’ He said, ‘What’s with all this nice guy shit?’”
After seven years in the stand-up trenches, David was hired for a late night sketch comedy program called Fridays and moved to Los Angeles. He ordered furniture for his new Hollywood apartment, and an amateur comedian happened to be his deliveryman. “I delivered a futon to Larry David,” said Ray Romano. “He complained about it and we had to go exchange it.”
Fridays was criticized as a shameless Saturday Night Live knockoff. The show lasted two seasons, 1980–1982, and was full of references to pot smoking and cocaine. Cast member Mark Blankfield had a recurring role as a drug-happy pharmacist who compulsively popped pills. Comedian Darrow Igus hosted a fake cooking show, “The Rasta Gourmet,” where marijuana was the key to every recipe. Larry David was a utility actor, doing impressions of Gene Shalit and playing rebellious rabbis.
Fridays brought him into contact with future Seinfeld collaborators like Michael Richards, an Andy Kaufman–inspired stand-up who performed one-man sketches at the Improv. The conceptual pieces often confused audiences, who would laugh out of nervousness. On Fridays he and David appeared in several sketches together, some written by future Seinfeld writers like Larry Charles, Bruce Kirschbaum and Elaine Pope.
The Comedians Page 37