The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  Jerry Seinfeld thought his Carson appearances would lift him out of comedy clubs, but it never did. “I had been on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson for nine years,” said Seinfeld. “Nobody at NBC—nobody—not one person after nine years of going on Carson three or four times a year and killing said, ‘Why don’t we talk to this kid?’”

  “I did thirty Tonight Shows and nobody still knew who I was,” said Bill Maher. “In the era that I came aboard, in the 1980s, it was no longer enough just to do The Tonight Show to become a star. The family thought you did one Tonight Show—you were a giant star, recognized everywhere. The truth was—no you weren’t. Your life was just incrementally better and you could now headline at the Pittsburgh Comedy Club.”

  Mild-mannered Tonight Show booker Craig Tennis left the program in the late 1970s to produce The Midnight Special. A more vocal and ambitious man replaced him. Jim McCawley had previously been a Carson segment producer, but fled to Canada to accept a job as talent coordinator for The Alan Hamel Show. He flew comedians Billy Braver, Jay Leno, David Letterman and Kelly Monteith to Vancouver for the talk show and was eager to return to Hollywood with his newly acquired expertise. Monteith says, “I was on The Alan Hamel Show when McCawley heard Craig Tennis was leaving the Carson show. He jumped up and said, ‘I’ve got to call! I’ve got to call!’ He got the job.” McCawley was hired to scout and book all stand-up comedians on Johnny Carson’s behalf. He was hired just as the Comedy Boom was starting. It was perfect timing. He became one of the most powerful men in comedy.

  Comedians would do anything to get on The Tonight Show. McCawley was hated, romanced and feared. When he walked into a stand-up show, the whole atmosphere changed backstage. Comedians cowered and shuddered. Jay Leno disliked him and didn’t feel he deserved his position. “Jim didn’t understand the comic sensibility. It was like he went to comedy school. He wasn’t a natural. He always had a Willy Loman aspect to it.”

  McCawley scouted comedy clubs every night and enjoyed free drinks wherever he went. Sometimes it was a defeating combination. “It was my and every comedian’s dream to do The Tonight Show,” says comedian Wayne Federman. “Jim McCawley saw me once—loved me. He came back to see me again—got drunk. I had a great set, but he didn’t remember it. That was it. I never did the show.” Comedian Jeff Altman says, “It wasn’t odd if Jim McCawley came to see your act at the Comedy Store and fell asleep on one of the back tables.”

  Comedians held grudges, but many of the complaints about McCawley were justified. McCawley booked the 1983 San Diego Comedy Festival and brought in Victoria Jackson, Bill Kirchenbauer, Bill Maher, Steven Wright and Maureen Murphy. An arts writer in the San Diego paper wrote, “McCawley’s close personal interest in Maureen Murphy’s career has sparked some controversy.” It was common gossip that McCawley’s relationship with Murphy got her on the show. “There were two comediennes up for The Tonight Show,” says comic Roger Behr. “Elayne Boosler . . . and another McCawley was sleeping with. McCawley decided she deserved to be on The Tonight Show more than Elayne. That opinion was shared by no one.”

  The Tonight Show was aware of the situation, but ultimately ignored it. “There were a lot of complaints from the comics who said Jim mistreated them,” said Tonight Show producer Peter Lassally. “He bullied people, allegedly. He was very good at his job. But the power he had maybe went to his head.”

  Drew Carey liked McCawley. “That’s all you heard: Jim McCawley this and Jim McCawley that. McCawley was a really good tastemaker. He knew when people were ready and when they weren’t. He knew Johnny’s taste.” Paul Provenza also defends him. “When we were working on my first Tonight Show set, he taught me things. I was doing two gigs a night every night for two weeks. I really wanted to be ready for it. After a couple weeks he calls, ‘You ready?’ I said, ‘Jim, I’ve been doing it and it’s not working anymore. It’s not getting the laughs.’ He said, ‘That means it’s ready for television.’ He knew the show, he knew the audience, he knew Johnny—he knew the vibe.”

  Bill Kirchenbauer has a different assessment. “McCawley would make suggestions like, ‘Maybe you should say blue instead of green.’ That’s the kind of shit he would come up with. Jim McCawley was a person in power who was totally unknowledgeable about comedy.”

  For the comedians who never landed on The Tonight Show or Letterman, there was always the proliferation of stand-up shows on cable TV. They were simple to shoot, cheap to produce, immensely popular—and there were a lot of them. “Cable didn’t have any money,” said comedian Rita Rudner. “So if they put a microphone in front of a wall and hired someone that they didn’t have to pay any money to they had very cheap television.”

  An Evening at the Improv was one of the most successful stand-up programs. It came at the right time for Budd Friedman, who lost custody of his New York comedy club in 1981 during a bitter divorce. Silver Friedman took over and blacklisted comedians like Rita Rudner and Gilbert Gottfried because they had been favorites of her husband. “It didn’t look good there for a while,” said Budd Friedman. “In fact, by 1981 I was trying to sell the [Los Angeles] club and get out.”

  And then An Evening at the Improv changed his fortunes. “It was financed by Canadian money, a tax shelter for Canadians. The original fifty-two shows were sold to the A&E Network, which kept repeating them until 1987, when they commissioned me to do new shows.” Both the initial 1981 series and its 1987 follow-up reran multiple times a day in different markets. Most professional stand-ups did more than one appearance and it was frequently compared to jury duty. “They used a lot of comedians on that show,” says Kirchenbauer. “They used comedians that Budd wouldn’t actually hire in his club.”

  Gary Mule Deer believes An Evening at the Improv screwed over the comics, denying them residuals. “We didn’t get the money we were supposed to. No matter what they say, we got screwed on that—especially when it went into syndication. They were shown over and over and we never got a penny for any of it. It was good publicity for a while, but we never made a dime.”

  Carbon copies followed: Alex Bennett’s Comedy Tonight in San Francisco, Bill Boggs’s Comedy Tonight in New York, The Big Laff-off, Comedy on the Road, Comic Strip Live, George Schlatter’s Comedy Club, The Half-Hour Comedy Hour, Showtime Comedy Club Network, Stand-up America, Stand-up Spotlight and USA Comedy Cuts clogged the airwaves. Brian Kiley was on one called The Johnnie Walker National Comedy Search. “They went around the country and gave everyone free whiskey. There were four or five hundred people in the audience and they were seriously hammered.”

  The popularity of the cable shows made the Comedy Boom even bigger. “A&E’s Evening at the Improv and stuff like that created the clubs,” says Robert Klein. “I was at the Just for Laughs festival when I heard them say ‘comedy industry’ for the first time. It became a thing.” In 1985 four new comedy clubs opened in North Carolina alone. A franchise called Coconuts opened across Florida. Canadian stand-up chain Yuk Yuk’s moved into the Northeastern United States. Fourteen new branches of the Funny Bone, the Punchline and Zanies opened between 1986 and 1988. New branches of the Improv opened in Dallas, Las Vegas and both San Diego and Irvine in California. Catch a Rising Star opened a location in Massachusetts and went public on the New York Stock Exchange. The New York Times reported, “One of the reasons for the nationwide popularity of stand-up comedy is that it is inexpensive . . . The average cost of turning a room into a 200-seat state-of-the-art comedy club [is] around $100,000. With any success, it can gross $20,000 to $25,000 a week.”

  VCRs were a common piece of living room furniture by the mid-1980s and VHS rentals sustained the Boom. Video stores stocked entire stand-up sections and fly-by-night companies released stand-up compilations. Wayne Federman appeared on a VHS tape called the Dodge Comedy Showcase. “If you went to test-drive a car, you got a VHS tape of young comedians. It was Comedy Boom insanity.”

  Film and television used the Boom as
a backdrop. The Funny Farm, starring Howie Mandel, was a feature film set in the Boom. Punchline, starring Tom Hanks and Sally Field, was another. Comedians started investing in the Boom. Rodney Dangerfield and Eddie Murphy both opened comedy clubs in Las Vegas. Family Feud host Ray Combs opened his own comedy club in Cincinnati. Al “Grandpa Munster” Lewis opened a comedy club on Staten Island. Mort Sahl briefly ran a comedy club in San Francisco. The New York Times reported in October 1987 that there were 260 comedy clubs in America and a total of 500 different comedy nights.

  The estimate of working comedians was one thousand. How many of them were actually qualified was another matter. Questionable people capitalized on the Boom, teaching stand-up courses at community colleges, penning how-to books and encouraging suckers to give it a try, the talentless leading the talentless.

  Some of the talentless were pitted against the talented in the Comedy Boom beauty pageant—Star Search. The talent contest, hosted by Ed McMahon from 1983 to 1995, hearkened back to the days of Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, with a comedian’s value determined by arbitrary votes. With only ninety seconds to prove themselves, shticky crowd-pleasers had an advantage over cerebral comics. Comedians willing to swallow their pride could get a career boost thanks to the exposure. However humiliating it may have been, the credit allowed a new comedian to tour and make decent money along the vast circuit. Among those who got early exposure on Star Search were Sinbad, Rosie O’Donnell and Dave Chappelle.

  HBO presented future stars in a less humiliating setting on the annual Young Comedians Special. It was a five-year-old program when Rodney Dangerfield was asked to host it for the first time in 1984. What had been just another cable stand-up show took on new gravitas with Dangerfield, one of the hottest acts of the decade. “They were always decent specials and guys got exposure—but the ones hosted by Rodney were the first to explode,” says comedian Harry Basil. “After it aired people would recognize you on the street and your money went up.” Over the course of its history the Young Comedians Special presented Judd Apatow, Dennis Miller, Roseanne, Rita Rudner, Bob Saget, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, David Spade, Yakov Smirnoff and Sam Kinison long before the general public knew their names. Kinison’s spot in 1985 was his breakout moment. By 1986 he was a superstar, bolstered by appearances on Letterman and The Tonight Show. Dangerfield adored him and introduced him to all the right people. He became a magnet for drug addicts, floozies and rock musicians. He became comedy’s cocaine spokesman and prolonged its popularity. For many drug-addicted comedians, Kinison was a vindication. “That period in Los Angeles with your whole Sam Kinison crowd was all fueled by cocaine,” says Paul Provenza. And although Kinison’s career functioned, his coke-induced mood swings were often directed at fellow comics. “Sam was jealous of Dice, Bobcat Goldthwait and Roseanne,” says Harry Basil. “All these feuds were at the same time. Sam was jealous.”

  He was hostile yet likable, and comedians admired his guts. “Kinison was the first guy I ever saw go onstage and not ask the audience in any way, shape or form to like him,” said comedian Bill Hicks. “I found that highly reassuring.” Cassette tapes of his act were as popular as the comedy records of Shelley Berman twenty-five years earlier. Kinison was one of the Boom’s biggest stars, and he influenced the younger comics starting out. “I try to be Sam Kinison comedically,” said Chris Rock. “Sam Kinison was the only guy when I was coming up that sounded new. Everybody else was just kind of doing different versions of other guys. Kinison was totally new. I don’t know anybody that sounded like Sam Kinison.”

  Kinison was one of the biggest stand-up draws in America come 1987. He had a natural rival in Andrew Dice Clay. Both had a following of angry young men, and both did stadium concerts, were the subject of tabloid controversies and had best-selling tapes. The similarities agitated Kinison. “I’ve known Dice since 1980 when he was doing impressions. In 1984, he did me. I haven’t liked him since. He ripped me off.”

  Dice was known for his loud, obnoxious persona, but for years he toiled as a mild-mannered impressionist at Pips in Sheepshead Bay. During the 1970s he performed under his birth name, Andrew Silverstein, and impersonated the two Jerry Lewis characters from The Nutty Professor. Silverstein’s interpretation of nerdy Professor Julius Kelp was a crowd-pleaser. His impression of the Lewis character Buddy Love, a brooding narcissist who flicked a cigarette, evolved into his leather-jacketed tough guy Andrew Dice Clay.

  Andrew Dice Clay was a fictional character turned into comedy’s Frankenstein monster. He spoke in an explicit manner and directed his hostility at womankind. Male fans felt he articulated their own angry frustrations. They failed to realize Clay wasn’t a real person, but an invention. As he reached superstar status, he himself stopped making the distinction—and became a poster child for misogyny. Jay Leno disliked the angry undercurrent. “I knew Andrew before, and I always thought he was an okay guy, but I hated his act because he came from the wrong point of view.”

  Some townships resurrected dormant obscenity laws to keep Clay away. He was booked for a major concert in Texas, but the gig was canceled when a county district attorney promised to file criminal charges. In 1990, while promoting his feature film The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, he was booked to host Saturday Night Live. SNL cast member Nora Dunn objected, and a media frenzy followed.

  Silverstein said, “I was really going through it as far as controversy goes. It just turned into mania. Next thing you know, I’m getting calls from Entertainment Tonight. I’m getting calls from all these different tabloid shows. And what was supposed to be a fun, light week wound up the most stressful week I had in my entire career. It wasn’t fun. What really bothered me about the whole thing is, these performers [who] are supposed to know what character comedy is didn’t know I was playing a character. It was the only time that they threw people out of the audience. I got heckled during my opening monologue and they had to throw people out.”

  Andrew Dice Clay, Sam Kinison and cable stand-up programming embodied the 1980s. There was so much stand-up on television that some thought an entire comedy channel might be a good idea. Producer Tom Kay announced plans for The Comedy Television Co. in 1986, claiming he would “do for comedy what MTV did for music.” But he was unable to find investors, and it never got off the ground.

  In May 1989 HBO announced a new subsidiary called The Comedy Channel. Three recent transplants from the Midwest comedy club scene—brothers Dave and Steve Higgins and Dave “Gruber” Allen—introduced clips of old comedy shows in half-improvised interstitial segments. Viacom launched a competing network in April 1990 called Ha! that mostly showed reruns of old sitcoms. “I was head of operations at The Comedy Channel,” says Vinnie Favale. “I worked out of HBO’s broadcasting facilities and my job was to put the material together in a cohesive form. Mostly it was clips from all the comedy movies airing on HBO and Cinemax. It wasn’t really programming so much as promo for what was on HBO that month.”

  When the two channels started competing, business analyst Dennis McAlpine concluded it was “very unlikely they can be successful.” His reasoning was that comedy was now oversaturated. The Boom paid dividends for ten whole years, but it couldn’t last forever. As in a stock market surge, a crash was inevitable. The struggle of the comedy channels was the first big sign of an impending comedy bust.

  In October 1990 Viacom projected that its Ha! channel losses would reach $50 million. Andy Nulman of the Just for Laughs comedy festival said that both channels were “misled by the Comedy Boom and junk-bond euphoria of the late 1980s into actually thinking they could each make a go of it.” In order to salvage some of the investment, the two channels merged on December 19, 1990. They became known as CTV (Comedy Television) and a month later emerged as Comedy Central.

  The Boom was over. The years between 1991 and 1993 were a depressing time for those comedians who’d been convinced it would last forever. Gary Mule Deer noticed the downturn at the start of the new de
cade. “I was making as much money as you could make in a comedy club, but I could see the writing on the wall. I remember a club owner calling me: ‘We want to have you back . . . but you know, we’re not paying quite the same what we were before . . .’” Brian Kiley started losing money just as his career was advancing. “I was finally starting to do The Tonight Show—and my income went down from when I was middling. The clubs dried up. The Boom was over.”

  It was difficult to count the number of comedy clubs opening in the 1980s. Now, in the 1990s, it was difficult to count the number closing. The future of comedy looked bleak. Louis C.K. had been a stand-up for seven years. He was in New York at the time. “Every club in the city was closing. There was no work anymore, anywhere. It was 1992. The 1980s comedy surge—it was gone. At the Comedy Cellar there would literally be nobody in the audience and they’d make you do the show. You’d literally be on stage in an empty room and you had to do the jokes. I mean, it was fucking awful.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The 1990s

  The hack comedians of the Comedy Boom abandoned their Jack Nicholson impressions and returned to their former lives. Creative comedians who kept at it emerged as the top comedy stars of the new millennium. Mainstream comedy was in a slump, but two ancillary scenes—the Alternative Comedy world and a new genre of predominant African American comedy—created some giants.

  Eddie Murphy’s monumental success in the 1980s inspired a new generation of Black comics to enter the game. It created a parallel stand-up scene that flourished in the early 1990s while white comedy clubs were imploding. “Before I came out you had Richard [Pryor] and Bill Cosby and Flip Wilson and Redd Foxx and a handful of people,” said Murphy. “After I came out it was just a fucking explosion of comics. Because I was so young it made the art form accessible to a lot of people.”

  Eddie Murphy was arguably the biggest comedy star of the 1980s. Stand-up, television, records and movies—he was dominant in every genre. His concert films Raw and Delirious inspired untold numbers of African American youth to try stand-up, and by the early 1990s they were seasoned professionals. While stand-up programming of the Boom era disappeared from television, new shows geared specifically to an African American demographic were successful. Eddie Murphy had created an entire movement.