The Improv

by Budd Friedman

  As a result, virtually any comic with a unique personal point of view and the goods to deliver it—young married life and the adult perils of living too close to your family (Mad About You and Everybody Loves Raymond), postmodern cynicism (Seinfeld), blue-collar motherhood (Roseanne)—suddenly held the keys to the kingdom with performers flocking into the Improv and producers, agents, and talent bookers flocking after them faster than you could say “laugh track.”

  Though Johnny Carson’s presumptive heir apparent David Letterman would be responsible for giving many of the decade’s hottest young acts their first national television exposure—and even with The Tonight Show now only airing new shows three nights a week, one of them sans Carson—make no mistake about it: It was still the place that virtually every comedian wanted to be. It also put the fear of God into them whenever the late Jim McCawley, Carson’s talent coordinator and surrogate comedic filter, came into the Improv—even if they had already been guests on the show.

  BILL MAHER:

  I really don’t have anything bad to say about McCawley, although he always gave the impression that he was kind of a troubled guy and it was nerve-wracking to get a call from him because it meant I had to run my set by him. If you did it over the phone, it was tough because that’s not how comedy is meant to be done. If you did it at a club where there was a bad crowd, he might say, “Well, you can’t do this joke on the show,” even if it had nothing to do with your material.

  RITCH SHYDNER:

  The funny thing about Jim McCawley is that I would audition for him and he’d go, “I don’t think you’re Johnny’s kind of comedian.” But then I’d do all these little clubs and they’d say, “Have you done Carson? You’re Johnny’s kind of comedian.” So I persisted and when I finally got it, Jim introduced me to Johnny after the show and he said, “You are my kind of comedian.”

  Something else happened in 1985, when Ellen DeGeneres became the first female comedian ever to be invited to join Johnny Carson on the couch following her debut appearance on The Tonight Show, ushering in an even bigger sea change. Suddenly you had more female comedians (Susie Essman, Joy Behar, Rosie O’Donnell, Rita Rudner, Kathy Griffin, and Paula Poundstone), African American comedians (Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, D.L. Hughley, Martin Lawrence, and the Wayans Brothers—the oldest, Keenen Ivory Wayans, had even started out as a doorman when he was first performing on the New York Improv’s stage), novelty and oddball acts (Emo Philips, Judy Tenuta, and Carrot Top), and triple-X macho acts (Andrew Dice Clay).

  With more performers than we knew what to do with, and An Evening at the Improv going gangbusters, the next logical step, even though it wasn’t originally my idea, was to start a franchise. The person who first approached me about it was a comedian named Mark Anderson, who was also a Princeton graduate, a psychologist, and an Olympic diver, in addition to being an eccentric alcoholic turned Born Again Christian who was later found dead in an Oklahoma hotel room in 2012.

  One day in the winter of 1985, Mark came to me out of the blue and said, “I want to open an Improv in San Diego.” Since the thought had never really occurred to me before, even though we already had two thriving clubs in New York and LA, I said, “Do you mean a franchise?”

  This was basically all it took and we made a handshake agreement right there. Over the next few months, we went down, scouted locations, and he put up most of the capital for the club, which Alix helped decorate. To make the events leading up to it as festive as possible, we rented a Pullman car that we attached to an Amtrak train where the guests, including Bea Arthur, Wil Shriner, and Bill Maher, met at Los Angeles’s Union Station. On the trip down, we set up a champagne bar and Bill went into the bathroom and came back out wearing a red smoking jacket.

  Even more unforgettable, however, was our grand opening, when I invited Robin Williams to perform, and Mark Anderson then called up Robin’s idol Jonathan Winters and said, “Robin Williams is going to be here and he’d love for you to come down.” So we had Robin and Jonathan performing together for the first time ever.

  With the help of my old friend Lou Alexander the year after that, we opened an Improv at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, followed by locations in Atlantic City, Reno, and Lake Tahoe. Then came more, including locations in London, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland, Houston, Kansas City, Orlando, Denver, and Pittsburgh, with a current total of twenty-two independent franchises nationwide, and with the Improv licensing the name in exchange for a fee and a percentage of the weekly gross under the governance of our holding company, Improv West Associates.

  And, of course, by the late eighties, lots of fresh talent like Ray Romano, Mario Cantone, Colin Quinn, and Dave Attell were still coming out of the New York Improv, with my former manager and partner Chris Albrecht also now being one of comedy’s biggest power brokers. Chris left the Improv in 1980 to become an agent for International Creative Management and built up one of the best stables of talent in the comedy business, including Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, Joe Piscopo, and Keenen Ivory Wayans, many of whom were plucked right from our stage when they were virtual unknowns. In June 1985, he joined HBO as senior vice president of original programming before eventually becoming chairman in 2002.

  There’s nothing more exciting than watching a person you helped nurture succeed beyond your biggest expectations, and Chris has deservedly done so beyond anything I could have ever imagined. During a spectacular twenty-two-year run at HBO and a list of accomplishments longer than you can count, he drove up the number of stand-up specials and original programming, including Comic Relief, The Larry Sanders Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Sex and the City, not to mention award-winning dramas like Oz, The Wire, Band of Brothers, and The Sopranos.

  With one of our own feeding the cable TV pipeline—not to mention being the chief purveyor of talent—we were now, it seemed, even more unstoppable. The late eighties also saw the arrival of young acts like Drew Carey, Janeane Garofalo, Jon Stewart, David Spade, Rob Schneider, Bill Hicks, Denis Leary, and Judd Apatow and his roommate Adam Sandler on Melrose Avenue.

  ADAM SANDLER:

  It was unbelievable. Just total fear and the most insane thing was that my first Improv spot was on a Saturday night at 9:20, which was a really crushing spot, but I did well. I didn’t kill, but I did okay. I’m not sure if Budd was even there that night, but in any case he started giving me two or three spots a week after that. Either I was on or I was hanging out there, having the best time of my life and hoping that somebody would discover me.

  JUDD APATOW:

  Adam moved to LA because Budd told him if he did, he’d take care of him, which was how I met Adam. I’d go to the club to see him and he was getting good spots because he was really funny. I remember the entire time I was doing this, I kept trying to figure out how I was going to get strong enough to audition for Budd. You knew if you weren’t ready he wasn’t going to let you do it again for a long time.

  Anyway, I finally worked up the nerve, and when I did, Budd very quickly asked me to be the emcee. I was sometimes on four or five nights a week on Melrose and in Santa Monica.

  DAVID SPADE:

  The night I found out Budd liked me, I was in shock because you sort of wait. Budd had a big circular table in the bar where he held court and if you were one of the bigger-name comics you got to sit there regardless of whether he was there or not.

  Anyway, the night I auditioned, I was there with an improv troupe called The Funny Boys who I first met when I did an open mic night at the Improv down in San Diego.

  On the night I found out I’d passed my audition on Melrose, we were sitting at Budd’s table when Bruce Willis came over and offered to buy a round of shots to celebrate, which they carded me for. It was horribly embarrassing and they wouldn’t serve me because I was under twenty-one, but I love Bruce Willis. Then Budd started putting me in Vegas where I drove down the next day and did twenty-one shows over the next week. I made $500.

  DREW CAREY:

  I ma
de my first Tonight Show appearance in November 1991, and it was always a big tradition to go to the Improv after the taping. What they’d do is play your set on the TV in the bar so that everybody could watch. So I did my first set on The Tonight Show and I couldn’t believe how well it went. Then I went straight from NBC to the Improv.

  I remember that when I walked in, Budd had a great table waiting for me and my friends. And when The Tonight Show came on, they turned off the jukebox and turned up the TV—at which point the whole place just busted out with applause with all these other comics patting me on the back and shaking my hand. Budd sent over a bottle of champagne and I was like a made man from then on.

  Thanks to the constant flow of talent we had in addition to the endless stream of agents, managers, and producers, we also became a scouting mecca for the comedy festivals, including Just for Laughs in Montreal, which remains by far the biggest. And besides briefly launching our own comedy festival, in 1987 I co-founded the American Comedy Awards with Eddie Kritzer. During our first year alone, two Improv alums, Lily Tomlin and Robin Williams, won female and male stand-ups respectively, while Bette Midler and Woody Allen won for their performances in Ruthless People and Hannah and Her Sisters.

  To top it off, Saturday Night Live was also resurgent thanks in no small part to Improv comics like Kevin Nealon and Dana Carvey who were now cast members. Plus, we saw the debuts of The Arsenio Hall Show and Keenen Ivory Wayans’s In Living Color—two FOX shows with two other Improv guys that broke new barriers in race and comedy on television.

  Then there was the debut of The Comedy Channel, later rebranded Comedy Central, the first basic cable network exclusively devoted to stand-up, on November 15, 1989, followed by the short-lived Ha! network six months later on April 1, 1990.

  Before that, with the comedy boom at its zenith and the Improv franchising machine moving up to thirteen clubs nationwide, there were talks of a possible over-the-counter IPO that, had it gone through, would have made us a publicly traded company. It didn’t, but that same year, in 1987, I also decided to take on a business partner, Mark Lonow, a former comedian turned actor who first joined the Improv in 1981. Though it hasn’t always been a perfect match, and he declined to be interviewed for this book due to an ongoing personal matter, I do give him credit for helping me to keep a better eye on the Improv’s bottom line.

  Still, no matter how rocky things have been between me and Mark over the years, nothing can compare to the potentially near-fatal partnership I had with a comedian and his girlfriend who briefly ran the restaurant on Melrose in the mideighties.

  I should preface this by saying that even though the bar had always done well, even during times when the rest of the club wasn’t, the one thing we’d never managed to get a handle on was the restaurant. We were and still are first and foremost a comedy club, which is why people came, and I never aspired to be Spago or Chasen’s. Nevertheless, it became such a point of frustration that I was willing to try anything.

  So when this comic and his girlfriend, neither of whom I’ll name, approached me about running the restaurant, I said yes without hesitation because not only was he in the middle of a major career resurgence at the time, he was selling out shows nightly during an extended multi-weekend engagement on Melrose.

  Here was the problem I didn’t discover until it was too late: They were both control freaks, they had no restaurant experience, and we butted heads from day one. Besides completely redoing the menu and eliminating some of our most popular dishes, they alienated our staff. And that wasn’t the only thing. Without consulting me, they did away with our policy of giving free meals to the comics, and even banished the ones who were performing from being in the restaurant before their sets—many of whom couldn’t afford to buy anything because they raised the prices so much.

  Okay, nobody forced me to go into business with them and I was so caught up in how well this comic’s shows were going that I didn’t think things through. I also bit my tongue, believing almost to the end that if I did, things would gradually work themselves out.

  But they didn’t. In fact, they rapidly went from bad to worse, and we were losing money and customers left and right. So I decided to end our arrangement and that was how things nearly turned lethal because when I told them, they demanded that I give them money as a payoff, which I didn’t have and wouldn’t have given them even if I did. And when they persisted, I said, “I’ll see you in court,” and I called my attorney to begin legal proceedings.

  A couple of days later, I received a menacing phone call at the club from a guy named Ralph, demanding that I immediately fly to New York to meet with him in person. Obviously, I was shaken, but after getting in touch with my attorney, he advised me not to do anything, assuring me it was probably just a scare tactic that would blow over—which wasn’t the case, as the phone calls continued.

  That following Sunday night, Alix and I arrived at the Hollywood Improv around nine o’clock. As we walked in, the first thing we noticed were four men seated at the bar dressed in dark suits whom I immediately knew were Mafia guys. I also suspected that there might be problems if I tried to talk to them, and so in an attempt to diffuse the situation and knowing they probably wouldn’t cause a scene with a woman, I asked Alix to find out what they wanted. When she tried to talk to them, she noticed a gun strapped to one of the men’s ankles, and he informed her in no uncertain terms that he wanted to talk to me instead.

  After that, we went upstairs to my office to talk in private, where they proceeded to ask me for money again as I continued to refuse to cave in to their demands—which aside from going into business with this comedian and his girlfriend, turned out to be mistakes two, three, four, and five. Though I didn’t know it yet, they were about to begin terrorizing me and my family in a nightmare battle of cat and mouse that would last for the next eight weeks, including following our sons, Ross and Dax, to school and making more menacing phone calls.

  Things finally got so bad that we were temporarily forced go to a hotel in Santa Monica for several days on the advice of my attorney. Thankfully, my daughters, Zoe and Beth, were in New York with their mother and we sent our sons to stay with friends.

  I also stayed away from the club on the advice of my attorney who had warned me that it would be the first place they’d go when they discovered I wasn’t at home. Still, I feared for the comics and my staff, so I hired private security guards for the club in addition to installing a burglar alarm in my home.

  Making things even worse was that when we called the FBI, no one would return our phone calls, nor did we get anywhere when we consulted with several actor friends who had connections to the Mafia. Meanwhile, the threats continued to escalate until finally one of the guys from the Mafia ordered me to fly to New York and meet with them in a restaurant near the Garment Center, which I did.

  The meeting subsequently lasted five hours while Alix nervously waited back at our hotel. I begrudgingly agreed to give this guy Ralph, who’d first tried to put the arm on me, six postdated checks for $10,000 apiece. And then that was that. I lost a ton of money, but at least we were all safe, and as I flew back to Los Angeles, I was greatly relieved.

  About three weeks later, three guys from the FBI came into the Improv one night finally offering to help, although by this point I didn’t need it. And in a sudden reversal of fortune, the club had also been doing so well in the weeks since I’d gone to New York that I could have afforded to give the Mafia $60,000 all at once, although I opted not to do that either.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The Comedy Boom Busts and Finding Fallon

  GREG BEHRENDT:

  I always did well at the Improv and other clubs, but there became a period after a while when you didn’t want to be seen as a “club comic” and it kind of became my secret shame.

  JUDD APATOW:

  By the time I started in the late eighties, you’d see big names come in to watch shows with Budd, so it didn’t feel as cutting-edge after a while, altho
ugh there were also those moments when it still felt like you were trying to become the next Jerry Seinfeld or Tim Allen, and that this was the place where you could get mainstream success, so it crackled with tension.

  BILL MAHER:

  I remember there was this one guy who was a dentist by day, and sitting around with the younger comics, I’d say, “For a dentist he’s very funny, but for a comic he’s a fucking dentist.” What used to bug me the most is that I thought what terrible luck it was that I came along just when every other idiot was trying to do it and it clogged the way.

  As much as Alix and I loved our home in Beverly Hills, we never again felt completely safe after our extortion ordeal. In 1996, we decided to move to a twenty-four-hour-doorman building in Westwood where we still live. For better or worse, it turned out to be the right decision, though, because just as we were starting to feel safe, the comedy business was tanking, which Bill Maher would later chronicle in his 1994 autobiographical novel, True Story:

  The showcase clubs had ceased to exist for some years as great venues of experimentation. There were no poetic types hoping to be challenged by Lenny Bruce. It had lots of tourists and bachelor parties from New Jersey hoping to hear dick jokes. The more non-cognoscenti took over the club scene, the more comedians tailored their acts along crowd-pleasing lines to survive. And the more the comedians did that, the more people in berets stayed away.

  Of course, the nineties would also make Bill into a one-man cultural and commercial force as the outspoken host of Politically Incorrect, although the hard truth was that right as he was coming into his own, stand-up had become so overexposed it could no longer sustain itself, even as sitcoms like Seinfeld, Roseanne, Home Improvement, Grace Under Fire, All-American Girl, Ellen, Martin, and Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper ruled the airwaves well into the decade.