I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era

by William Knoedelseder

  Reid: Enact a law that living people can’t vote in Mississippi.

  (The interracial repartee didn’t always go over with the audience, however, and when that happened, the consequences could be painful. One night at the Golden Horseshoe in Chicago Heights, an offended white patron walked up to them after their set and smashed out his cigarette on Reid’s face. Another time, while they were performing at the University of Illinois, Dreesen got hit in the face with an ice ball thrown from the audience.) The irony of the street-savvy black dude/naive white boy act was that Reid had a college degree in business and was formerly a marketing rep for the Dupont Corporation, while Dreesen was a high school dropout from some of the meanest streets in America 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 28

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  who had survived a childhood that even Charles Dickens couldn’t have conjured. He was the third oldest of eight children, four boys and four girls, who were raised in a rat-infested shack in Harvey, Illinois, with no bathtub, shower, or hot water; to bathe they boiled water in a pan. All four boys slept in one bed. Their parents, Walter and Glenore Dreesen, were dedicated drinkers. The shack sat in the shadow of half a dozen steel mills in a neighborhood that supported eight taverns. Glenore was a barmaid in one, and Walter was a patron of them all.

  Tom went to work at age six, shining shoes in the bars. Every day after school he’d make the rounds, from Sparrows Tavern, to Al’s The Corner Club, to Fuzzy’s, to Mudryck’s, to The Curve Inn, to Johnny’s Gay Club (long before the word took on its current meaning). His last stop was always Polizzi’s Tavern, where his mother worked. As he waited for her shift to end, he’d watch with rapt attention as the owner, Frank Polizzi, held forth behind the bar, telling the best stories he’d ever heard. Tom marveled that Polizzi’s vocabulary, inflections, and imitations of various accents could make strange sounds come out of the customers’

  mouths. He didn’t have a TV; he’d never seen a comedian. This was his first exposure to comedy and laughter, and he was mes-merized. He’d take Polizzi’s stories back to the playground at As-cension grade school and try them out on his Catholic playmates.

  He didn’t understand some of the stories; he just knew that Polizzi’s customers had laughed at them.

  Frank Polizzi was a big, tough, good-looking, charismatic guy who was married to Tom’s mother’s sister, which made him Tom’s uncle. Tom would learn as a young man that Polizzi was also his real father. His mother had had a fling with her brother-in-law, and he had been the result. That finally explained why he was the only Dreesen kid who wasn’t fair-haired and blue-eyed. Walter Dreesen went to his grave without figuring it out, however.

  At fifteen, Tom ran away from home and was arrested and briefly jailed in Hammond, Indiana, before being sent back to Har-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 29

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  vey. At sixteen, he quit school because he could no longer stand the taunts from his classmates about his shabby clothes. On his seventeenth birthday, he finally escaped the poverty by joining the navy, where for the first time in his life he slept in a bed by himself, ate three meals in the same day, and experienced a hot shower.

  Dreesen and Reid met in 1968 when Dreesen was attempting a wider launch of a drug-education program for kids that he’d developed as part of the Jaycees in Harvey, where nearly 80 percent of crime was drug related. Reid attended a meeting at which Dreesen was presenting his program to a community group. After the meeting, he introduced himself and said he’d like to work with Dreesen on it. The program became a huge success, eventually spreading to all fifty states and dozens of foreign countries. And Dreesen and Reid proved a big hit with the kids, to the point that an eighth-grade girl said to them one day, “You guys are really funny together; you oughta become a comedy team.” So they did.

  At the Improv, Dreesen and Reid arranged a so-called showcase audition for Craig Tennis, the talent coordinator for The Tonight Show. Other than giving them a time slot, Budd Friedman wasn’t particularly friendly or accommodating. They asked for two microphones and two stools, but when they got up on stage, there was only one of each, so they had to hand the single microphone back and forth, which wreaked havoc with their timing. Tennis said afterwards that he liked their act and thought they showed promise, but he didn’t think they were ready for The Tonight Show.

  On the bus back to Chicago, they were disappointed about the audition but also energized by their overall experience at the Improv—and full of ideas. There was no comedy club in Chi cago, no stage where comics could try out new material, experiment without fear, and dare to fail. “We need a place where we can be bad,” Dreesen kept saying. Within weeks, he convinced a Chicago club owner named Henry Norton to let him take over his place on Monday night and put on a lineup of stand-up comics. “Comedy 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 30

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  on Monday Night at Le Pub” was patterned after the Improv, with Dreesen in the Budd Friedman role as emcee. In a classic case of

  “if you build it, they will come,” young wanna-be comics started coming out of the woodwork to audition, and a small stand-up community began forming where there’d been none before.

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  Mitzi’s Store

  In the spring of 1972, NBC set off a shockwave in the entertainment industry with the announcement that after eighteen years as a New York institution, The Tonight Show was moving from New York City to the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank.

  Over the years, a large proportion of the show’s guests had been drawn from New York’s creative ranks—Broadway actors, singers, dancers, and songwriters; novelists, magazine writers, and newspaper columnists; and, of course, comics—all of whom wondered what was going to happen with those guest spots now that Johnny was going Hollywood. Comedians were particularly concerned.

  Many of them lived in New York—had moved there—because of The Tonight Show. Now, the center of power had shifted to Los Angeles. The Improv was a great place to work out, but would the dynamic be the same with The Tonight Show 3,000 miles away?

  Steve Lubetkin fretted more than most. He worshipped Johnny Carson, often telling the story of how he once ran into the Great Man on the street as he was getting out of his car. Steve went up to him, introduced himself, and said he was a stand-up comic and that he hoped to be on the show some day. Carson was friendly, shook his hand, and wished him luck. As Steve walked away, he 31

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  couldn’t help it—he blew Johnny a kiss. Now Lubetkin worried that Carson’s move west would make it more difficult for him to realize his career goals. What was The Tonight Show going to do, send someone back to New York a couple times a year to scout for East Coast talent? How was he ever going to get noticed?

  He talked about his worries with Richard Lewis, but Richard didn’t seem all that concerned. He was too busy. Freed from day-job hell by David Brenner’s largesse, he’d worked his way up to headliner status at the Improv, getting prime-time slots on the weekends. When he wasn’t writing or performing, he was enjoying one of the by-products of his new status: women, lots of them. Every night when he came off the stage, he’d hit the bar, and there they’d be, waiting for him. They didn’t even seem to mind having to schlep to his crummy guesthouse in Paramus to have sex with him.

  Steve wasn’t doing nearly as well. For one thing, he was still living at home with his father. He’d appeared on one local TV

  show, The Joe Franklin Show, but he was stuck in place at the Improv, still relegated to occasional late-night spots during the week. Richard had eclipsed him.

  After weeks of worry over what would happen with Johnny gone, Lubetkin decided what he had to do: He was going to follow The Tonight Show.
He was moving to Los Angeles. His destiny was waiting there; he was certain.

  On April 10, 1972, a few weeks before The Tonight Show’s West Coast debut, an old-school comic named Sammy Shore opened a small club on Sunset Strip in the building that once housed Ciro’s, the famed Hollywood nightspot of the 1930s and 1940s. The launch of Shore’s ninety-nine-seat club passed unnoticed by the media and most of the comedy community. But together, the two events were about to bring big changes to the business of laughter.

  When Shore and his partner, Rudy DeLuca, were trying to come up with a name for their new venture—the Fun Spot? Sammy Shore’s Club?—Shore’s wife Mitzi piped up from the kitchen,

  “Why don’t you call it the Comedy Store?” It would become one of 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 33

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  the most recognizable brand names in show business, but it was a misnomer in the beginning. The Comedy Co-op would have been more accurate.

  Shore had forged a successful career as a warm-up act for such mainstream nightclub performers as Ann Margaret, Tony Bennett, and Sammy Davis Jr., and he was coming off a five-year run opening for Elvis Presley in Las Vegas and on tour. But he was not a businessman. He saw the Comedy Store as a place where he and his comedy pals could hang out and entertain one another between real jobs on the road. He had a rent-free deal with the owner of the building and a vague agreement to split whatever was left over from cover charges and drinks after expenses. But it really didn’t matter to Sammy. Profit was not part of his equation.

  This wasn’t about making money; it was about having fun.

  And the Comedy Store was riotous, free-form fun in those early days. No one, not even Shore, knew who would be performing on any given night. It all depended on who was in town and happened to walk in the door. It might be anyone from Norm Crosby to Buddy Hackett to Jackie Vernon or a dozen other Shore contempo-raries. Flip Wilson showed up regularly, arriving in his blue Rolls with license plates that read “Killer” and awarding a hundred- dollar bill to the evening’s “ugliest comic.” Redd Foxx was the biggest star on TV at the time with his Sanford & Son sitcom, so he got extra -

  special treatment: Whenever Redd came around, Sammy immediately cleared the stage for him to go on. Foxx could do an hour off the top of his head—and often did. Shore never cut him off.

  If the night was going well, Sammy let it go on and on. He’d stop letting people in the door and send the bartender home at the legal closing time of 2:00 a.m., but the show sometimes continued until as late as 5:00 in the morning. The comics went behind the bar and poured their own drinks. Sammy didn’t charge them. How could he when they were working his place for free?

  Filling in the gaps between the big names was a resident troupe of younger improv performers, the Comedy Store Players, which 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 34

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  included Valerie Curtin (who would become a successful actress and screenwriter), her husband-to-be Barry Levinson (later the prolific writer, director, and producer of such films as Diner and Wag the Dog), Craig T. Nelson (of TV’s Coach), and Pat Proft (who went on to mint money as the creator of the Police Academy movie franchise).

  The arrival of The Tonight Show brought in even more talent.

  New York–based comics like David Brenner and Robert Klein started stopping by to try out their new material on a West Coast audience the night before they appeared on Carson . Tonight Show talent coordinator Jim McCawley dropped in once or twice a week. It was like the Improv, but with better weather.

  One day Shore got a phone call from TV producer James Komack asking him to “put this Mexican kid on for me tomorrow night. I want some people to see him.” Shore had never heard of Freddie Prinze (who was not Mexican but rather half Puerto Rican and half Hungarian, or “Hungarican” as he liked to say), but he put him on at 10 p.m. the next night as requested. The people that Komack wanted to see Prinze turned out to be The Tonight Show’s Jim McCawley and some NBC executives.

  As he watched Prinze’s set, Shore had to admit the kid was young, fresh, and impressive, and he could tell that the TV guys liked what they saw. But the middle-aged comic felt a twinge of jealousy as he watched the proverbial big break wash over a performer not yet out of his teens. Look at this little shit, he thought.

  And I’m having trouble trying to get a deal for a damn talk show.

  What happened next has become the stuff of show biz legend, much like the discovery of Lana Turner at the lunch counter at Schwab’s Drug Store. On December 6, 1973, Prinze appeared on The Tonight Show. His friends at the Improv were gathered around the TV on the bar, watching as he broke through the curtains.

  Freddie did an engaging five-minute set that so tickled Carson that the host immediately waved him over to the panel to chat.

  Jaws dropped at the Improv, where the crowd of compulsive Car-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 35

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  son watchers instantly recognized that they were seeing history: Never before had Johnny done that for a young comic making his debut on the show. Comments around the bar ranged from “Holy shit,” to “I can’t fucking believe this,” to “Right on, Freddie.”

  Within weeks, NBC announced that it had signed Prinze to star in the title role of a new NBC sitcom called Chico and the Man. Overnight Freddie had become rich and famous. He was only nineteen. (The next time anyone saw him at the Improv, he was climbing out of a limousine wearing a purple velvet suit, two babes on his arms, high on quaaludes, and headed for big trouble.) Few comics failed to notice one more thing about Prinze’s Tonight Show debut: Johnny introduced him as “a young comedian who’s appearing here in town at the Comedy Store.” That statement put the Comedy Store on every comic’s map and created a new equation in their heads: One set at the Comedy Store plus one appearance on Carson equals the whole world. If it happened to Freddie, then it could happen to any of them. You could almost hear the suitcases being packed.

  Sammy Shore’s bags were packed, too. As 1973 came to a close, he had to return to Las Vegas to fulfill a contract with the Hilton left over from his days with Elvis. He would be working solo in the lounge for several months, which posed a problem: Who was going to run the Comedy Store while he was gone? Rudy DeLuca was going to work as a writer for The Carol Burnett Show. The only person he could think of to take over was his wife, Mitzi. They’d been married nearly twenty years and had four children, ages six to nineteen. She had been the quintessential long-suffering showman’s wife, raising the kids alone while he was on the road and sometimes hauling them along with her to wherever he was performing, which is how the youngest, Pauly, came to pee on Elvis’s pant leg.

  Careerwise, Sammy was no Bill Cosby, but he’d been a good pro -

  vider. The Shores owned a beautiful home on Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills that was built by Cecil B. DeMille for his daughter and over the years had been the residence of Dorothy Lamour, 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 36

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  Joan Blondell, Andy Williams, and Carol Burnett. But Sammy knew that Mitzi had ambitions beyond homemaking. She had been a career girl when he met her: Mitzi Lee Saidel, the twenty-year-old secretary to the owner of the Pinewood Resort in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, where he was the social director. She was attracted by his Jewishness. “I grew up as the only Jew in Green Bay,”

  she joked. Everything about her was different from any other woman he’d ever met—from the way she dressed (vaguely bo-hemian, dramatic), to the way she talked (in a piercing nasal voice that once heard can’t be forgotten), to the way she thought (“When everyone else goes right, she goes left,” Sammy always said). And she was smart as hell. She’d done fairly well as the pro-prietress of the Pickle Barrel, a funky clothing store/gift shop that Sammy financed for her across the stree
t from the Comedy Store.

  But it bored her, so they closed it down after eight months.

  Sammy knew that Mitzi loved comedians, finding them endlessly fascinating. So he asked her, “Why don’t you take over the Store while I’m in Vegas? Run the place. It’ll be fun for you.”

  She said okay with no visible excitement. But once he was gone, she jumped on the opportunity like a dog on a bone.

  She turned her attention first to the growing number of young comics who’d been coming in night after night and sitting in the back hoping to get on. Under Sammy’s whoever’s-famous-goes-first rule, they rarely got a chance. But Mitzi saw potential in the youngsters, both as performers and as a labor pool. She immediately set them to work at $2.50 an hour redecorating the club to her specifications. She had them paint the entire room black—

  walls, ceilings, tables—and ordered that the stage be lit with a single spotlight. “That way, all of the audience’s attention is focused on the comic,” she explained. She removed the bar from the room and put it in the back by the kitchen so that patrons had no access to it and had to order their drinks from cocktail waitresses, who then brought them to the tables. She initiated a two-drink minimum. Taking a page from Budd Friedman’s play-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 37

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  book, she established Monday as “Potluck Night,” when anyone could get up on stage for a few minutes to try out. And she instituted a system of nightly lineups, featuring a dozen or more young comics, starting with beginners doing five-minute sets in the early evening and then moving to increasingly polished performers and longer sets as the night went on and the crowd grew. No one stayed onstage more than twenty minutes. She put on two shows a night, clearing the room after the first to make way for another paying audience. Each show was stitched together by an emcee and tightly timed with an amber light that warned performers they had sixty seconds to wrap it up and get off the stage.

  Comics were supposed to check with the club on Monday to get their assigned time slots for the following week and to take the stage on the minute. Mitzi made the comics run on time.