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

by William Knoedelseder

  Lewis knew he wasn’t the most objective judge of Steve’s work, but he thought the movie was funny, rough in places, sure, with some jokes that fell flat, but with lots of energy and Steve-ness.

  Mostly, he was impressed that Steve had pulled it off, down to getting all those people to show up for the screening. He didn’t know any other young comic who’d written, produced, and starred in his own movie.

  As usual, Lubetkin put on a brave face for his best friend. He was disappointed about the movie but not discouraged, he said.

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  He still thought Dante would be released eventually, and it would be a success. The problem, he said, was that all “the biggies” running the movie companies just didn’t know what funny was.

  Steve told Richard that he and Susan Evans were now working together as a stand-up team, billed as Lubetkin & Evans. He was writing the material for them, and they were gigging at small clubs around LA in preparation for taking the act to the Comedy Store stage.

  Richard didn’t say it, but he was concerned that Steve was letting another career setback send him spinning off in an entirely different direction, just as he’d done when The Tonight Show rejection caused him to quit stand-up and turn filmmaker. He worried that Steve was far more upset about the fate of his movie than he was letting on.

  In fact, Steve was devastated, in no small part because most of the money spent to make Dante Shocko had come from his father.

  Jack Lubetkin lent him more than $15,000, which was a lot of money for a man of his means to lose. Barry kicked in a few thousand, too. Both men had been reluctant to invest in the movie, but Steve lobbied hard, peppering them with phone calls and letters that played up the project’s “can’t-miss” qualities. “The director thinks Dante will be a giant hit.”

  They weren’t persuaded by his rosy predictions of huge profits; they put up the money because they feared he’d take their failure to do so as lack of faith in his talent. The movie was so important to him—he had so much of his ego invested in it—that they felt they needed to back him to whatever extent they could.

  The long production and editing process had put a strain on family relations, as Jack Lubetkin fretted that the first-time director Steve had hooked up with, William Larrabure, was more interested in taking the money than making the movie. Steve defended Larrabure’s slow pace by saying he was “a perfectionist and a metic-ulous editor whose wife had a miscarriage, which took him out of 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 98

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  action for a period.” Later, he revealed that “Bill is leaving his wife and has been living under intense stress” and that the director “simultaneously had to work on another project.”

  The tension between father and son got to the point where Steve began communicating only with Barry. “If you call me on my birthday please give me a birthday present by sparing me the doubts, accusations and second guesses that help nothing and just give me physical pain,” he wrote in a letter.

  “I’ll tell you, living as I do (poor) and with the expectations I have (justified and big) it’s a wonder I haven’t had a nervous breakdown already. Barry, in a short while you and daddy will be very, very proud of me, not only because of the movie I’ve created but because of the hell I’ve lived through in waiting for it.

  “The film is going to stun you,” he wrote. “Believe me.”

  Jack and Barry Lubetkin wanted to believe in Steve’s dream, but the demise of Dante Shocko made it exponentially more difficult. They’d watched him ride the comedy roller coaster for six years—rising and falling, veering one way and then the next, from Budd Friedman to Mitzi Shore to Johnny Carson to Dante Shocko— and now they feared he was careening toward a crash.

  It was Steve’s idea to form Lubetkin & Evans; Susan had reservations. For one thing, in an effort to work her into the act, he was writing skits that involved putting on wigs and hats and changing characters, and she didn’t think the material went over as well as when he was just going one-on-one with the audience.

  That’s where he excelled—in working off the cuff, responding to heckles. But Steve was certain that the new act would work. As he wrote in a two-page manifesto aimed at girding them for the task ahead, “If we stick it out, we’ll make it. If we follow these rules, we’ll stick it out. Therefore, if we follow these rules and read them, we will make it.” The “rules” included

  • We’re the only male-female comedy team. That’s the kind of selling point that speaks to people. Stick it out.

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  • The more we do it, the more we can make a living from it.

  • Everyone endures failure, hecklers, noise. . . . Just brush it off, hang in, and make it.

  • Totally disregard embarrassment, criticism, etc.

  • The rewards for sticking it out are the biggest of any business.

  • The heckles and put-downs are just like the occasional rejection you get in any business.

  • Worst thing just a temporary pain.

  • We could experience one of the greatest joys imaginable—shared joy as it happens.

  • We could help people we like, if we make it. . . . Stick it out.

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  The Funniest Year Ever

  In the annals of American entertainment, 1978 will be remembered as the Year of Comedy. The Fiftieth Annual Academy Awards ceremony kicked it off on April 3 when Woody Allen’s Annie Hall won an unprecedented (for a comedy) four Oscars—

  Best Picture, Best Actress (Diane Keaton), Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay (both to Allen).

  Faster than you could say, “I’d like to thank my agent,” the major Hollywood studios had multiple picture deals in place with Steve Martin, Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, David Steinberg, Martin Mull, Marty Feldman, Chevy Chase, Cheech and Chong, and the writing staff of the National Lampoon.

  A number of them got what was becoming known in the business as “the Woody Allen deal.” Steve Martin’s contract, for example, called for him to receive $500,000 to write and star in his first movie, The Jerk, which he could also direct if he wanted to (he didn’t). In addition, Universal Pictures agreed to give Martin and his company, Aspen Film Society, the final cut, the last word on the movie’s marketing campaign, and 50 percent of the profits.

  Martin quickly set a new standard for stand-up success. On April 22, he promoted his upcoming national concert tour with 101

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  his fifth appearance as the host of Saturday Night Live. His musical guests that night were John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in their debut as the Blues Brothers. SNL was just hitting its creative peak in 1978, becoming the highest-rated late-night show in TV history and forging what was being hailed as “the best demographic in television,” an audience dominated by eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds, the big spending, record-buying, and movie- and concertgoing public.

  Martin went on to play sixty sold-out one-nighters (at a minimum fee of $75,000), packing concert halls and stadiums with as many as 20,000 near-hysterical fans who came not so much to laugh as to cheer their favorite Martin routines—his greatest hits—not waiting for punch lines, breaking into applause at the first hint of “happy feet.”

  “It’s kind of like being Jesus or Hitler,” Martin told the Los Angeles Times, referring to the phenomenon that his fellow comics dubbed “rock ’n’ roll comedy.”

  Indeed, Martin’s first album, Let’s Get Small, went multiplat-inum during the tour, and he scored a No. 1 single with King Tut, which was born as a
musical comedy sketch on SNL. ( King Tut was featured on his follow-up album, A Wild and Crazy Guy, which was named after another SNL sketch. Together Martin’s two albums sold more than 5 million copies.) Meanwhile, based on their SNL appearance with Martin, Blues Brothers Aykroyd and Belushi landed a million-dollar contract of their own with Atlantic Records. On September 18, they opened for Martin at the Universal Amphitheater in what was regarded as the concert of the year in Los Angeles. Atlantic recorded the Brothers’ performance and released it as an album titled Briefcase Full of Blues during the first week of December. Naturally, it shot to No. 1 on the pop charts on its way to selling 2 million copies.

  At the same time, Belushi’s first movie, Animal House, was setting a box office record for a comedy, racking more than $100 million in U.S. ticket sales. Executives at Universal Pictures, which pro-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 103

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  duced and distributed Animal House, fell all over themselves to sign Belushi and Aykroyd to write and star in The Blues Brothers Movie. By the time SNL’s fourth season got underway in the fall, most of its cast had movie and/or record deals in the offing.

  “They’ve become the Beatles of comedy,” said talent manager Bernie Brillstein, who numbered Aykroyd, Belushi, Gilda Radner, and SNL producer Lorne Michaels among his clients.

  Any showbiz suit could see that America was in a mood to laugh. And that put Mitzi Shore and Budd Friedman and their stables of stand-up comics at the vortex. The atmosphere inside the Comedy Store and the Improv was positively charged as an army of agents, managers, talent scouts, network executives, and show producers prowled the showrooms, hallways, bars, and parking lots, looking for new talent to feed the public’s appetite for humor. In the days before twenty-four-hour cable TV and video-tapes that could be sent around to serve as auditions, if you wanted to see comedians, you had to go see them perform live.

  A quartet of TV heavyweights stopped by the Sunset Comedy Store on February 23 to check out Andy Kaufman’s performance in the Main Room. James L. Brooks, Ed. Weinberger, Stan Daniel, and Dave Davis were the writing-producing team responsible for one of the most successful sitcoms in TV history, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and they wanted to see if Kaufman’s “Foreign Man”

  character would fit into their follow-up sitcom, which was to be set in a New York cab company.

  Kaufman was about the last young comic you’d expect to take a regular role on a sitcom. A veteran of seven appearances on SNL

  and four on The Tonight Show, he was enjoying a thriving business on the college concert circuit and was booked to play such upscale venues as the Huntington Hartford Theater in Los Angeles and Town Hall in New York. Kaufman’s envelope- pushing act—

  featuring Conga lines, bikini-clad female wrestlers, and audience sing-alongs of “The Cow Goes Moo”—seemed the antithesis of prime-time network fare. And he had a reputation among his 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 104

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  peers (no matter how weird they thought he was personally) as a true and fearless artist. It would be like Belushi taking a role on Three’s Company.

  But the historical imperatives were compelling. Freddie Prinze had proved to TV executives that it was time for baby boom comics to take over the American sitcom ( Chico and the Man didn’t survive Prinze’s death by much), so the networks were offering bags of money and making unusual creative concessions to young comic talent. To everyone’s surprise, including his own, Kaufman agreed to join the cast of Taxi, playing the gibberish-spouting mechanic Latka Gravis. His pay was $10,000 per epis -

  ode. He assuaged any guilt he may have had by agreeing to appear in only eight episodes in the first season.

  The same month, two other unlikely candidates for sitcom stardom, Richard Lewis and Robin Williams, sat side by side in a Paramount casting office waiting to audition for a guest-starring role in an episode of the hit sitcom Happy Days. The episode was titled “My Favorite Orkan,” and the role was that of an alien named Mork from the planet Ork. Lewis knew he didn’t have a chance in hell because you were supposed to deliver the lines in what you imagined was the voice of a space alien. Lewis didn’t do voices. The best he could manage was a pathetic imitation of his girlfriend Nina’s accent. Williams, on the other hand, couldn’t stop doing voices. “Man, this is practically written for you,” Lewis said. “If you don’t get this part, it’s a joke.”

  Lewis was called into the audition room first. He started reading as if he were a Danish alien but then stopped. “You know, Robin Williams is next,” he told the casting director and his assistants.

  “He is Mork, and if he doesn’t get this, then you are all crazy. I don’t want to waste any more of your time,” he said, walking to the door and opening it. “Mork is waiting outside, and I’d like to bring him in right now. So would you all please welcome . . . Robin Williams! ”

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  Williams bounded into the room and blew the doors off the place. He got the part “because he was the only alien who showed up for the audition,” executive producer Gary Marshall was quoted as saying later. When the “My Favorite Orkan” episode aired a few weeks later, Williams’s performance as Mork generated the most viewer mail in the show’s history, and he was offered his own spin-off series, Mork & Mindy, beginning in the fall. The contract that Paramount put on the table was for $15,000 an episode, or $3 million over five years. Williams quickly worked into his club act a mock-Shakespearean soliloquy about the decision he faced: TV or not TV; that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler to do stupid shit at 8 o’clock, aye to take the money and run and yet buy a condominium, this all vexes me thus. Yon video will take your mind and turn it to Jell-O, but yet whether ’tis nobler to take arms against the God Nielsen or to stay here and be in small clubs. . . .

  In the end he took the money but passed on the condo in favor of a house in Topanga Canyon near the beach.

  Mork & Mindy premiered September 1 on ABC and quickly became the No. 1 show on television. Williams was featured in Time magazine and Newsweek. US magazine and People both put him on the cover, the latter proclaiming him “the lunatic spark of TV’s newest smash.” The Los Angeles Times called him “comedy’s newest phenomenon . . . an immediate contender for the sort of massive appeal that Steve Martin commands.” Actually, Williams was more than a contender. With about 57 million viewers tuning in to see him each week, he clearly held the title as America’s favorite funnyman. And all the media attention focused on him served to shine the spotlight more brightly on the Comedy Store and his fellow comics.

  Mike Binder was working as the doorman at Sunset one night when All in the Family producer Norman Lear walked up to him 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 106

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  and said, “Call me tomorrow.” Binder did, and Lear cast him as a regular on his new sitcom, Apple Pie, guaranteeing the eighteen-year-old an income of at least $100,000.

  Jay Leno was standing outside the club when a noted Czech film director named Ivan Passer handed him a card and asked if he wanted to be in a movie. Leno didn’t recognize the name and thought it was a joke at first, but several weeks later he was on location in Switzerland, making a movie called The Silver Bears with Michael Caine and Cybil Shepherd.

  At times, it seemed as if there were more Hollywood talent hunters, entertainment reporters, and celebrities in the audience than there were paying customers. At Westwood one night, the comics were unnerved to find themselves facing an audience that included Johnny Carson, Steve Martin, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr. At Sunset, Burt Reynolds and his then girlfriend Sally Field, Willie Nelson, and Sugar Ray Leonard came to see Richard Pryor, and after the show, they all sat at a table in the main room while Nelson played guitar and p
erformed a private concert until 5 a.m.

  Ringo Starr made a memorable solo appearance at Sunset one night, arriving so intoxicated that Mike Binder, who was working the door, had to help him to a seat in back. Starr was seated just as David Letterman took the stage, and the former Beatle immediately began heckling him, which attracted the attention of every comic within earshot. Letterman had a reputation for evis-cerating hecklers, and as word spread along the back hallway, other comics started filing into the room to watch the impending bloodshed.

  It wasn’t a fair fight. In the spotlight, Letterman couldn’t see who the heckler was, so he showed no mercy, and Starr was too drunk to appreciate how badly Letterman was beating him up. Finally, one of the comics took pity and called out, “Hey, Dave, it’s Ringo.”

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  “Oh, that makes sense,” Letterman shot back in the direction of Starr. “You ruined your career, and now you’ve come here to ruin mine.” George Miller almost fell off his stool laughing.

  Letterman’s TV career was starting to heat up. With the help of his new management company, Rollins-Joffe, he was cast, along with Michael Keaton, as a regular on Mary, CBS’s new Mary Tyler Moore musical variety show . The series’s show-within-a-show conceit had him playing the part of a behind-the-scenes staff member helping put together Mary’s weekly TV variety program.