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

by William Knoedelseder

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  Dreesen usually didn’t stop to ponder the underlying inequity of working comics having to borrow money to eat. He figured it was part of the deal that they’d all signed onto. But on this night, the deal seemed more unfair than usual because Mitzi Shore had charged $20 a head at the door. He did the math in his head: $20

  times approximately four hundred seats times three shows equaled $24,000, not a penny of which went to the comics. It seemed all the more unfair a little later when one of the Comedy Store waitresses stopped in at Canter’s and mentioned that she had made $214 that night.

  Two Saturday nights later, Dreesen arrived at the Comedy Store for his 9 p.m. set and was informed by one of Mitzi’s assistants that instead of performing in the Original Room, he would be appearing in the Main Room, along with four other comics.

  “No shit? ” he said, pleased at his apparent promotion. He’d been on the road and hadn’t heard about Mitzi’s new plan for making the Main Room profitable. This was debut night for “The Best of the Comedy Store,” and the others on the bill were Robin Williams, Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Elayne Boosler.

  None of them had played the Main Room before. It was considerably larger than the Original Room, with nearly four times the seats, a higher ceiling, a wider stage, and more sophisticated lighting. It was much more a professional showroom than a showcase club, and it definitely didn’t feel like a workshop. The experience reminded Dreesen of performing in Tahoe or Vegas.

  At Canter’s after the show, Jay Leno got right down to it. “Does anyone think this system is fair anymore?” he asked rhetorically.

  “I mean, that place was fuckin’ packed tonight. It took five of us to do it, but it was still packed, at $15 a head with a two-drink minimum. Shouldn’t we get something for that? When Rodney [Dangerfield] and Richard [Pryor] play that room, Mitzi gives them the door. Shouldn’t we get, like, I don’t know, half the door?”

  He got no argument from anyone at the table. They could cal-culate the cut as easily as he could: Half the door came to a little 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 119

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  more than $800 per person. Leno didn’t need the money. Like Dreesen, he was making a good living on the nightclub showroom circuit. Letterman’s managers were negotiating a so-called holding deal with NBC that would pay him $250,000 to sit tight while the network figured out what to do with him. Robin Wil liams was a newly minted millionaire. Of the five who’d performed in the Main Room that night, only Boosler wasn’t in a high tax bracket.

  Dreesen kept thinking about Michael Rapport having to borrow five bucks for breakfast on New Year’s morning after performing in one of the most prestigious entertainment venues in the country. And plenty of other Comedy Store regulars in Canter’s that night were in the same boat. Eight hundred bucks would make their month, covering rent, food, and transportation. Some of them were in fairly desperate circumstances, practically sub-sisting on the two free beers they got for performing and on the condiments at the bar—the cocktail cherries, olives, and lemon wedges that they only half-jokingly referred to as “the buffet.”

  There was no end to the survival stories. Marsha Warfield was often so broke that she was reduced to stealing restaurant crackers, which she took home to the apartment she shared with comics Brad Sanders and Jimmy Cook and turned into fried cornmeal.

  Cook was the only one of the three who had a car, so on nights when there was no money for gas or Cook couldn’t pick her up, Warfield walked home from the Comedy Store at 2:00 a.m., a one-hour trek to the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Tama rind Street through an area being terrorized by a sadistic serial killer known as the Hillside Strangler.

  Acting on a tip from comic Johnny Witherspoon, Warfield and Sanders sometimes went to the Comedy Store in the morning and crawled around on the floor in search of change dropped by the previous night’s customers. One day, they came up with just enough to buy some Rice-A-Roni at the Ranch Market on Vine Street. Hoping to stretch the meal a little further, Sanders slipped a package of ground beef down the front of his pants, but an old 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 120

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  security guard spotted him and confronted the pair with a can of mace. “I’m not going to call the police because I can tell you’re hungry,” he said, “but you have to put it back and leave.”

  Warfield even panhandled for food on occasion, but always in true stand-up comic style. She’d walk up to women on the street and ask, “How are you doing today? Do you have any food in your purse? ” She learned that a surprisingly high percentage of them did, about one in ten. And the percentage only dropped slightly when she specified, “You got any chicken? ”

  The experiences were hilarious in the retelling, but they’d been humiliating in the moment. The talk at the table quickly turned from getting a cut of the door in the Main Room to getting paid in the Original Room and at Westwood, too—the ultimate heresy.

  Why shouldn’t they get paid in all the rooms? A lot had changed in four years. The Store wasn’t a small struggling club anymore. It was a massive, cash-generating laugh factory. And Mitzi was no longer a brand-new divorcee worrying about how to keep the business afloat and feed the four kids. She was driving a silver Jag and having an affair with Steve Landesberg. Rents had risen, and gas had just gone to $1 a gallon. About the only thing that hadn’t changed was Mitzi’s policy of not paying them.

  For Leno, it was a matter of principle. “The sense is that our time and effort and talents aren’t worth anything,” he said.

  “Jay’s right. This isn’t fair anymore,” Boosler said. “We gotta have a meeting.”

  She and Dottie Archibald worked the phones the following week. It was a little like herding cats, but they managed to corral about twenty comics, including Leno, Letterman, Dreesen, Robin Williams, George Miller, Gallagher, and most of the headliners who were being asked to appear in the Main Room.

  They met at Boosler’s apartment on Sweetzer Avenue in West Hollywood, about half a mile from the Comedy Store. It was her third apartment in three years, and Leno had helped her move 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 121

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  into each one. The last one, on Larabee Street, they nicknamed

  “the thirty-nine steps” because they had to haul all her belong-ings up several flights of stairs. At the end of the day, he pleaded,

  “Promise me you’ll never buy a couch.”

  She had one now, plus a dining room table and chairs and a real bed—all signs of her burgeoning career. But she still had two wooden salad bowls in her cupboard that she’d “borrowed” from the Comedy Store in the early days, when they were all she had.

  Most of the comics had swiped dinnerware from the Store. They saw it as a kind of payback for not being paid, an unauthorized perk.

  Despite the supposedly serious intent of the gathering, the conversation quickly took on the cadence of a session at Canter’s, with people talking over one another and lobbing good-natured insults at anyone trying to make a point. Comics just can’t help themselves; it’s their nature. Life’s a roast.

  As host, Boosler tried to focus the group’s attention on the subject at hand: getting paid for performing in the Main Room. “All of a sudden there are rules,” she said. “We’re not allowed to break in new material. We have to do what Mitzi calls ‘a Vegas act.’ We’re supposed to dress up, no jeans and sneakers like in the Original Room. We’re not allowed to ‘experiment.’ Does that sound like a workshop to you? What the hell. Why aren’t we being paid?”

  Once again, there was little disagreement. All present thought they should be paid some portion of the door. After all, Mitzi was already splitting the take with the
older performers, so there was a precedent. All they had to do was ask her. They’d never done that before. Surely she’d realize that it was only fair and reasonable.

  Leno was so convinced she’d go along that he volunteered to be the go-between. After about an hour, the meeting appeared to be heading toward an easy resolution when Boosler asked a question that few of them expected. “What about the Original Room?”

  Her question hung in the air unanswered as they pondered its import. The Original Room was the Comedy Store, its heart and its soul. For most of them, the Original Room had served as a 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 122

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  womb, where they were nurtured in their fetal stage of funny.

  Professionally speaking, they were born in the Original Room. To propose any kind of change seemed like blasphemy. “No payment” was a founding premise of the place. To ask for money in exchange for performing there was like proposing that the “all men are created equal” line be removed from the Declaration of Independence. At least that was how Mitzi was likely to see it.

  A psychologist would have had a field day with their conflict-ing feelings toward Shore. She was by turns their boss, their friend, their surrogate mother, their harshest critic, and their biggest fan. They flattered her to her face, made fun of her behind her back, craved her approval, and resented her dominion over their lives. They admired her and thought she was wacko. But none of them disliked her, and all felt a measure of gratitude for her patronage. Was this any way to show it?

  Dreesen finally broke the silence. “The thing is, us getting paid for working the Main Room doesn’t help the majority of our fellow comics who aren’t working the Main Room and who really need the money,” he said. “I don’t think anyone here has had to borrow five bucks for breakfast recently.”

  There was no easy consensus this time. Some thought it was wrong to expect to be paid in the Original Room because most of the comics performing there weren’t at a professional level yet.

  The workshop atmosphere allowed anyone with talent to rise at their own pace, they said. And weren’t they all proof that the system worked? Why turn it into a professional room and run the risk of fucking everything up?

  Others argued that it was a professional room already because there was so much media and industry presence on any given night that some comics had stopped trying out new material for fear of, as Robin Williams put it, “going down el tubo in front of the man from Time magazine.”

  Leno and Boosler floated a compromise idea borrowed from the New York Improv, where the new owners—Budd Friedman’s ex-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 123

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  wife Silver and her partner Chris Albrecht—were giving comics $5 to cover cab fare between clubs so they could do sets at several places a night. Mitzi could give the comics $5 a night, too, they said, but call it “gas money” instead. That way she could preserve her no-payment policy and the comics still would be able to buy breakfast. Dreesen, Miller, and Letterman were among those who liked the idea and thought Mitzi might go for it. Leno again volunteered to be the messenger. But after more discussion, they decided they didn’t feel comfortable speaking for the entire comedy community. By their own estimate, as many as two hundred performers worked the local club scene, with more hopefuls arriving every week. Shouldn’t they have a say in this, too?

  It was partly the optimism of the age and partly their sense of community that led them to believe they could get that many comics into a room to debate a common cause. It had never been done before. There’d never been a need. But now there was a growing feeling among them that the time had come to take some control of their futures. They’d been going to comedy college long enough. It was time to graduate.

  They left Boosler’s apartment that evening with a promise to call every comic they knew and use their status as Comedy Store headliners to convince their colleagues to show up at a time and place to be determined. It was a nutty notion—a convocation of comedians? Woodstock for clowns?—and a haphazard plan. But the stage was set for a historic confrontation.

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  Drugs and Theft

  Mike Binder felt like he’d died and gone to heaven. Among his earliest memories of growing up in Detroit was riding by Baker’s Keyboard Lounge down the street from his house and seeing Lenny Bruce’s name on the marquee. It was one of the first things he was able to read. He remembered watching Woody Allen on The Ed Sullivan Show and practically wearing out his George Carlin and Robert Klein albums. From age thirteen on, all he wanted to be was a comedian.

  Now he was. More than that, he stood at the epicenter of comedy in America, a regular at the Comedy Store, where he might run into Carlin any night. And if that happened, he’d likely say, as casually as he could, “Hey, George,” and shake his hand. And Carlin would say, “Hey,” back and maybe even know who he was.

  It was heady stuff for someone six months shy of his nineteenth birthday. Headier still was the feeling Binder had that he belonged there. He’d come to Los Angeles two years earlier clutching a copy of Phil Berger’s book The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-up Comics, which chronicled the New York comedy scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Within days of his arrival, Binder was rubbing elbows with some of the guys in the book: Richard Lewis, Jay 125

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  Leno, Michael Preminger. The first money he earned in show business was $25 that George Miller paid him for a joke he wrote:

  “When I was in high school, I did a lot of drugs. Yeah, it was high High.” It was a stupid joke, but filtered through George’s persona, it was funny as hell. The night George used it on The Tonight Show, Binder called his father in Detroit to tell him to be sure to stay awake all the way to the stand-up comic near the end. “The guy’s a friend of mine, Dad. And I wrote the fifth joke in.” In the Comedy Store kitchen later that night, they all gathered around the TV to watch, and Binder’s joke got a big laugh from both audiences.

  Binder reveled in the camaraderie, loving the hanging out nearly as much as the performing. He was closest to Leno, who was ten years his senior and had slipped easily into the role of watchful big brother. One night, when Binder was deathly ill with an intestinal virus, bleeding from his butt and scared out of his mind, Leno literally carried him to the hospital and then phoned his father in Detroit to tell him what was happening and assure him that everything would be okay.

  On a more typical night, Leno would pick Binder up in his mammoth ’58 Buick Roadmaster—“Mr. Buick,” as Jay called it—

  and they’d motor to the Store, where Binder would do an early spot and then wait around for Leno to perform in prime time. He never tired of seeing Leno rock a room. Afterwards, they’d hit Canter’s and then head over to Jay’s place to play the board game Risk for hours or watch tapes of other comics on The Tonight Show. For all his good fellowship, Leno had a latent cruel streak.

  He taped every comic on Carson and loved nothing better than to invite people over to watch particularly bad performances.

  “Hey, you wanna watch [so-and-so] bomb? ”

  Some weeknights they’d go to the Posh Bagel on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood to see Andy Kaufman perform, not as a comic but as a busboy. One or two nights a week, the 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 127

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  breakout star of a hit network sitcom worked for minimum wage and went unrecognized for the most part, which is why he did it and why his comedian friends would show up to participate in his peculiar brand of performance art. They’d sit at a table like normal patrons, pretending not to know him. He’d ignore them and go about his busboy business.
Then, something would happen: He’d drop or spill something, or they would. An argument would break out; shouting would ensue. Chairs might be knocked over, bagels thrown. Kaufman’s pals would bolt for the parking lot before dissolving into laughter, and he’d resume bussing tables for the stunned customers without ever breaking character.

  Kaufman had time to moonlight because, thanks in part to Binder, he didn’t have to work very hard at his day job on Taxi.

  Kaufman hated the rehearsal process, believing it detracted from real performance. So, to keep him happy, Paramount agreed that he didn’t have to rehearse all week with the rest of the cast just so long as he showed up fully prepared for the Saturday taping. The studio hired Binder to run Kaufman’s lines with costars Judd Hirsh, Danny DeVito, Marilu Henner, Tony Danza, and Jeff Conaway—a move that didn’t endear Andy to the others. Binder then would meet Kaufman on Friday night with a copy of the script and a dia-gram of the set—“Okay, they are doing this bit here, and Latka is over here by the car”—and Kaufman would go in the next morning and usually nail it in one take.

  The gig was a great deal for Binder. He got $1,000 a week out of Kaufman’s salary and daily access to some of the best writers, producers, and directors in the TV business. But he didn’t take advantage of it. He really only wanted to be a nightclub comic and stay out until 5:00 a.m. with other nightclub comics. So, he constantly showed up half an hour late and dog tired for his 10:00 a.m. call on the Taxi set, irritating the cast and crew, who couldn’t believe they had to wait “for a fucking stand-in.” It pissed them off all the more at Kaufman.

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  When Binder wasn’t hanging out with Leno, he gravitated to the hard-partying crowd. No teenager ever had easier access to controlled substances. Among comics, alcohol and pot were givens. You couldn’t stand in the Comedy Store parking lot for five minutes without someone passing you a joint. Jay Leno, David Letterman, Tom Dreesen, and Andy Kaufman were in the small minority that didn’t indulge. George Miller indulged more than anyone. His consumption of various and sundry downers began to worry his best buddies, Letterman and Dreesen, to the point that one afternoon they drove deep into the San Fernando Valley to check out a drug-rehabilitation facility. They explained to the woman in charge that they were interested in getting treatment for a friend. As they talked, she kept smiling at them oddly and glancing out the window. Finally, she admitted that she recognized them from The Tonight Show and asked if this was some sort of comedy bit they were doing. Was there a camera truck outside?