In terms of topical, trendsetting, cutting-edge material, Robert was the perfect fit. On the most fundamental level, he was hysterical. Not only was watching him perform live like seeing a one-man band who could play every instrument pitch-perfectly, more broadly and indirectly, he would go on to influence multiple generations of comedians, from Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno, Richard Lewis, and Bill Maher to Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart.
JAY LENO, comedian and former host of The Tonight Show:
Robert Klein was my comedian. I say this because before Robert came along, most of the comics were older Jewish men like Rodney Dangerfield or Alan King. Or there was Pryor who was black and he was talking about that experience. There was no middle-class white kid out there and Klein was. He was talking about things I could relate to, like how bad television was back then. I was like, “Here’s somebody who’s talking about the exact same things I am.” To a certain extent, George Carlin was, too. But I wasn’t a hippie and I didn’t smoke dope, so Robert was my guy and to this day he still is.
RICHARD LEWIS:
I didn’t get to the Improv until 1971, which was a few years after Robert, and he had already gotten hot by then. I had begun dabbling in comedy writing while I was still a student at Ohio State University, even though I got a degree in marketing and became an ad copywriter, which I had to supplement with a lot of horrible day jobs once I decided to become a comic. The turning point that got me back to the East Coast was when I heard that Robert Klein was hosting a summer replacement show on network TV in 1970, and a friend of mine somehow connected me with his manager Buddy Morra. I immediately set out to write some material for Robert, which I then mailed to Buddy, who liked it enough that he passed it along to Robert. When I followed up about a week later, Buddy told me to call him the next time I was in New York.
I couldn’t get there fast enough and the meeting was life changing. Even though Robert turned me down, telling me that he didn’t buy other people’s material, he also said he liked what I’d written. Then Buddy promised to hook me up with some other comedians, which he did, even though he never managed me. The biggest one was Morty Gunty, who was a big star in the Catskills at the time and began buying jokes from me. There were also others I wrote for, and I made a decent living, but then I ultimately pushed forward on the same path as Robert and started performing the material myself. I owe a lot of that to Robert because of the encouragement he gave the first time we met.
Without a doubt, the Improv would have also been a much different place without him—both less funny and certainly not as intelligently funny. That’s because Robert, whom I have always considered to be comedy’s first “modern comedian,” made you laugh and think at the same time. This is no easy feat, of course, and so in that sense he truly became our tipping point.
Steeped in recognizable human behavior that was always socially and politically relevant, Robert’s razor-sharp observational style was an instant hit from the moment he got on our stage. Over the next five decades, he enjoyed a legendary career that included such milestones as releasing his seminal debut comedy album, Child of the 50’s (1973), followed by starring in HBO’s first comedy special (1975), eventually ranking him in the supreme pantheon of the greatest comedians of all time, an acknowledgment he deservedly received from Comedy Central in 2005. Needless to say, I am enormously proud that we were one of the first places where Robert did stand-up and I will always remember our times together with great fondness.
Aside from what he added to the club in talent and creativity, my respect and affection for Robert also had a brotherly kinship from day one. First of all, he talked about subjects I knew very well, like being a middle-class Jew from the Bronx, which we both are. On top of that, we’d both attended DeWitt Clinton High School. In addition to his observational bits that were often accompanied by songs and the harmonica, one of my earliest favorites was a routine he did on his old teachers in public school, which I could obviously relate to well. He’d say: “They had these older women who had gone to normal school in 1899, graduated in two years, took religion and first aid. They gave them each a bun in the back—a chignon—a large black dress, and Boy Scout shoes, and sent them into schools to say, ‘No talking.’”
It was incredible and so was Robert. His father, Benjamin, was a textiles salesman and an impressionist who told funny stories and was a friend of the Yiddish-dialect comedian Myron Cohen. His mother, Frieda, was a medical secretary who later became the assistant to Leo Davidoff, the world-renowned neurosurgeon who had once operated on Albert Einstein and was immortalized in journalist John Gunther’s 1949 memoir, Death Be Not Proud. Robert’s mother also played the piano by ear and she would often accompany herself while singing Broadway show tunes. Even though he had initially planned to become a doctor, Robert, too, became interested in show business at a very young age when his abilities gravitated equally towards music and comedy—even forming a doo-wop group in high school, which years later he reprised into a trio with Buddy Mantia, Marvin Braverman, and later Danny Aiello at the Improv called the Untouchables.
In 1964, Robert left the Yale School of Drama after one year to pursue acting roles and supported himself by working as a substitute teacher. He then decided to try stand-up on the Greenwich Village amateur circuit in local folk clubs. He joined Second City in Chicago in 1965, spending a year there before returning to New York with the road company in the spring of 1966. In the fall of that year, he had landed a small role in the new Broadway musical The Apple Tree. It was during this same period that Robert reconnected with a Second City alum named David Steinberg. Despite having been rivals in Chicago, it was at David’s urging that Robert give stand-up another try at the Improv.
ROBERT KLEIN:
Steinberg was just so brilliant. He had been at Second City for a while by the time I arrived, so he was the big star of the place. One night not long after I got there, David invited me up to his apartment, and Sheldon Patinkin, who was one of Second City’s principal directors, was there. He took me aside and said, “Be careful of David.”
Then David told me, “Watch out for Sheldon.”
Anyway, David wiped the floor with me. I was talented but raw, so when he eventually left the company and went to London, I was relieved.
DAVID STEINBERG:
Basically the feud with me and Robert—and we talk about it a lot—wasn’t about us. It was about our friends because we were both coming up at the same time and they’d say things like, “He’s better than this and he’s better than that.” However, we were never in a conflict about the work itself. I don’t mean this in a good way, but if anything, I was just so intimidating at Second City—that and the fact that I’d been there for a couple of years before he arrived. But then not long after, I went to England with the company and that’s when he blossomed.
ROBERT KLEIN:
With David, it was never an issue of whether we worked well together or whether or not I respected him. What I thought about him back then, and what I still think of him now, is that I’ve never seen as good an improviser anywhere. However, there was also a period of dislike when I kind of resented him for giving me a crisis of confidence—even though it never showed up in our performances per se. He was famous for stealing the stage and I had to toughen up in a hurry. By the time we were heading to New York with Second City in 1965, I had ulcer symptoms because he was still making sure he had all the best scenes.
But that was pretty much that, because by this point I had gotten pretty good at holding my own and doing what I did. Actually, the show ended up closing after only five months and years later David apologized. Even before that, we had already begun mending fences by the time I landed my first Broadway role in The Apple Tree. I had also started toying with the idea of trying to do stand-up again—and that’s when David told me about the Improv.
DAVID STEINBERG:
By the time I got to the New York company of Second City around 1965 or ’66, I had already been in E
ngland. Then Second City wound up closing in New York after only about five weeks. About six months later, Bill Alton, who had been a founding member of Second City and was the one who told me about it, approached me about putting an act together. He’d been living in New York for a number of years by this point, and Bernie Sahlins from Second City arranged for a producer from The Merv Griffin Show to come and see us at the Improv. The setup was that I played a very nervous stand-up comedian coming onstage for the first time and Bill played a drunk heckling me from the audience. We ended up getting on The Merv Griffin Show, which suddenly jump-started my career—all because Budd knew enough to let us do it because we were sketch comics and stand-up was where everything was headed. He was always willing to take chances.
Then I became a regular at The Bitter End in Greenwich Village. So one night, Robert dropped in to see me not long after he’d gotten The Apple Tree, which was at the Shubert Theatre, right around the corner from the Improv. We were friends at that point, which we always were more than adversaries. We got to talking about him doing stand-up again and that’s when I told him he ought to try and get on at Budd’s place. The Improv just seemed tailor-made for Robert, and I think I told him to do something musical.
Even before he did whatever he did onstage that night, Robert made an immediate impression as soon as he came in and introduced himself to me. I vividly recall saying to myself right then and there: “Wow, he’s a tall, good-looking Jew from the Bronx who went to my high school. How bad can that be?”
ROBERT KLEIN:
Even though I was gradually easing back into stand-up at this point, I had never heard of the Improv until David told me about it. For starters, I wasn’t a bar guy and I never hung out in them. And I wasn’t what you’d really call an “uptown” guy either. I mean, I was living at 108th Street and West End Avenue, which wasn’t the greatest neighborhood in those days.
Anyway, I believe that it was in the fall of 1966 when I first started at the Improv. It was after the reviews of The Apple Tree had come in and I knew I was going to have a job for a while. I wound up staying with the show for seven months. I was making $200 a week and I had just bought a Volvo. I think the word on the street was that the Improv wasn’t a hootenanny the way a lot of these clubs down in the Village were.
My memory is that David told me Budd would definitely love to have me because I was in a Broadway show—this, and that it seemed very uptown, even though I wasn’t, like I said. But it was also such a dive that I used to do this bit where I’d say: “The Improv is the kind of place where you put toilet paper on the men’s room door before you went in.” When I went there, it was the only place of its kind and it was still equally music and comedy.
There was this short redhead whose name I forget who could belt it out. And then I saw, or maybe I heard, that Liza Minnelli had been there to try out something. I also saw comedian Jackie Vernon coming through to put the finishing touches on his next Ed Sullivan appearance. What was great was that there were a lot of stars around but also a lot of fringe show-business people like managers and people who came in because they lived in the theater district. It hadn’t caught on with tourists yet and it was about as hip as a late-night audience could be where there’d be an incredibly eclectic hodgepodge. You’d see regulars who had their favorites, alcoholics, people who had money, and eccentrics, who came in overdressed wearing gloves and things. There were also bums who’d peep in from 44th Street.
To the club’s credit, this is one of the reasons why I had to write so much material. I’d had that improvisational training at Second City to begin with, but then having the same people in the audience every night at the Improv forced me to keep building things up and changing them around. One of the first comics I met there was Richard Pryor and we wound up doing some improvs together in a group.
On my first night there, I arranged to have the entire cast of The Apple Tree with me. That impressed Budd. I already knew when I walked in that I wasn’t just depending on, “Gee, will he put me up?” And then I just killed that night.
Budd was good to me right from the beginning in part because I’d been in The Apple Tree but also because of how well I did. However, I’ll say this about him: There were plenty of times after that when I saw him dealing with other people, including comics and singers, and he wasn’t warm and fuzzy. I guess I was lucky in that sense because he never gave me any problems. Over time, I came to admire him all the more because he’s one of three people who have told me some pretty intimate tales of combat. Ever see that scar on his leg? That always impressed me, and this is a guy who was never afraid to confront somebody who was out of line because his own life had been in mortal danger in Korea.
But as much as I love Budd, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that he had a pretension about him when he’d introduce me. He would even sometimes take my lines. I’d say something and then he would go: “Ha, ha, ha.” I’d be like, “Get your own material, Budd, please.” I wasn’t as offended as I would have been if another comic had done it, but he would, and it kind of annoyed me. Basically, though, we always got along fine and if pretentiousness was part of the package, you pretty much accepted it because it was also part of his charm.
Back when I had my goatee, I liked to refer to myself as “your charming bearded host” and the “benevolent dictator,” even though there were plenty of people who took issue with that. Robert was never one of them, though, and I used to love stealing a line or two from him as I was bringing him up, which I still liked to do even when we had another emcee. If he ever got pissed about it, it didn’t show. The other thing about Robert is that he’s always had a very charismatic presence both on and offstage and he never lost his composure.
But putting aside his ability to connect with any audience and how talented he is, the other thing that has always impressed me about Robert is his passion for the work to the point of perfectionism. He’d have this humongous reel-to-reel Wollensak tape recorder with him. It was probably a foot and a half long and probably even wider. It weighed a fucking ton. Not only would he tape every performance; more importantly he would listen to it.
He said Joan Rivers told him to do it, but he was the first guy I knew who taped his acts. He’d call me up asking to go on, and he invariably did because he could do absolutely no wrong. If Rodney Dangerfield had been the king of the Improv, then Robert was definitely the anointed prince. He always went to the head of the line. Hardly anybody ever questioned it either because he was that good and he always had something to say.
CARL REINER:
My introduction to Robert was through my son Rob. He called me up one day and said, “I just saw this guy who was so different than anybody else I’ve ever seen.” After I went to see him for myself, I instantly knew what he was talking about. Robert Klein informed every comedian who came after him.
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
We all kind of felt like Robert was God, and that’s what it was like whenever he came into the club—an encounter with God. I remember being there one night when Robert came in with his manager, Buddy Morra. Robert was getting ready to record an album and he came in and just killed. I’m talking annihilate here. Afterwards, they sat down at one of the booths in the back and he started writing stuff down on a bunch of napkins with a red felt-tip pen. Then he left and I noticed one of the napkins that he had sort of discarded. It was crumpled up and smudged, but I took it anyway because it had Robert’s handwriting on it. I was just this kid in awe because I’d seen what he could do with stand-up.
MARVIN BRAVERMAN, writer and comedian:
I used to be in this doo-wop group with Buddy Mantia and Robert. We’d sing backup for him. The idea originated at the Improv. Robert always inspired me with his comedy. Whenever I saw his act, it was so smart and funny that it pushed me to become better. He wasn’t always easy to be around and he wasn’t always nice, but when he was, he was great. The other thing I remember about Robert is his technique. Some people pushed through their mater
ial, but he blasted through his.
LENNY SCHULTZ:
Without fail, Robert was always brilliant onstage and I think he’s one of the reasons I started taping my acts. He was also a bit of a loner, and I don’t remember him ever being one of the guys who would go out with us for breakfast at four in the morning. However, we all respected him.
JERRY STILLER:
Robert came to the Improv a little after Anne and I did, but once he was there, he kind of became the nucleus of the place. He was instantly likable. And he was always very intelligent and literal. Then he started talking about his own connection to comedy and the fact that he was Jewish, which was something that I could easily relate to.
MIKE PREMINGER, screenwriter and comedian:
Interestingly enough, Robert and I grew up four blocks from each other in the Bronx and my mother knew his mother. We could have lived four hundred miles from each other, but it just so happened that we lived four blocks apart and we went to the same high school and the same junior high school.
But we never once laid eyes on each other until we got to the Improv. Robert was there a few years before me, and by that time he was a big star, so Budd pretty much gave him the run of the entire place and he’d come in and do these long sets. He was fabulous, but again, we never talked. And then one night, I guess he’d either seen me perform or he’d heard about me somehow and he kind of walked up to me out of the blue and said: “You’re next. It’s going to happen to you soon.” I’m not sure if we said much else after that, but it was the supreme compliment he paid me.
DICK CAVETT:
The Improv Page 13
