The other thing about Brenner was that he always had plans. None of us were really like that when we were starting out. It was just about getting stage time, or getting better and getting chicks, or whatever. Brenner had a plan—and he had the exact dates of when he was going to do whatever he was planning to do—things that never really occurred to guys like me. We’d hear him talking about this stuff and we’d be like, “What is this guy talking about?”
Don’t get me wrong, Budd and I also had our issues, but if I had to guess, I think Budd may have felt a little intimidated by David for whatever reason. David was a few years older than all of us and he knew more than we did. But I also think he thought he knew more than Budd, and Budd may have been insulted by that.
DANNY AIELLO:
David was the guy all the comedians came to for advice, and I think that might have been part of the beef Budd had with him.
Here’s another thing about David, and it’s really interesting. Once I was at his apartment and he showed me these metal filing cabinets he had. Then he opened the drawers and pulled out these index cards, with each one detailing the date he did a certain performance, the exact time of night he did it, and people’s reactions to a specific joke. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.
RICK OVERTON, screenwriter, actor, and comedian:
I gave Brenner a tag line that he used in a joke once. The joke was, “Did you ever notice that when a guy sticks a coat hanger into a car door somebody will ask, ‘Did you lock your keys into your car?’”
I threw him the tag line where he added, “Thank God the top was down or I never would have gotten in.” I came up with that, Brenner used it, and it worked on one of the late-night shows, so he’s responsible for the first time I ever threw a guy a line and it worked on television. He gave me the confidence to think that somewhere down the line I’d do this again—some variant of that—and I did. It was all because of Brenner.
JEFF FOXWORTHY:
I never met Brenner personally, but I remember watching an interview with him somewhere not long after I started doing stand-up. He was telling this supposedly true story about how he’d done a show in Las Vegas and two ladies in the audience didn’t laugh. So he went back to his hotel room, wrote a new act, and then the next night the same ladies were there and they still didn’t laugh. This went on for like four or five nights in a row and the punch line was that they didn’t laugh because they didn’t speak English. Well, even at this point—as young as I was—I knew Brenner was full of shit. I knew there was no way he could be writing a new act every night because I knew how difficult writing stand-up was.
ALAN BURSKY, comedian:
I never will forget a night back in 1975 or 1976 when David took me, Freddie Prinze, and a bunch of other comics out to eat. It was at this place in LA called Chez Deni that used to be Dean Martin’s restaurant in the sixties. Basically, it was this upscale diner where you could go and have eggs at one in the morning. Anyway, David took us there and it was right when Freddie was at the peak of his fame on Chico and the Man and David had just done a TV pilot that hadn’t been picked up.
Keep in mind that David and Freddie had been great friends, but on this particular night, David was absolutely seething about all the success that Freddie was having and he wasn’t. I remember what he said like it was yesterday. He said, “Freddie needs to fall down a flight of stairs. He’s getting awful cocky.” I think it drove David crazy that Freddie became such a big star overnight.
Right up until the day he died, David always had a big chip on his shoulder. I remember hearing a story that, just before he got sick, Robert Klein’s manager wanted to package Robert in a show with David. But David didn’t want to do it because he said that Robert’s audience was too old. When I told Budd this, he said, “David Brenner is delusional to the end.”
EIGHTEEN
Richard Lewis
Though I may have had a rocky relationship with David Brenner personally, his generosity towards other comedians ultimately benefited us in many tangible ways. One of the biggest acts was Richard Lewis. Not only did David lend him $1,000 so he could quit his day job to pursue stand-up full-time, he’s also the one who first told him about the Improv—and advised him not to try and get on until he was ready. When that time came, Richard was another one of my favorites from the beginning, even despite having a less-than-stellar second set his first night.
RICHARD LEWIS:
I forget which, but I’d either read about the Improv or heard about the Improv. When I finally decided to become a stand-up comedian, I decided to go check it out, which is when I was befriended by my pal David Brenner. He became my mentor, and he told me this was the place. Then he forbade me from going on there during open mic night until he thought I was ready.
We became best friends instantly after that and I took about six months playing every conceivable dive you can imagine. I was so driven that sometimes I’d drive a hundred miles round-trip and I must have performed 340 nights that first year.
Basically I worked at any place that had a microphone, but then there were better ones. The Champagne Gallery down in the Village where a lot of other Improv guys worked was my favorite, and it was the first time I ever went onstage.
By the time I started doing stand-up, I knew Lenny Bruce’s albums. I also had Richard Pryor’s and Robert Klein’s routines memorized by heart and I’d watched every comedian on Ed Sullivan and The Tonight Show, so I knew what the craft should be and I knew what the high bars and the low bars were.
After about five or six months of doing hundreds of shows anyplace I could—and where I was head and shoulders above everybody—Brenner came to see me one night. He had a gig someplace nearby, and after watching me do my set, he walked me outside and said, “You’re ready.”
I’d been there before to watch, but I want to say that my first night performing at the Improv was sometime in the fall of 1971. I’ll never forget this, because after my set, Budd walked onstage and he put his arm around me and said: “We have our new 1971 Rookie of the Year.” It was a defining moment in my life—and an educational one—because the regular show started at ten o’clock and Budd informed me that he was bringing me up again.
This particular open mic night, I think, was on a Monday, and I had an incredible set. What I should have done is just gone home afterwards with my college girlfriend or tried to dig up enough change for a glass of wine at Mama Leone’s around the corner, but when Budd asked me if I wanted to go on during the regular show, of course I said yes. What ended up happening was that I didn’t go on until two o’clock in the morning and I bombed.
A total of four people were there and it was an impossible audience, which was the high and the low of it, but Budd still made me a regular. The exact way he phrased it was, “You can come here and perform anytime you want to.” I knew that to become a regular at the Improv meant that I had made it. After that, I didn’t even think of turning back.
Richard came in to audition for me on one of our Monday open mic nights in 1971, and completely unbeknownst to me he brought in some of his friends to watch him make his big debut. When a new comic does this in order to get laughs, we typically call these people “bringers.” In fact, many comedy clubs today even have a standing policy where they’ll only put a new comic on if he or she brings a certain amount of people, which is something that we’ve never done at the Improv and is a practice I personally abhor. I’ve always felt it was unsavory just on basic principle. Moreover, I think it dilutes things. My feeling has always been that if a comic can’t get an honest laugh in front of a group of complete strangers—no matter how raw or inexperienced they are—it’s usually a pretty sure sign that there’s either something wrong with their act or they’re not ready to go on.
This isn’t to say they won’t get better, because plenty of comics have. One particular case in point is Eddie Murphy, whom my first wife, Silver, turned down in New York years later for being too vulgar when he first auditio
ned for her, as I probably would have done, even though he eventually performed at the Improv in LA. While I’m sure there are many readers who will take exception with this, the truth is that I’ve always found Eddie’s use of the F word to be excessive and often without merit. Nor have I ever particularly been a huge fan of his stand-up either, although I do think he’s one of the best impressionists and comedic actors of all time hands down.
I’ll also admit that I didn’t like Chris Rock at first either. As a matter of fact, when Chris first came to my attention in the late eighties, my initial reaction was that he was little more than an arrogant Richard Pryor rip-off, although when he came back about a year later he absolutely blew me away, and from then on I’ve been a huge fan.
But in Richard Lewis’s case, I could tell he had the goods immediately, plus he was never dirty. What’s more, he had great delivery and timing, even if some of his material was slightly underdeveloped. When he went on that first time, it wasn’t just his friends who were laughing. He had almost the entire room in stitches, something that I quickly became very highly attuned to early on after we began using comedians and I learned how to gauge an audience.
When Richard got done performing, I told him to stick around for the next show, which started at ten o’clock. The only problem was that none of his friends decided to stay, and so his second set that night wasn’t as strong, and the later audiences weren’t nearly as responsive as the first, although it wasn’t until a while later that he finally told me about having his friends there during the first set.
Richard and I became pretty tight after that, which we’ve remained over the years. In fact, just as I was getting ready to embark on my move to Los Angeles in early 1975 to open up a West Coast branch of the Improv, Richard co-wrote and starred in an NBC movie of the week called Diary of a Young Comic, where one of the characters was a “Budd Friedman type” that he invited yours truly to play. Although I only had a couple of lines, it was a blast. But then when we got done filming my scene, one of the production assistants came up to me and asked me to sign a release, which meant I wasn’t going to get paid, so I said, “What about my union?”
When she asked me what union I belonged to, I told her the Screen Actors Guild, which I didn’t, but I was also determined not to let Paramount, the production company that was producing Richard’s film, get away without paying me, even though I still wasn’t paying my own comics by this point. I also went out that same afternoon and joined SAG for $500. The amount I received for basically playing myself in Richard’s movie was $365. Even so, doing the film was a joy for me—just as it always has been working with Richard Lewis.
NINETEEN
The Hippest Room in America
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
In 1973, I was this Jewish kid working as a deli clerk in Queens and writing jokes for these Catskills comics for seven dollars a pop. When I was working at the deli and we weren’t busy, I would scribble down jokes on the backs of little grocery sacks they used to sell cigarettes in. Then what I’d do is go home and type them up at my parents’ house on Long Island where I was living at the time.
But slicing meat in a deli got old pretty quickly, and when I went to an employment agency in Manhattan to look for another day job, I told the guy who interviewed me that I wrote comedy and he asked me if I’d heard of the Improv. I hadn’t, but not long after, I took my then girlfriend and we went as customers. That very first night on the same lineup, I saw Richard Lewis, Elayne Boosler, Jimmie Walker, and Gabe Kaplan.
I remember immediately thinking to myself that these were my peers. Richard Lewis was frenetically hilarious. Elayne back then was real sort of sexy looking, although she scared me a little bit. She had this loud voice, but she was really funny and smart. She had a woman’s point of view that was different than I was used to from the women on The Ed Sullivan Show. It wasn’t the ugly girl who couldn’t get a date.
Instead, she talked about guys who were inadequate in bed, which was a stark contrast to the guys I was used to writing for in the Catskills. They were always about: “My wife wouldn’t fuck me because she had her hair done today.” But here at the Improv, Elayne was talking about men who wouldn’t satisfy her. It was guy stuff from a woman about guys.
I forget what Gabe Kaplan did that night, but my girlfriend and I were seated at a table that was pretty close to the stage. I remember Jimmie Walker asking me what I did for a living, but I didn’t have the balls to say I was a comedy writer. Number one, I didn’t really consider myself one yet even though I’d had some minor success. And number two, I didn’t want to be ridiculed by him. So I told him I was a dentist and he did some really shitty dentist jokes about me.
BOB “UNCLE DIRTY” ALTMAN:
Budd and his first wife, Silver, saw me perform at the Café Au Go Go down in Greenwich Village in the late sixties and they immediately asked me to start performing at the Improv. Being there was like being a child wrapped up in a big security blanket every night—women, free booze, and adulation. How could you resist that? You went in dressed in Levi’s, a T-shirt, and a pair of comfortable sneakers, and then you just got up in front of a mic and started bullshitting in front of a bunch strangers. It was the ideal gig. You didn’t have to get dressed up; you just told everybody what was on your mind and they treated you like you were important. It was a fucking dream, man.
Even as we continued to live hand-to-mouth financially, the early 1970s would be magically artistic years for us. It also wasn’t long after Richard Lewis’s arrival in the fall of 1971 when I began to realize that, by extension, the Improv was slowly being recast as the progenitor of a new kind of showcase comedy club that hadn’t existed before. While we never officially stopped presenting singers who remained paradoxically popular and would continue to perform into the next decade, inevitably their once-dominant presence would be significantly diminished and eventually ended.
A lot of that had to do with the fact stand-up itself was undergoing a radical metamorphosis and becoming hipper in the wake of America’s political social upheaval in the mid to late 1960s. Added to this was the other fact that comics—most of whom were having a difficult time finding live audiences to work to at old Greenwich Village hangouts that were either closing or switching to mostly rock ‘n’ roll formats—needed a place to go and came to the Improv.
First, there were the already-established and soon-to-be-established regulars and semi-regulars like Robert Klein, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, Stiller and Meara, Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Pryor, Professor Irwin Corey, Jimmy Martinez, Ron Carey, J.J. Barry, Martin Friedberg, and Steve Landesberg, as well as newcomers Gabe Kaplan, Marvin Braverman, Ed Bluestone, Lenny Schultz, Billy Saluga, Marty Nadler, and Mike Preminger.
After that, and in no particular order, this list would go on to include Jay Leno, Richard Lewis, Freddie Prinze, Bob Altman, Jimmie Walker, Bob Shaw, Bruce Mahler, Elayne Boosler, and Andy Kaufman, as well as such popular comedy teams as Overton & Sullivan and Weeden, Finkle & Fay, who wrote a parody to commemorate our tenth anniversary. In what was often compared to a high school for humor, each year’s incoming class of cutups and freshly minted graduates would both collectively and individually permanently catapult the Improv into the American pop culture hall of fame.
The press also began to take notice, beginning with a profile by Calvin Trillin in The New Yorker and a five-page spread in the New York Daily News Sunday magazine on November 29, 1973. It ran with the headline, “Let’s Hear it for the Improv.”
After that, there was seldom a week that went by when someone wasn’t writing something about us—and me—after I became one of the hosts of music impresario Don Kirshner’s nationally syndicated NBC variety show, Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, which premiered that same year. This was in addition to the Improv’s occasional big-screen cameo appearances such as in the 1977 film version of Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl starring Marsha Mason and Richard Dreyfuss.
It’s notable that several years before, we go
t another major boost when director Michael Blum filmed what would be Richard Pryor’s first—and comedy’s first ever—recorded stand-up special called Richard Pryor: Live & Smokin’ at the Improv on April 29, 1971. Shot in black-and-white, it was first seen in a 1985 VHS release. At the time, Richard was still several years away from becoming America’s biggest comedy superstar. But in the four years since his self-imposed exile in Berkeley, California, following the notorious 1967 incident where he stormed offstage during the middle of a performance at Las Vegas’s Aladdin hotel, he had also long moved away from doing clean, innocuous material towards an act that was dirtier and rawer than anybody had ever seen. More importantly, though, he had never done his act on film. He talked about growing up in a brothel (“That’s where I first met white dudes—they used to come to our neighborhood to help the economy”), race, and experimenting with homosexuality. Almost by default, this pretty much became the template for all other comedy concert films that followed.
As a result, the dynamic at the Improv would get even more competitive as the years wore on, albeit a lot funnier. This was especially evident on Mondays when I held auditions for our open mic nights. The way we did it was through a lottery system where each comic would put his or her name on a little piece of paper that would go into a fedora. Some days I almost couldn’t get through the front door because there were so many people blocking the entrance. There would literally be hundreds of young hopefuls lined up around the block.
And so it went, although everybody was pretty much just another face in the crowd when they first got to the Improv. And they all have war stories, particularly the comics. Undoubtedly, my three most favorite are Jay Leno, Freddie Prinze, and Andy Kaufman. Actually, Jay and Freddie auditioned on the same night. There was also the time that Larry David, who had never done stand-up before and was in the audience as a customer, came up to me out of the blue and asked if he could go on—all of which I’ll get back to. But first, here are the stories of a couple of other comedians because they are also interesting.
The Improv Page 15
