TOM DREESEN:
Man, do I remember my first time at the Improv and meeting Budd Friedman, who later became one of my dearest friends. I grew up in Chicago, and back in the late sixties I was part of America’s first—and last—biracial comedy team. This was over forty years ago and there’s never been one since.
I had been an insurance salesman and I joined the Jaycees, a civic group in my neighborhood. I wrote a drug education program where I taught grade school children about the dangers of drug abuse, with humor. That’s how I met my future comedy partner, Tim Reid, who was also a Jaycee. Tim later went on to major fame playing the hipster disc jockey Venus Flytrap in the late-seventies CBS sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati.
While we were in the Jaycees, we began doing funny bits together during the lectures that were very well received. One day after the lecture, a little eighth-grade girl said, “You guys are funny. You ought to become a comedy team.” We took her suggestion and developed our act and we rehearsed and rehearsed it. The only problem was we had no place to do it, so we’d volunteer to provide the entertainment at any charity we could find. And then we’d wander into all of these little jazz clubs around Chicago asking the musicians if we could go on after they finished. Sometimes they would even say, “We’re going to take a break, but we’ve got a little comedy team who are going to entertain you while we’re gone.” Usually, the people would get up and leave. But it still gave us an opportunity to try out our material until I wound up starting Chicago’s first comedy club at a place called Le Pub on Lincoln Avenue.
Meanwhile, I’d either heard or read about this club in New York called the Improvisation where you could work every single night even though it was for free. Around that same time, Tim wrote a letter to Craig Tennis who was the talent coordinator at The Tonight Show. (Later, he changed my life overnight after putting me on in the early 1970s.) Craig’s a great guy who was very approachable, which was extremely rare even back then considering all the power he had. The even more incredible thing was that he wrote Tim back telling us to come see him if we were ever in New York.
Needless to say, we were on a Greyhound bus that same night, but when we auditioned for Craig the following afternoon at his office at NBC, it didn’t go well. Craig, being the guy he is, was very nice about it. He said, “Look, there’s a guy named Murray Becker who handles George Carlin. Let me see if I can get you an appointment to go see him.”
So we did, and Murray couldn’t have been nicer. He said, “Craig sent you over and you’re the first black-and-white comedy team. That’s interesting. Where can I see you work?”
When I told him we were going back to Chicago, that’s when he offered to call Budd to see if we could get on at the Improv that night. I remember meeting Budd and just completely being taken aback by how insensitive he was that first time. I’m not even sure if we shook hands, but when Murray introduced us he was like, “I’ve got so-and-so and so and you’ll follow so-and-so and so-and-so.”
The bit we were planning to do that night was a spoof of The Dating Game. The setup was that I played the announcer and Tim played the bachelor. Then I’d put a wig on and I became the girl, which required two stools. But when I asked Budd about it, he gruffly informed me that he only had one. And when I asked him if he had two microphones, he absolutely bit my head off. He said, “Two microphones! What the hell do you need two microphones for? What do you think this is, Radio City Music Hall or something?”
It was just awful—and so was our performance for this big-shot manager that night. Since we only had one microphone, we had to pass it back and forth, which made things awkward and completely screwed up our timing.
Just as bad was the fact that he gave us a chair and stool instead of the two stools the same size that we needed, so Tim wound up sitting high and I was seated low. The whole thing was an absolute disaster, and Budd was as sympathetic as a doorknob that night. Like I said, he’s since become one of my dearest friends, but back then he didn’t give a fuck if you bombed.
MIKE PREMINGER:
I can’t put a specific age on it, but I always liked stand-up comedy and I wanted to be a comic from as long as I can remember. What sealed it for me was watching The Steve Allen Show as a kid and seeing all those guys he had, like Don Knotts, Tom Poston, Bill Dana, and Louie Nye. To this day, I don’t think there’s anybody who can talk and work an audience better than Steve Allen could. He made it look so easy but also enjoyable, and that’s what made me want to do it.
After high school, I flunked the New York City College entrance exam and joined the army because they were going to draft me anyway. I spent a year and a half in Korea, and after I got back, I got a job at NBC giving studio tours in New York. It was great fun, but there really wasn’t a lot to show because in those days the only things being produced there besides The Tonight Show were the news, soap operas, and the musical-variety show Hullabaloo. The tours were about an hour, but mine were an hour and a half to an hour and forty-five minutes. The reason was that I’d do stand-up in between each stop and the tourists just loved it.
But the executives at NBC didn’t—even though I later got a job in the advertising department, which I hated. This was 1969 and I had a big birthday coming up, so one day I decided to start doing stand-up professionally. When I gave my bosses at NBC my two-weeks’ notice, they couldn’t get rid of me fast enough. They liked me, but their response was, “Just get out of here. Go away.” So I cleared out my things, and that very same night I went down to this little club in Greenwich Village called the Champagne Gallery. It was a weeknight and it was slow, but they had about fifteen people there—including a table of four guys in the back who looked to be about fifty years old, maybe more.
So I’m sitting there when one of them from this group gets up onstage and starts telling jokes, although you couldn’t really call them that because it was the worst stuff I’d ever heard. It was absolutely horrendous—just the most sophomoric things like, “I went to the store and the milk fell over on my head.” But these guys were all doubled over laughing like he was Don Rickles or something. At first, I was like, “Gee, I guess comedy’s not all that hard if these guys are laughing.” But as it turned out, they were all friends and it took me another four times of going back before I finally worked up enough courage to ask the owner if I could go on, which I did.
In the meantime, I’d also heard of the Improv, which was the place to go in 1969. I remember thinking to myself that if I could ever get on there then I’d have reached the top. By the time I finally went there myself, it must have been at least two or three months later. And it was another two or three months after that before I even spoke to anybody, much less tried to go on. I just sat there like a piece of furniture watching the other comics until one night around two thirty in the morning the guy who was the emcee came up to me and said, “You’re on next.” Even though I hadn’t said a word, somehow somebody must have tipped him off that I was a comedian. That somebody was Danny Aiello. At first I resisted, but then he almost physically grabbed my hand and I did just fine.
In the weeks and months that followed, it didn’t make things any easier when it came to persuading Danny’s boss Budd to put me on earlier. The thing about going on late was that there was hardly much of an audience, so you’d always have a much tougher time getting laughs and gauging your material. This didn’t faze Budd in the least, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that this went on for months and months and months and months. It didn’t even matter what time I got there. Let’s say I arrived at nine o’clock; Budd still wouldn’t put me on until two-thirty or a quarter to three in the morning, by which point he usually wasn’t even there, so there was no way for him to tell if I was getting better or not.
But that was how I learned the craft, and on a good night there might be seven people—mostly a couple of hookers, their pimps, and a few drunks from out of town. They even used to put me on when the waitresses were putting the chairs up on the tables and this guy name
d Hy was delivering the next day’s bread order.
But that was my stage time. Afterwards, we’d all go over to this all-night coffee shop around the corner called the Camelot for eggs—where just as they were delivering the order, one of the waiters would almost always decide it was time to start mopping the floor. Ever eat eggs with the smell of ammonia around your feet? It kind of ruins the taste. But that was the life of an Improv comedian back then. And we all loved it because we’d say to ourselves, “This is what I do and I’m with my peers and we’re all struggling and we’re all going to eat eggs at four in the morning until Budd gives us better spots.”
MARTY NADLER:
I love Mike, don’t get me wrong, but he was always a little bit of a whiner—especially when it came to ordering eggs at the Camelot, which was almost always our destination of choice after the club closed. The Camelot was open all night. Sometimes we’d go even later and here’s what would happen. We’d sit down, open the menu, and even though he’d order eggs practically every time, he’d still say, “Eggs! I have eggs at home.”
We’d all go, “Here they cook them for you, Mike. They bring them out and they even clean the plate afterwards.” The other thing was that he was always the last one to order, so we’d have to wait, which drove us all insane.
On one particular winter evening after we’d finished eating, none of us wanted to leave because it was freezing out and we would’ve had to walk over to Columbus Circle to catch the D train back up to the Bronx where we all lived. So instead, we huddled into the vestibule inside the entrance of the restaurant waiting for somebody to make a move, when all of a sudden Mike looked out and saw a police car pulling up Eighth Avenue. There were two officers in the front but no one in the back so Mike goes, “Why can’t we get a ride with the cops?” We all started to laugh our asses off like a bunch of hyenas, because none of us could get over the fact that Mike actually thought they would stop and pick us up.
It was just about then that the car stopped and one of the police officers rolled down the window and said, “What are you, a bunch of comedians?” After this, he got really pissed, because his comment made us laugh even harder and now he thought we were making fun of him. It was hysterical.
As far as getting stage time at the Improv went, every night you’d go down and it was like being a longshoreman waiting at the docks to see whether you’d get on the boat or not. Sometimes you did and sometimes you didn’t, but that was the deal and you either bought into it or you didn’t buy into it.
I still wasn’t scheduling any formal lineups. The system was very simple. If a comic walked in and there was nobody there, usually I’d put them on next. But if Rodney Dangerfield came in, I’d go, “Oops, you’re on after him.” And then if Robert Klein, Bette Midler, or someone else of equal stature happened to come in while Rodney was on, the lowest man or woman on the totem pole that night usually wouldn’t get on until probably three in the morning. I’ll be the first to admit that it was no democracy. It was the furthest thing from being a democracy without being a totalitarian state.
ED BLUESTONE:
God knows I paid my dues as much as anyone else, but you know something—one of the things I respected most about Budd was that the Improv was always a meritocracy compared to most other places.
To Budd’s credit, if you were one of his regular performers and you’d worked your way in and he believed in your talent, by and large he wouldn’t knock you off just because a guy who was on some television show walked in. Of course, there were exceptions when it came to the big marquee names like Robert Klein, Rodney Dangerfield, or Bette Midler, where he had no choice, but he was basically very loyal.
TWENTY
The Improv’s Gentle Giant
Besides all of the wonderfully gifted performers we’ve had over the years, I’ve also had the great fortune of having some equally terrific people working behind the scenes, one of whom was actor Danny Aiello. Danny was the New York Improv’s bouncer from the late sixties until the early seventies, and like many of the other good fortunes I’ve had in my life, both meeting and hiring him were complete flukes.
As I’ve said before, I’ve always loved sports, so when the club was presented with the opportunity to have a unisex softball team in the Broadway Show League in 1968, I immediately jumped at the chance. Established in 1955, as the name suggests it originally started as a way for cast members of the various Broadway and Off-Broadway shows to informally gather and blow off steam between the Wednesday afternoon matinee and when they had to return to the theater for their evening performance. By the late 1960s, however, the league had begun to relax its rules and started admitting people who were on the fringes, meaning that they had some sort of affiliation with the theater—which the Improv did, not only because we were located in the theater district but also because of the kind of club we were.
Not only were we invited to join, I’m also enormously proud to say that the team endured long after I moved to California in 1975 until the original New York club closed in 1992, and that during that time, it boasted a list of players that included Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Reiser, Paul Provenza, Joe Piscopo, Sarah Silverman, Judy Gold, and Dave Attell, just to name a few.
During the years I was still there, I was the pitcher, and while we never set any world’s records, we had a blast. Our seasons typically ran from mid-spring until early summer, and our games with the various Broadway shows that were currently running were played at the Heckscher Fields just east of Columbus Circle in Central Park.
One of our first opponents, believe it or not, was none other than Woody Allen, who was then starring in a play on Broadway called Don’t Drink the Water, which ran for two years and had 598 performances. I’m not sure if Woody ever swung a bat, but his show had a team and we played them. He was also there on the day of the game, and so was my mother, although she was more impressed by the fact that one of my guys was an actor on As the World Turns, her favorite soap opera.
I don’t remember who won or what the score was, but as we were warming up, I noticed Danny Aiello, whose face I vaguely recognized because I’d seen him at the club a few times. On this particular day, he happened to be in the park tossing the ball around with someone from one of the other teams. He had an incredible pitching arm and we must have needed an extra player because the next thing I knew I went over to see if he wanted to join us. The only problem was he wasn’t affiliated with the Improv other than as an occasional customer, and I wasn’t about to risk being thrown out of the league for having a ringer, so the first thing I asked him was if he had a job, which he didn’t. In fact, he’d recently been fired, and he was expecting his fourth child at any moment.
As soon as we began talking, I could immediately tell how down on his luck he was. I also had the sense that he was an extremely likable guy who was probably dependable and so I offered him a job as the Improv’s bouncer. I said, “Look, I’m the bouncer and we don’t need one, but I’ll hire you anyway.” Needless to say, he accepted and we had another player that day, although the even more astonishing part was that I offered to pay him $190 a week, which was more than I was making at the time.
I don’t know why I offered to pay him so much—especially since he would have probably accepted anything—but the dividends have been enormous because in the years since, Danny has never forgotten to mention me and the club whenever he’s doing an interview about his life.
He started working for me that same night and he stayed for the next three years. At the time, though, I don’t think he had any particular goals other than being able to support his growing family—and certainly a career in show business was likely the furthest thing from his mind. Nevertheless, he liked to sing and he had a very rich voice, so when he wasn’t guarding the door, he’d often get up and perform a lot of times with Robert Klein, who is also extremely musical. They’d do these impromptu songs, making the lyrics up as they went along and eventually joining The Untouchables, a doo-wop group wi
th Robert, Marvin Braverman, Bobby Alto, and Buddy Mantia.
Danny also had acting ability, something that quickly became apparent not long after I began letting him emcee late at night. Like me, he loved it. I also think it’s pretty safe to say that the audiences loved him more than me because not long after, he began reading these wonderful monologues, which caught the attention of a struggling young playwright from Hoboken, New Jersey, named Lou LaRusso. Lou ended up writing a play for Danny called Lamppost Reunion, a barroom drama that centered around stars who achieve fame and ordinary people who don’t, that would change both of their lives.
After that, Danny starred in another play called The Knockout that eventually went to Broadway. Talent aside, though, the biggest thing I’ll always remember about Danny is how much everyone liked him. He’s an absolute teddy bear, and he’s never forgotten what I did for him. To me, our friendship is priceless.
DANNY AIELLO:
I don’t remember the specific date I first went to the Improv, but it must have been around 1968 or 1969 while I was still working at Greyhound, because I sometimes used to stop in after my shift ended over at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Even though I had no idea whatsoever that I would or could become an actor, the thing besides the comics that fascinated me most was when they’d announce this character actor named Charles Dierkop, who occasionally performed there and later went on to minor fame in the 1970s TV series Police Woman starring Angie Dickinson. At the time, he’d already appeared in a film with Robert Downey Sr., and when they brought him up onstage, I thought it was the biggest fucking deal in the world.
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