A day or two later, I was at the Improv and the first thing Budd said to me was, “Hi, what would you like to eat?” And I was like, “Son of a gun!”
When Catch opened in ’72, it was great for me personally because now I had two clubs. There were many nights—and when I tell people this they still can’t believe it to this day—but there were times when I’d do a nine-thirty spot at the Improv, then get a cab and go on at Catch at ten-thirty, then head back to the Improv for the twelve-thirty show, and finally finish up the evening around two-thirty in the morning at Catch. I was doing as many as four shows for free some nights, but I loved it and I was in heaven because this was what I wanted to do.
SHELLEY ACKERMAN:
I was a singing waitress at the Improv from 1971 until 1980. Budd gave me my first job and I’ll always be grateful for that. But soon after it opened, I also eventually wound up singing at Catch. I think Budd was initially a little threatened even though it turned out fine for both clubs.
I began singing at Catch through a comedian friend of mine named Cassandra Danz who died in 2002. She was part of a singing-comedy-improv group called The High Heeled Women before becoming a solo act and writing two books. She also did segments on Regis and Kathie Lee called “Mrs. GreenThumbs.” Cassandra told me about Catch and she recommended I start singing there. At first I was like, “What do I need that place for when I have the Improv?” But then I did, and it quickly became clear to me that something was brewing. Rick had this wonderful publicist named Gene Weber, and between the Improv and Catch I started getting all of this press. I didn’t realize that my being a singing waitress and nineteen years old at that time and a rabbi’s daughter from the Lower East Side was really that interesting, but I guess it was.
BILL MAHER:
I’m guessing I was around eight or ten when I first realized I wanted to become a comic, although I never said anything because I was basically a shy kid and I didn’t really grow up in the era when everything was about pumping up a kid’s self-esteem. I also think that a lot of kids today have too much confidence, if that’s possible.
We were just the opposite in my era and so the idea that I could reach such a lofty height never really crossed my mind. Also, when I was a kid, becoming a comedian was a rare thing. It became a lot more common just as I was starting out with the explosion of comedy clubs—and largely because of the Improv and Catch. But for me, in the era I grew up in, it was just a crazy dream, so I kept it to myself.
The way I first found out about the Improv was reading about it in the newspaper when I was in high school. Of course, as somebody who was interested in comedy, I’d started thinking about it in practical terms of how I was going to go into comedy even though it never crossed my mind not to go to college. I mean, it was sort of expected of me and I wanted to go. But even so, I was never thinking for a minute, “Oh, this is going to get me a job.” All I was thinking was, “I’m wasting precious time when I should be doing comedy.”
When I was a student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1975, there was no place to perform. But I actually forced myself into performing once. There were these weekly poetry readings on campus, and I wrote what I thought was some funny stuff and basically tried to do a comedy bit because there was an audience. Not surprisingly, it didn’t go great because I was new. I didn’t really know how to do it and it was a fucking poetry reading.
After that, I started checking out the New York club scene while I was in college. I auditioned for Catch during college, but before that I rode the bus into Manhattan from New Jersey just to see the Improv as an audience member. By this time, both places were getting a lot of press—you know, the new comedy club scene and how you lined up on Monday nights to audition. I remember reading about that and I lined up at Catch. This must have been around 1977 and I remember talking about the Yankees, who were in the news a lot. There were some stories floating around about them growing marijuana in the outfield and I think I did some riffs on that. There was also a heckler in the audience who I got some laughs off of. Whatever it was, the emcee, who I believe was Larry David, passed me. He told me that I could come back and start hanging out, but I still had college to go to. All I could think about was how I needed to cash in this chit, and then, like a year and a half after I graduated, I went back and said, “I’m here. I’m ready to hang out.”
Not long after that, I started working at both clubs, as well as the Comic Strip, and Rick Newman eventually made me one of his regular emcees at Catch. Being the emcee was like being God because you had the power to pass people. You also didn’t have to fight city hall to get stage time because you were city hall, which meant you basically got as much stage time as you wanted, plus you got paid and you got free drinks. If the crowd sucked, you just brought the next comic up, but if the audience was great you did ten minutes.
At the time, I think we all had the same idea in our head: You got your shit together in New York, where you got good enough to do a bunch of Tonight Shows. Then you moved to California and got a sitcom.
CATHY LADMAN, comedian, screenwriter, and actor:
Bill Maher was always incredibly generous to me and he took me under his wing almost immediately. Not long after I auditioned for Budd’s former wife, Silver, at the Improv, Bill arranged for me to audition with Rick Newman at Catch. The exact date was September 5, 1981, and I remember this because this was the day my nephew was born and I was just about to go on when my parents called to tell me the news. This immediately took the edge off things, so I wound up having a great set and I became a regular.
I’d been doing stand-up for a while and I did fine after that, although it wasn’t until sometime in 1982 when I got the call for my first prime weekend spot because another comedian, Gilbert Gottfried, didn’t show up. It was like being called by Hollywood, and it was great because back then the only other place you could see stand-up was on late-night television. Comedy club audiences were also for the most part well educated and hip, which meant that you were going to be able to cover intelligent ground with a receptive crowd that was quick on the uptake.
RITCH SHYDNER:
Thanks to Gilbert Gottfried, I had a similar experience to Cathy’s at the Improv, although it was kind of the reverse of hers. Back in the seventies and eighties, the clubs used to stay open until three or four in the morning. You’d get on, but the goal was for somebody not to show up so you could get on earlier, which is what happened the night I was meant to follow Gilbert, and when I realized how desperate people got when they didn’t have enough comics. You’d literally see the owner or whoever was running things getting so panicked that they’d stand outside to see if another comic was going to drive up in a cab. Well, on this particular evening, they didn’t have anybody and they put me up, which is how I became a regular after that.
BUDDY MANTIA:
For the most part, we all had each other’s backs. This was true at both the Improv and at Catch, even though I was at the Improv more in the beginning. A lot of times we’d also come up with a line and say, “That’s not right for me, but it would work for so-and-so.”
PAUL REISER:
In the seventies and early eighties, the Improv was always viewed as the purest of the three New York clubs. I played all three and the Comic Strip was my home club if I had to rank them, but it was also the new kid on the block so it never had the same prestige. Catch had a bit of sexiness to it because Pat Benatar, who Rick Newman managed, and stars like Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and John Belushi came through there a lot just to hang out at the bar. So, Catch had this kind of showbiz, rock ‘n’ roll vibe about it, like Studio 54 and Elaine’s.
Budd’s place, on the other hand, was more organic because it was there first. This made it feel different. I remember watching an episode of Seinfeld once where he was at a comedy club, and they were clearly modeling it after the Improv because the stage entrance was on the other side like the Improv’s. The actual portal that you walked through to get up and
do a set was only about twenty inches wide, although it was huge contextually because it meant you were in show business.
The other cool thing about the Improv was that being on Ninth Avenue with all the junkies and prostitutes had a nitty-grittiness about it that the others lacked. I remember when I got the audition with director Barry Levinson for Diner in late ’80 or early 1981, he came to see me at the Improv. What made it so special was that the Improv had been the DNA of my comedy career.
JOE PISCOPO:
Like most guys back then, I kind of jockeyed back and forth between the two clubs, but I was definitely more of an Improv guy because I was also the emcee and the doorman. I’ll tell you how it happened for me at both places. After I graduated from college in 1974, I was kind of in a catatonic stupor for a year or two—you know, what am I doing, where am I going, am I going to law school like my father? That kind of thing. Then I heard about the Improv, probably through Robin Williams or Billy Crystal.
This was February of 1976. I put together five minutes of God-awful material, and on a bitterly freezing Monday night, I got into my 1972 Cutlass Oldsmobile and drove through the Lincoln Tunnel and over to the Improv. I swear, there must have been two hundred or three hundred people, and after taking one look at the line, I chickened out and went home.
I decided to go back the next week. I’d talked to some people beforehand and they told me to get there at noon. So I got there at the stroke of noon for an eight-thirty audition. By this point, Budd had already moved to California, and Chris Albrecht and Judy Orbach were running things. Anyway, I got passed, but guys like Larry David and talk-show host Alan Colmes were already there and they were ahead of us. Because we were all new and they still weren’t doing strict lineups on Monday night, the other guys and I would sort of draw straws as to who would get up first because nobody really wanted to.
It was all very random, and on nights when the club was really crowded, we’d all wait in my car because I was the only comic who had one, and it was freezing out. Then we’d go in and go on and you know the drill—it was bad, but it wasn’t that bad. It was like I held their attention, but didn’t get many laughs. This went on for two weeks at the Improv before I finally had the nerve to go over to Catch and try that also. I always did okay there, and by week three or four, I got on my feet and the laughs came.
BILLY CRYSTAL:
In New York, I was mainly a Catch guy. Part of that had to do with the fact that I was living on Long Island and Catch was closer to the 59th Street Bridge. Plus, my wife, Janice, was supporting us, so Rick was always great about giving me earlier spots so that I could get home in time to get a couple of hours of sleep before I had to get up at six-thirty with our eighteen-month-old daughter.
Beyond the logistics of getting there, I was also a little bit intimidated by the New York Improv. Not by Budd, who was always great to me, but by the club itself, which had this reputation as the place. I remember the first time I went there was in late 1972 or early 1973. It was a rainy Monday night, and Bette Midler came in dripping wet and sang “Danny Boy.” I’d gone there with an improv group called 3’s Company that I was in.
We did well, but I was always more of a Catch guy in New York. As others have said, Catch was more of a show room whereas the Improv felt like Kronk boxing gym in Detroit. It was the place where all of the heavyweights went to work out.
TWENTY-THREE
Meeting Jay
In between my initial concerns about The Tonight Show’s departure and Catch A Rising Star’s arrival, even more unexpected surprises came my way in the early seventies. Fortunately, they were mostly happy ones. One of the best occurred when a shaggy-haired young man from Boston came into the club on a chilly fall evening in 1971. He was dressed in a wide-collared, open-neck shirt and bell-bottom jeans with a gigantic turquoise-studded buckle securing an oversized leather belt. It wasn’t so much his physical appearance that made an impression on me as it was the curved tobacco pipe he clutched in his right hand.
This young man was Jay Leno. Without a doubt, Jay is one of my favorite subjects to talk about. He was twenty-two when we first met, and in the years since, we have enjoyed one of the most incredible friendships in the history of show business, both personally and professionally. While practically all our comics have been special to me in one way or another, when I think of Jay, I always have to add the word “extra” and I can never stop bragging. One of my proudest moments was when he invited me and my second wife, Alix, to see him accept the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in 2014. It was comedy’s highest honor, but it represented so much more than just an award. When he mentioned my name and invited me to stand at the end of the ceremony, I nearly choked up as the cameras panned towards us on national television.
My relationship with Jay had something of a roundabout beginning. Born in New Rochelle, New York, and raised in the Boston suburb of Andover, Massachusetts, Jay, the son of an insurance salesman, struggled academically in school while dreaming of someday becoming a stand-up comic. After briefly enrolling at the Bentley School of Accounting and Finance, he transferred to Boston’s Emerson College, the nation’s only four-year college dedicated to communications and the performing arts, where he majored in speech therapy.
JAY LENO:
Now they even have an entire major devoted to stand-up comedy, but back when I was there, there really were no comedy classes at Emerson. I was pretty much the only comic I knew in Boston.
Most of the classes were just drama and I wasn’t interested in that, so I didn’t apply myself. I did have a comedy team for a while with my friend Gene Braunstein, and after that I joined a comedy troupe, Fresh Fruit Cocktail. I remember that we had a lot of fun and it was great training and all that. The problem was that it wound up being one of those deals where some people wanted to work and some people didn’t. Basically, their attitude was, “Oh, we worked last weekend, so let’s take this weekend off.” I wasn’t like that and I wanted to work, so I decided to go solo.
I obviously didn’t know Jay yet, but I later found out that he took any gig he could find. Hospitals, retirement homes, Kiwanis clubs, strip clubs, and even prisons, you name it; by the time he got to the Improv he’d done just about everything. One of my favorite stories was how he used to walk into local bars, give the owners fifty bucks, and ask to do a set, telling them that that they could keep the money if he bombed.
JAY LENO:
Basically, I was just trying to get spots pretty much any place I could. Although Boston had a fairly fertile underground scene, it was still kind of an odd time. Lenny Bruce, who’d been dead for about four or five years by this point, was sort of a mythical figure to all of us, and Albert Goldman’s bestselling biography, Ladies and Gentlemen—Lenny Bruce!!, had just come out.
One of the places Jay worked was a jazz club called Lennie’s on the Turnpike on Route 1 in Peabody, Massachusetts, where he opened for acts like Linda Ronstadt and Kris Kristofferson. I also knew the owner, Lennie Sogoloff, and had booked Bette Midler there a couple of times when I was managing her.
JAY LENO:
Lennie Sogoloff was a wonderful guy who was very good to me. Unquestionably, next to Budd, he was one of my biggest supporters early on, and I got to meet all of these incredible jazz musicians like Buddy Rich and Miles Davis. But let’s face it, Route 1 was obviously not where show business was, so I drove down to New York to try and get on at one of the places where you could do comedy. At the time, there really weren’t very many other than the Improv, and they were still using singers, although it was also becoming known as more of a comedy room by this point.
Besides comedy I had another reason for making frequent trips down to New York because my day job was prepping cars for a Rolls-Royce and Mercedes-Benz dealership called Foreign Motors in Boston. It was great and sometimes they’d fly me to New Jersey and then I’d pick up the car and drive it back to Boston. Which reminds me, one of my craziest—and scariest�
��Improv stories was the night some guy gave me $34,000 in cash for a Rolls-Royce. That was how much they cost back then. I delivered the Rolls to this guy and he gave me the biggest wad of cash I’d ever seen in my life. Then I picked up another car, but instead of going back to Boston, I impulsively decided to drop in to the Improv and do a set. I got there around 8:30 PM, but there were a lot of other comics there and I wasn’t an established regular yet, so I just hung out at the bar until I went on at one-thirty in the morning. I also distinctly recall bringing the money into the club with me and holding on to it until it came time for me to go on. This is when I put the money on top of the piano.
Then I did my set—and it was probably one of the best I’d done yet—because I was absolutely on cloud nine. Afterwards, I got back into the Rolls, which was parked on the street and thankfully hadn’t been stolen or vandalized, and drove off. As soon as I got out of Manhattan, I began listening to my set on the tape recorder I always carried with me, still on this incredible high from how well I’d done. I was driving along, replaying the tape over and over, until I made it all the way up to Greenwich, Connecticut, which is where the tollbooth was. When I reached into my pocket to take out some change for the toll, it suddenly hit me that I’d left the envelope with the $34,000 in it on top of the piano at the Improv.
Immediately, I turned the car around and drove back. My mind racing along with the car, I must have gotten there within the hour. I wasn’t exactly sure how to handle it, because I knew there was a fifty-fifty chance that somebody had made off with it. All I could think of was how I was going to explain to my boss that I’d lost thirty-four grand. It was horrible. But when I parked the car in back of Dykes Lumber Company and raced back into the club, to my complete surprise the money was still on top of the piano. There were about eight people left in the audience and a young woman was onstage singing. Relieved but still shaken, I made a beeline for the stage and said, “Excuse me, I forgot my lunch.” Then I took the envelope and left. God, it was scary.
The Improv Page 19
