Then I told him I was going to try to get on, and when I asked one of the waitresses who the person in charge of putting the acts on was, she pointed Budd out to me. It was on a Saturday night and the place was packed to the gills, but I walked right up to him and said, “I’d like to go on.”
Budd just looked at me and said, “Who are you? Are you a comedian? Have you ever done stand-up?”
When I told him I hadn’t, he informed me I had to audition, which came as a complete surprise. All I can say is thank God he didn’t put me on because I probably never would have gone on again anywhere after that.
I can’t say that Budd’s rejection was necessarily the catalyst, but it wasn’t too long after that when I decided to begin pursuing stand-up. I found out where to go and I started doing all of these small clubs down in Greenwich Village like Gerde’s Folk City and Gil Hodges’s bowling alley in Brooklyn. After that, I eventually auditioned and got passed by Rick Newman at Catch A Rising Star. Then gradually, I began going back to the Improv, which was an easy transition, because by that time the comedians knew me.
I’m a bit fuzzy on the exact dates and I may very well have had one foot in California by this point. However, I don’t think it was all that long after Larry came back to the Improv and became a regular before he was reunited with his childhood friend—and once-nemesis—Richard Lewis.
RICHARD LEWIS:
Interestingly enough, Larry and I were born in the same hospital room. We didn’t actually come out of the womb there, but we wound up being in the same ward. I was a preemie and I had to stay an extra week in Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, which no longer exists. I was born on June 29, 1947, and Larry’s birthday is July 2.
Our arrivals into the world kind of dovetailed one another, and then one summer when I was teenager, I went to a famous sports camp in New York State and Larry was there. He was a terrific athlete and so was I, but we hated one another. It was like oil and vinegar and we just didn’t get along. But then years later, I began doing stand-up before Larry and he was a big fan. I wasn’t at the Improv the night he tried to go on and Budd told him no, but he used to hang out there a lot because he had this dumpy little apartment a couple of blocks away.
By this point, I was already making a name for myself with guys like Billy Crystal, Jay Leno, and Freddie Prinze, and Larry and I became inseparable best friends at the Improv almost from the start. Then one night—I forget when or exactly where we were at the club—something happened. I looked at him and there was something about his face that freaked me out. Afterwards, we both realized we were the same teenagers who despised one another thirteen years before at summer camp. Ever since then, Larry and I have been bonded in some sort of mystical way. In those days, we used to hang out together all the time.
LARRY DAVID:
The way I remember it happening is that we looked at each other and he said, “There’s something about you. You look familiar.”
At first, I was like, “Yeah, you do, too.”
Then he asked me my name and I told him, and he said, “David . . . David!”
And I said, “Lewis . . . Lewis!”
And pretty much that was that.
From then on—for a period on and off that spanned roughly the next fifteen years and simultaneously included writing and starring in ABC’s Saturday Night Live knockoff comedy-variety series Fridays, one lack-luster season writing for Saturday Night Live itself, and eventually cocreating Seinfeld—Larry was always a crowd-pleaser at both the New York and LA Improv.
However, he was equally as much of an agitator as well, especially in the beginning, and the stories about him are, without a doubt, some of our most legendary. Many, in fact, are downright bizarre. And taking nothing away from his prodigious talent, it’s also not a stretch to say that at times—albeit in much different ways than Andy Kaufman—Larry was also an acquired taste, if not something of a provocateur.
LARRY DAVID:
As a comedian just starting out, you basically do whatever you can to get laughs. I was no exception, so I was just trying to figure out who I was and what I was supposed to say. Of course, I wanted to talk to the audience in the same way I was funny with my friends, but that wasn’t always to be. I’d go up every night and experiment with different things. Whatever worked, I would keep.
Suffice it to say that it’s probably a good thing I wasn’t around very much in those days because when things weren’t working for Larry there could be hell to pay.
LARRY DAVID:
Remember The Gong Show with Chuck Barris? It was at the height of its popularity at the time, and the audience at the Improv would often imitate what they saw in the show. If they didn’t like you, they’d yell out, “Gong!”
I was very temperamental, so it’s fair to say that if someone from the audience said “Gong” to me, it didn’t sit too well. Sometimes I would yell at the audience and other times I would just leave. I simply didn’t see the need for me to torture them—or them to torture me—any further, so I decided to part company. It’s also fair to say that if I did well I loved it, and if I didn’t do well I hated it.
This didn’t just happen at the Improv either, although it did happen there with pretty regular frequency. One night up at Catch A Rising Star—and I’ve told this story many times—I looked at the audience and said, “I don’t think so.” And then I left.
Let me put it this way: Whenever I went on, the emcee didn’t go very far.
ALAN ZWEIBEL:
When I first met Larry in 1974, I had never seen anybody who looked quite like him because he had this unkempt mane of wiry hair that resembled a giant Brillo pad. But he’s my best friend now and we liked what each other did from the start. I can’t remember what our first conversation was, although so many years later when I appeared with him on an episode of Curb our discursive banter was similar to every phone conversation we’d ever had.
On the handful of occasions when he went on during prime time at the Improv and I was scheduled to follow him—let’s say it was on a Friday night, Larry was supposed to go on at 9 PM and I had a 9:20 spot—I would get there in time to go on at 9:01. I did this because if Larry didn’t like the audience, he’d walk offstage after a minute.
JOHN DEBELLIS:
At the Improv in New York, Larry and I got together pretty quickly because we were the guys who usually went on at the end of the night, and we shared very similar views on comedy in the sense that we both wanted to do something different. Larry loved to shock people, so he’d always come up with different opening lines. One night, he’d say, “I hate my penis.” And then the next night he’d say, “My penis has no friends.” I was there once when Lily Tomlin came in with a bunch of female friends and Larry looked at them and said, “I don’t like menstruating women. In my house, I make them stand on a newspaper.” Not that it was necessarily directed at them, but Lily and these women were so offended that they literally ran out of the club.
I think the thing that bonded us the most, though, was that we were both huge Yankees fans, so a lot of our conversations were about baseball. Not long after we met, another comic from California named Bobby Kelton came along and the three of us became really close—almost inseparable. But then Bobby went back to the West Coast and it was just Larry and me.
Larry spent every holiday with me and my family in New Jersey. I used to take a bunch of the guys fishing at this lake out there and whenever we did this we always had luck, except when Larry came along. I never caught a single fish with Larry.
Later, when I was writing for Saturday Night Live and he was writing for Fridays, the producers used to accuse us of stealing sketches from one another, which was absurd. What made it so ridiculous is that mostly what we talked about was how bad both shows were at the time.
RICK OVERTON:
Larry had this giant thing of hair and I used to go visit him at his apartment at the Manhattan Plaza. That’s where I met the real Kramer—the actual guy the Seinfeld character is based on
—who was Larry’s neighbor.
GILBERT GOTTFRIED:
We weren’t great friends back then, but we were friendly. The only time I think I was ever in his apartment was when Larry had cable. There was a movie coming on with some actress we both liked that had a nude scene.
JOHN DEBELLIS:
A lot of times Larry and I had dinner together at his place, and we’d often have fish of some sort because it was cheap, nutritious, and there were a lot of fish markets in the neighborhood. The only problem was that Larry just had one spoon, one fork, one knife, and one plate, so we had to eat in shifts.
When we weren’t discussing writing or baseball, most of our conversations were about women. I don’t want to say we were afraid of them, but we were both painfully shy and so we’d talk about how much we got rejected. Larry would tell me his sad stories and I told him mine. Basically it was this mutual feeling we shared that we might get a woman or two, but if we did, they weren’t going to stay with us or we weren’t going to stay with them.
Larry also had this obsessively neurotic laundry list of preparations he’d go through before he went out on a date, like shaving. Then he had this thing about going to the bathroom—not the physical act of actually going, but being able to find one if nature called. So we’d get into conversations about it where he’d go, “When am I going to go to the bathroom? I’ve got to go to the bathroom before I go, because what happens if I get with her and I can’t find a bathroom? What should I do? Should I bring her back here? And then what do I do if she likes me?”
We were both totally out of our element as far as members of the opposite sex were concerned. However, Larry did have this one girlfriend named Anna for a while and she was really pretty. So, when he did date, he went out with women that were hot, but they were few and far between.
BRUCE SMIRNOFF:
Larry David was an unfriendly kind of guy. I guess if you were his friend, he was the nicest guy in the world, but I was just this peon doorman who was also Budd’s house emcee. I can’t ever pinpoint a specific incident where Larry was mean to me, but he never went out of his way to be nice to me either.
Back when Larry was doing Fridays on ABC in the late seventies, he used to come into the Hollywood Improv dressed in a Chicago Blackhawks jacket. Then he’d go onstage, and God forbid, if somebody didn’t laugh or they said something he didn’t like, he’d literally start wishing cancer on them. Then he’d walk offstage and he could clear thirty or forty people out of the room in one fell swoop. He was exactly the way everyone says he was.
I remember one night we had a packed house. I don’t know how they do it now, but when I was there, we did two shows on the weekends. The first one went from like eight o’clock to ten and the second one usually lasted from ten-thirty until two in the morning. Anyway, on this particular night, Richard Lewis, who was already a big star by then, was scheduled to go on during the peak spot at nine o’clock. By this time, there was almost nobody in the audience, because Larry had been there earlier and emptied out the room.
JUDY ORBACH:
Larry and I used to have these really long, drawn-out conversations about food. He’d come in and say to me, “What should I have for dinner tonight, sweetheart?”
“I don’t know,” I’d reply. “What did you have for lunch?”
And he’d say, “I had a hamburger.”
“Well,” I’d say, “maybe you should have a little pasta then.”
So we would have these peculiar, neurotic conversations about food and what he should order from the menu—after which a bunch of us would often go to the Market Diner at four in the morning for breakfast when the Improv closed. Either we’d go there, or we would all go down to Sam Wo’s in Chinatown.
In terms of performing, though, the other thing I remember about Larry is that he was absolutely horrified being up onstage. He would get up and if the audience wasn’t paying attention for whatever reason—if they were chatty or they were heckling him—he’d drop the mic in the middle of a sentence and leave. He’d say, “I don’t need this.” He did this at the Improv and at Catch A Rising Star more times than I can count. He was always wearing an army jacket.
CHRIS ALBRECHT:
I remember that army jacket of Larry’s extremely well. I think he wore it because he’d either been in the army reserves, or maybe he’d even been drafted in the army. In any case, he’d wear it whenever he came in and he’d hang out at the bar. He was always a bit of a dour character. Larry was never happy about anything.
BOB ZMUDA:
Larry was just so completely neurotic and unhinged. I remember one night when he was up onstage, Chris Albrecht and I were standing in the back of the room and we started laughing our asses off—which is what you’re supposed to do at a fucking comedy club. Afterwards, Larry went ballistic. He came up to us and started screaming at the top of his lungs, “Why are you guys laughing at me?” He was one of the last guys you’d have ever predicted would make it big.
PAUL REISER:
Whenever I saw Larry doing a set at the Improv, it was usually combative. He’d dig a hole for himself with the audience and he’d relish being in that hole. It’s like he thrived on that kind of adversity and he wasn’t happy until he was unhappy.
JOHN DEBELLIS:
Another thing about Larry was that he was a textbook hypochondriac. He’s mellowed with age, but back then, honest to God, anything he saw or heard about he thought he had. Sometime around 1982 while he was doing Fridays and he had a few bucks, he was living in Laurel Canyon when he got the idea that wearing gravity boots would help him live longer and prevent back problems. So he bought these humongous sci-fi-looking boots and he’d hang upside down in them.
One afternoon I was home when the phone rang and it was Larry. He said, “John, I can’t get up. I’m stuck down here. Blood is racing to my head. What am I going to do?” He sounded more panicked than I had ever heard him, so I immediately got in my car and sped over there. When I finally arrived about twenty minutes later, I ran to the door as fast as I could, and just as I was about to go inside, I felt my shoe sink into this huge pyramid of dog shit. The stench was unbearable and the shit was all over my shoe. I was really worried that Larry might either be unconscious or dead by this point, too.
So I quickly scraped my shoe off on the pavement, which made an even bigger mess, and went inside. When I did, Larry—who would have thrown his shoe out if it had happened to him—was over in the corner. He was completely vertical, beet red, and hanging from his toes upside down. I had to push him up so he could pull himself enough to reach the pole that was attached to the boots and take them off.
I don’t think he’s ever worn gravity boots since then, but another time either before or after that, this famous cardiologist had just come out with a study about people with Type A and Type B risks for heart attacks. He’d also written a book, so another comedian named Lenny Maxwell and I decided to buy a copy, which we then autographed as if it had been signed by the author. We were very clever about it, too. We signed it with a black Sharpie and mailed it to Larry in a padded manila envelope.
Inside the front cover, the inscription we wrote was something to the effect of how we’d recently seen him onstage and thought he was a prime candidate for both Types A and B. Well, needless to say, Larry fell for it hook, line, and sinker, because the next night he came running into the Improv out of breath and looking whiter than a sheet—at which point we realized we had to tell him. He was so worried we actually feared he might have a real heart attack right there.
TOM DREESEN:
I don’t know who wrote it, but there’s a great story in a book about Jerry Seinfeld about how I first met Larry David that I’ll tell here. One night back in the midseventies, I went over to the Improv after Catch A Rising Star. Now mind you, I’d already done some Tonight Show appearances and I was getting some noise.
I’d gone over to the Improv where they all knew who I was, and this kid named Larry David went up and
he was spectacular. He did about fifteen minutes and every line out of his mouth made me laugh. So I went over to him afterwards and said, “That was funny stuff. I really enjoyed it.” Well, Larry could have cared less. He just stared at me for about a half a second and walked off.
The next night I was back at Catch A Rising Star and lo and behold, Larry was at Catch A Rising Star, where he did another fifteen minutes that was completely different. So I said to him again, “You’re really funny. I saw you last night and tonight you did a totally different fifteen minutes.” But again, Larry just looked at me, sighed, and walked away.
And then the very next day, honest to God, I was coming out of the Stage Door Deli over near the Improv when I ran smack dab into Larry—who I later found out had been on his way to see his shrink. Still not knowing quite what to say, but hoping the third time might be the charm, I decided to make one final attempt to ingratiate myself. I said, “I’ve got to tell you, I just thought you were fantastic the other night. I saw you two nights in a row and you had all this different material. I thought it was really good.”
Yet again, Larry looked at me and sighed. Only instead of walking off this time, he said, “What’s with all this nice guy shit?” And then he stormed off.
PAUL PROVENZA:
He did that a lot. Those stories are kind of legendary where he’d get up onstage, pick up the microphone, and cover his eyes just enough to where he could look out into the audience and go, “Nah, nah, nah, this isn’t going to work for me”—and then turn around and leave. I always thought this was a great gag, although as a young comic just starting out, I also thought, “My God, I can’t believe he would throw away an entire set just for that one laugh.”
The Improv Page 26
