My suspicions would later prove correct—most pointedly in the form of a lawsuit over rerun syndication rights that took nearly two decades to resolve, which we won in 2015. Nevertheless, the offer Larry made me was too good to refuse, especially when I discovered it included both capital and huge tax breaks.
We officially made the deal in the fall of 1981. Initially, the arrangement was to use a Canadian producer, a Canadian director, and as many Canadian comics as we could find since the Screen Actors Guild prohibited us from using anyone in the United States for logistical reasons. The only problem was that the Canadian comedy scene wasn’t nearly as fertile as America’s and the number of even halfway-decent comics we had to choose from was few and far between. As a result, we ended up with fewer than twenty comedians whom we flew to Los Angeles, put onstage, and edited out before the show ever got on the air.
Just as disastrous was the decision to broadcast the show in different time slots on various independent stations across the country, including KNBC in Los Angeles, WOR in New York, and WGN in Chicago. Even though I knew almost nothing about the television syndication business back then, the slipshod move dismayed me. I quickly realized that with the show airing at different times in different places, it would be next to impossible to promote it properly to find an audience, which ultimately proved to be true.
In spite of these challenges, however—and with me hosting it and comics like Howie Mandel and Jim Carrey, who were two of the three Canadian comics we didn’t eliminate, along with Richard Lewis, Robin Williams, and Andy Kaufman—we still managed to get fifty-two episodes in the can, all of which had decent ratings right out of the gate when we began airing on February 2, 1982. This continued for about a year as business at both the New York and LA clubs grew rapidly as a result. In the meantime, the show had a recurring cast and scored a major coup when we decided to use a different celebrity guest host each week.
Virtually any Hollywood actor from any decade was a prime candidate to host, with almost everyone we asked happy to oblige. Some of the bold-faced and no-longer-were names included Morgan Fairchild, William Shatner, Estelle Getty, Mr. T, Phyllis Diller, Phil Silvers, Vincent Price, Sherman Hemsley, Monty Hall, Doc Severinsen, Janet Leigh, Mort Sahl, Pee-wee Herman, Victoria Principal, Madeline Kahn, Milton Berle, Phil Foster, Patrick Macnee, Tom Bosley, Vicki Lawrence, Louis Gossett Jr., Kim Fields, Patrick Duffy, Alan Thicke, Flip Wilson, and Gary Coleman. We also had musical guests like Cyndi Lauper, Weird Al Yankovic, the band Kansas, and MTV VJ Martha Quinn.
On the comedy side, we had Billy Crystal, Elayne Boosler, Bob Saget, Jeff Altman, Larry Miller, Paula Poundstone, Paul Reiser, Janeane Garofalo, Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey, David Spade, Dennis Miller, Adam Sandler, Dave Chappelle, Bobcat Goldthwait, Dennis Wolfberg, Jerry Seinfeld, Tim Allen, Ellen DeGeneres, Greg Giraldo, Jay Mohr, Chris Rock, Kevin Pollak, D.L. Hughley, Arsenio Hall, Steven Wright, Dave Attell, and Sarah Silverman, many of whom had never appeared on television before.
Then there were the wannabes, like diver Greg Louganis, who flew in from Korea to perform the night before the closing ceremonies of the 1988 Summer Olympics, and O. J. Simpson’s girlfriend, who was onstage while Simpson and his wife Nicole watched from the audience.
However, just as it seemed as if we were unstoppable, it all came to a screeching halt because of a change in Canadian law that caused us to lose our financing and tax breaks, which forced us to shut down production for nearly two years. Needless to say, I wasn’t a happy camper, not only because of what happened but also with myself for not having a better handle on things. Happily, though, we managed to license the existing fifty-two episodes to cable’s Arts & Entertainment Network, which launched on February 1, 1982, and reran them constantly. After that, thirteen new episodes were commissioned, followed by thirteen more, then twenty-six, and finally fifty-two a year that ran until 1996, culminating into a library of about 400 hours, some of which are now available on DVD.
NICKOLAS DAVATZES, CEO emeritus and founder of the Arts & Entertainment Network:
I think the first agreement we made was in 1985. We already had a lot of British comedy and we wanted some American comedy that would attract a younger demographic, which it did, and it was mutually beneficial for both of us.
I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to say that we made A&E because in those days most of their other programming was either reruns or documentaries of Winston Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt.
Because of this, our show—rebranded as A&E’s An Evening at the Improv—permanently put us on the map, and I quickly became as well known around the country as many of the people we had on—plus I got a free wardrobe. All of the sudden, people were stopping me in the street and in airports asking for autographs, which I loved, not to mention the fact that the Improv became the Kentucky Fried Chicken of stand-up comedy. I was now Colonel Sanders.
JIMMY FALLON:
An Evening at the Improv was where you’d go, “That’s the brick wall.” No pun intended, but this cemented in my mind what stand-up comedy is—you stand in front of a brick wall with a microphone and that’s it. When you’d watch it at home, you’d be like, “How can you go up and just make people laugh like this?”
Besides being a comedy fan as a kid and wanting to be a comic, I was a video-game freak, which I still am. When the show was on, A&E put out this video game that was like Atari. But instead of playing an actual game, you’d go through this simulated Improv that was on the screen and click on the headshots of the various comics to listen to their acts, which I did constantly.
JEFF FOXWORTHY:
The first time I was on the show, I was headlining at a club in Charlotte, North Carolina, called the Punchline. This was on a Wednesday night, and when I got the call they told me they wanted me for the next night; I left the following morning. I did the show and then I flew back to Charlotte to finish my gig on Friday.
When I got to the Improv to tape it, the crowd wasn’t very good, so Budd said, “Don’t worry, we’re going to sweeten it and it’ll look great on TV.”
Picture it: I’m this rube from Georgia who had never, ever done television before and when I delivered my first joke, there was dead silence. Immediately, I started to panic and I began thinking to myself, “Okay, if I’m going to die, Budd said they’re going to sweeten it so I’d better look like I’m killing.” That was my thought process and if a joke didn’t get a laugh, what I did was nod and grin as if it had. Then I did the same thing with the Punchline.
About six months later, I was in New York when another southern comic named Vic Henley came up to me and said, “I thought you told me you died on An Evening at the Improv.”
“Oh my God, I did,” I said. “It was terrible. There were thirty people and nobody was laughing at anything.”
“Dude, I saw it and you killed,” said Vic.
“Well,” I said, “it looked that way because my pauses were so long that they had to put giggle laughs in between to cover them up.”
So that experience was me learning how to do TV, and what Budd did was very instructive, because even though I didn’t do that well, I still had a credit. When I went back out on the road to perform, people were like, “He must be pretty good. He did An Evening at the Improv.”
LARRY THE CABLE GUY, comedian and actor:
This had to be around 1987 or ’88. The very first time I ever went to LA, I’d gone out there to help a friend of mine move, and as soon as we got to town, the first place we went was the Improv. It was the middle of the afternoon, the club was open, and I happened to be wearing a pair of shorts and a black An Evening at the Improv T-shirt. I got so caught up in the moment that I got up onstage and my friend took four or five pictures of me. Before we finished, I said, “I’m going to be working here someday.”
When I finally did, it was one of the biggest stepping-stones of my career because performing on Budd Friedman’s stage meant that you weren’t just another comedian anymore.
BYRON ALLEN:
A lot of stand-up “purists” kind of put [the show] down, but to me it was a really cool thing to do because it was easy. You went on and you did your set, and it was a great advertisement for the club and you’d see all these young acts that were so eager and passionate.
GREG BEHRENDT, comedian and writer:
If you did the show, you could headline. There was a point where the goal was obviously Johnny Carson or David Letterman, but right underneath that was An Evening at the Improv.
DREW CAREY:
There was kind of a running joke among comics back then that if you couldn’t do An Evening at the Improv then you should get out of the business. It was such an easy show to do comparatively and every comic did it.
PAUL REISER:
In retrospect, they were pretty cookie-cutter episodes, but it was still a huge step because you had a much better chance of getting one step closer to what you really wanted to do. Your whole attitude after that was, “Now I have a tape. I can be seen.”
JUDY GOLD, comedian, actor, writer, and producer:
At first, it was whether you did An Evening at the Improv and then it became how many times you did it.
DAVID SPADE:
All I remember is wearing Bugs Bunny blue jeans on one of them. After a while, it kind of became like doing jury duty because there was Budd’s show and so many others like them. It got to a point that it was difficult to keep coming up with new material. It’s like you’d start to burn out your whole act. This wasn’t good if you weren’t a headliner because you didn’t have enough material to blow.
PAUL RODRIGUEZ:
Maybe because I’m a minority it was just me, but doing that show brought to the surface the fact that everything that was getting me attention was starting to bother me. I was the Mexican guy, and because I had no one to measure myself against, I began to wonder if I should change. It didn’t last long, though, because then I realized that this was my hook and I had something to say. My attitude sort of became, “I made my bed and I’m comfortable sleeping in it, to hell with everyone else.”
LEWIS BLACK:
As long as I’ve been doing this, which is a long time now, I get anxious before a show. This was especially true back then, because the mentality was that you could eat tomorrow depending on how well you did or didn’t do. So doing An Evening at the Improv that first time nearly put me over the top, a lot of which had to do with the name, because right before I went on, I literally felt like I was high on cocaine.
Of course, anxiety can work really well for you if you channel it right, and I did fine, but it was hands-down the strangest performing experience I’ve ever had in my life.
KEVIN NEALON:
The night I did it, Harvey Korman, who was one of Budd’s partners, hosted and the air conditioner conked out. It was hot as hell and they had to take a break right before I went to fix it. The audience wound up having to sit in the sweltering show room for forty minutes before it was finally fixed and the show resumed with Harvey introducing me. It was not a good night for me.
ADAM SANDLER:
Budd was the one who urged me to come out to LA to begin with, and for me doing that show was like a huge rite of passage because you were also on with guys you loved who were already famous. I just remember saying to myself, “Holy shit, I’m on this show with that person,” and being really excited about it. It was my first taste of having the pressure of—this is being recorded and there’s no turning back.
PAULA POUNDSTONE:
Besides giving young comics exposure and having celebrity guest emcees, one of the great things they did was have other celebrities and semi-celebrities planted in the audience. Budd prearranged this, of course, but it was still great because it reflected a typical night at the Improv where they had a lot of famous people there to begin with.
One night, they had Ted Bessell, who played Marlo Thomas’s boyfriend Donald Hollinger on the 1960s sitcom That Girl, which I loved as a kid. If you remember, he’d say “Who is that girl?” at the beginning of each episode, and when I came offstage, he said this to me. True story.
Another night, Jim Backus, the actor who played Mr. Magoo and Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island, was there. The whole time I was on he had his hands folded, which isn’t exactly the most supportive thing to see when you’re onstage. He wasn’t doing it intentionally, I don’t think, but afterwards I kind of made a promise to myself. I said, “You know what? If Gilligan’s Island ever does a reunion, I’m coming to the set just so I can fold my hands.”
My all-time favorite memory was the night Bea Arthur was hosting. I wasn’t scheduled to go on, but when Budd invited me to do another show that same season, I said, “Yeah, but can I pick who my host is?”
I told him I wanted Bea, and he specifically got her for me. I was thrilled. On the night of the show, they’d partitioned off a section backstage for a makeshift dressing room for the host. Anyway, I was standing there pestering one of the stagehands to tell me when Bea got there so I could say hello, which I did. I said, “It’s so nice to meet you. I asked Budd to put me on the same night as you and he did.”
I also told her what a huge fan I was, not realizing how nervous she was, because stand-up was foreign territory to her even though she was a comedic actress. But I had no idea how nervous, especially since she’d played these ballsy characters on The Golden Girls and Maude.
The more we talked, the more nervous she got, so I tried to make her feel at ease by saying, “Bea, if there’s anything at all I can do for you, just name it.”
She just looked at me and said, “Just get me the fuck out of here.” She wound up doing a fine job and I think she was kidding when she said it, but I also think she was genuinely scared.
DOTTIE ARCHIBALD:
Before A&E picked it up, I did the show a number of times where I was part of the recurring cast that used to play the Improv employees. I was the cashier and they’d have me seated outside the club on a stool during the opening, which was great fun because there’d be all these unscripted jokes going back and forth and I got to riff with all these celebrities as they went by me.
The one I remember the most is Flip Wilson, whose variety show had been off the air for a number of years and he’d gained a ton of weight. In the same episode, there was another overweight comic who’s now dead named Mark Goldstein. Budd loved him, but he never went anywhere and when Budd brought him out, the first words out of Mark’s mouth were, “Can you believe there’s anyone fatter than Flip Wilson?” He didn’t get one laugh.
Just as I was savoring the success of what I’d always wanted during the first incarnation of An Evening at the Improv, in October 1983, Showtime feted us with an hour-long special commemorating the club’s twentieth anniversary called 20 Years of Laughter at the Improv, which I dedicated to Alix and which later won a CableACE Award. Hosted by Robert Klein, it was a night filled with joy and nostalgia as many of our biggest stars like Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Andy Kaufman, Joe Piscopo, Byron Allen, and newcomer Dana Carvey took to the stage alongside such guests as Bea Arthur, Lainie Kazan, Mamie Van Doren, and The Love Boat ’s Ted Lange, who all came out to pay tribute on Melrose Avenue.
Bette Midler sent videotaped remarks from New York, while a subdued Richard Pryor, four years into recovery from his near-fatal freebasing incident in 1979, called me his mentor during a segment we prerecorded weeks earlier at his Hollywood home. As the special concluded, I thanked everyone for making the Improv what it had become.
Sadly, the special also marked what would be one of the last performances of Andy Kaufman, who died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on May 16, 1984, following a courageous six-month battle with lung cancer at the age of thirty-five. Despite his over-the-top, often bizarre behavior onstage and off, his sudden illness came as a complete shock because Andy had always been a health nut, who in his latter years practiced transcendental meditation and never smoked, drank, or used drugs. Two months before his death—which for many y
ears later those who knew him best hoped and still believed had been a hoax—Andy held a screening for his final film, My Breakfast with Blassie, at a small theater on Santa Monica Boulevard that his longtime manager George Shapiro rented.
Andy was emaciated and appeared onstage with his head completely shaven except for a Mohawk down the middle. Afterwards, I asked George if he thought Andy might like to invite his friends over to the Improv to have an ice cream sundae party. George said, “I’m sure he’d love it,” and the next day he called me and said, “This is the best thing that happened to him in the last two years.”
For me, though, having Andy’s memorial service at the Improv eight weeks later—attended by George; Robin Williams; Andy’s recent and former girlfriends Lynne Margulies, Little Wendy, and Elayne Boosler; longtime writing partner Bob Zmuda; and Taxi co-stars Judd Hirsch, Danny DeVito, Marilu Henner, Tony Danza, and Jeff Conaway—turned out to be one of the worst days of my entire life. When I got up onstage to deliver one of the eulogies, I was so overcome with emotion I couldn’t get the words out for all the tears. Yes, Andy drove me crazy at times as he did everyone that knew him, but I loved him.
I’m not sure I fully ever came to terms with how much either, until fifteen years later when I played myself in Jim Carrey’s 1999 biopic, Man on the Moon. I broke down again while we were shooting the scene about Andy’s audition for me at the New York Improv. Indeed, he remains one of the most extraordinarily gifted and special comics that I have ever known. Perhaps Robert Klein summed it up best when he was introducing Andy during our twentieth anniversary special, comparing him to a Jackson Pollock painting—“That is, everybody interprets it differently.” There will never be another Andy.
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