THIRTY-FIVE
The Improv Explodes . . . and the Stakes Get Even Higher
What a decade! Though the stand-up comedy community had been growing steadily since the 1970s, nothing could have completely prepared me for the dizzying array of established and new talent that the enormous popularity of An Evening at the Improv would bring to Melrose Avenue and West 44th Street throughout the mid to late eighties.
In LA, the slogan “Over One Billion Jokes Told” was painted underneath the Improv sign on our brick wall. And yet even with all this success, I still had no idea just how fast we were becoming one of the biggest conduits for America’s comedy boom, a barometer by which every future generation would be celebrated for and measured against—if also to avoid the same mistakes.
BILL MAHER:
Monologists hated magicians or anybody who did gimmicky things back then. We worked hard to craft jokes and we thought of ourselves as much cleverer. We were trying to do something with language, and we thought these prop comics, who went to a novelty shop and bought a fucking magic trick, were cheap ways to get laughs.
DAVID SPADE:
I had a Playskool xylophone I used for my killer Jeopardy! bit I did—you know, the one where Alex Trebek says, “Ask a question.” And then they go, “bing, bing, bing . . .” At the end, I’d say, “Okay, pencils down.”
I also had a spatula because I did a bit about how expensive everything on Wheel of Fortune was, where I’d say, “I’ll take the spatula for $600.” I can’t even remember what else, but I thought they were effective and then Dennis Miller actually talked me out of them.
“Your jokes are very solid,” he said, “but you don’t want to drag these props around like an asshole for the rest of your life.”
BOB SAGET:
I had a lot of weird riffs. I would say, “My mother is Gumby, my father is Pokey, and I’m Mr. Potato Head. I have the brain of a German shepherd and the body of a sixteen-year-old boy—and they’re both in my car.” That’s not a nightclub joke. That’s a pedophile murder joke. I was about eighteen when I wrote that. When I first started, I was purely an attitude comedian, non sequiturs and strange lines—all the stuff you do when you’re a personality-driven comedian. I think I did my first six minutes for ten years.
BRUCE SMIRNOFF:
We’ve already talked about how Budd is with celebrities—it’s like he could be talking to you and if somebody famous came in, he’d just stop the conversation in midsentence and walk away. To Budd, celebrities were like big, shiny objects and to a certain extent they probably still are. One of my most unforgettable memories during this period was the time that David Letterman was scheduled to do an unannounced set at the Hollywood Improv that nobody was supposed to know about, and Budd spilled the beans because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. It was around 1980 or ’81, shortly after Dave’s daytime talk show on NBC was cancelled and about a year before he started doing Late Night with David Letterman. It was also after the fire at the LA club and before Budd got An Evening at the Improv. Business and morale were just awful, and we didn’t know if we’d survive from one day to the next.
Because Dave had a holding deal with NBC where he couldn’t work because he was under contract, he was doing a lot of stand-up to pass the time. He was also still on the outs with Mitzi Shore at The Comedy Store because of the strike. Offstage, Dave always dressed like a slob kind of the way he does now in the pictures that have surfaced since his retirement. Back then, he also drove this beat-up red pickup truck and he couldn’t have cared less about his appearance. It was as if nothing mattered to him.
So one afternoon during this period, I was working at the club to earn some extra money, when Dave walked in. His hair was messy, he had on an old T-shirt, and he was unshaven. Immediately, Budd stopped whatever we were doing and said, “Hey, David.”
Without returning the greeting, Dave said, “You know, Budd. I’m back now and I think I’d like to come in tomorrow night.”
Of course, Budd was just over the moon about this and said, “We’d love to have you.”
This was on a Thursday and they arranged for him to come in at nine-thirty the following night. However, Dave expressly told Budd that he didn’t want anyone to know about it. He said, “You can’t tell anybody. I don’t want this to be a media event.”
Budd gave his word that he wouldn’t. He said, “I promise, David. I would never do that.”
No sooner than Dave got back in his truck and drove away, Budd ran over to the phone and started calling people. And he didn’t just run. It was more like he levitated. The next night, the line was so long that it literally stretched all the way to Crescent Heights. Needless to say, when Dave pulled up in front of the club, he was pissed. He wasn’t nasty or anything, but when he walked inside and saw all these people sitting in the show room, he kind of got this perturbed look on his face. He said, “Budd went and told everyone, didn’t he?”
And I said, “Uh-huh.”
This was all it took, and Dave just walked out of the club, got back in his truck, and drove away.
As the 1980s wore on, not only were we attracting the biggest names in stand-up as comics, it was their loutish behavior offstage that sometimes drew the most attention.
LEWIS BLACK:
I never will forget the night Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold got into a fight while I was onstage. I don’t recall who started it or what was said, but they started screaming at each other right in the middle of my set and then they stormed out. I was like, “Really? Here I am on the first two rungs of the ladder and she’s at the top, but she doesn’t have the courtesy to control herself.”
Then there was the evening in 1983 when the King of Late-Night Television himself showed up unannounced on Melrose Avenue.
BRUCE SMIRNOFF:
The night Johnny Carson came in unannounced in 1983, people gave him a standing ovation. People who were already standing started to clap. The ones who were sitting at the bar stood. This was when he was still anointing stars on a regular basis and everybody knew what a huge deal it was to have Johnny Carson coming into a comedy club.
Budd was beside himself. He was three feet off the ground and he was running up to anybody he could find to tell them about it. Carson was completely oblivious because he was already shitfaced. He just walked right up to the bar past the commotion and ordered three shots of Jack Daniels.
A few minutes later, he turned around and walked down the hall into the show room. From my vantage point, I was like, “Whoever’s onstage now is going to be seen by Johnny Carson. Who’s going to be so lucky?”
No sooner than I opened my mouth, Budd walked up to me and said, “Brucie, two guys just called and cancelled. You’re on next.” I don’t remember who else was performing that night, but because it was prime time, they were all big names. Anyway, I went onstage, Carson knew I was there, and I can still relive it. I did my first joke, the audience laughed, and I was like, “They’re going to help Johnny Carson discover me.”
It was just like something out of a storybook. I did my second joke and they laughed again. I was like, “Oh my God, this is happening to me.” Then I did my third joke and a fourth joke. Each one was better than the last and I was on a build. And then suddenly, from out of nowhere, somebody yelled out, “Stolen! You’re doing somebody else’s material.”
I looked out and saw it was my agent’s son. He had four empty beer bottles in front of him and he was smoking a cigarette, slurring his words, and going, “I don’t know why my dad handles you. You’re a fucking thief. You suck.”
All within a matter of seconds, I’d gone from being in my dream to being in the middle of a nightmare. I felt like I was Linda Blair in The Exorcist and I absolutely flipped out. I said, “Adam, we’ve got some big people here tonight.”
But he started up again. He said, “I don’t know why my father even handles you.”
By this point, I couldn’t even talk. Luckily, someone got Budd, who quickly got me offst
age, and then the bouncer literally threw this kid out onto the sidewalk because he was being so belligerent.
About five minutes later, I went outside. I stood right in front of his Jeep and confronted him. I said, “Why did you do this to me, Adam?” And he told me to go fuck myself, shifted into high gear, and drove off, literally missing my foot by inches.
But the story gets even better because as soon as I walked back into the club, Bud Robinson, who was the manager of Tonight Show’s bandleader, Doc Severinsen, came up to me and said, “Bruce, Johnny’s too drunk to drive home. You’re the only responsible person we know here. You’re going to have to do it.”
So they got Carson out of the club and into his Mercedes. He’s with this young girl he’d just met who was in town from Chicago and couldn’t have been more than eighteen. I saw them in the backseat making out, but before we left, I went back into the club to tell this guy Sandy Shire, a musical conductor, to follow us back to Carson’s place in Bel Air.
By the time I got back to the car, Johnny was doing a full-court press with this girl and we drove off. Every so often, they stopped kissing and she looked up at me in the rearview mirror. Then she looked back at Johnny and said, “You should really put him on your show.”
As I was about to find out, however, his reputation for not being a nice guy was true, because that was when he said, “What are you talking about, him?” Then after a couple of seconds, he said to me, “What’s your name, kid?”
“I’m Bruce Smirnoff,” I said.
“Let me tell you something, Smirnoff,” Johnny said. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You’ve got no structure. You stink.”
By the time we got to his house, I still couldn’t believe what was happening. There was an armed guard with a shotgun sitting at the gate who saw me in Johnny’s car and gave me a thumbs-up. So we drove up, I got out of the car and opened the passenger side—where Johnny was on top of this girl in the backseat and he wouldn’t let her out. He also couldn’t see what I saw, which was the guy I told to follow me from the Improv leading a parade of about six cars full of people he’d invited to a party over at Johnny Carson’s house.
Finally, Johnny got out and he looked up at me and said, “What the fuck are all these people doing here?” He threatened to call the police if we didn’t leave. Then on Monday, my agent dropped me as a client because of what his son had done. He couldn’t face me.
There were plenty more stories like this to come as the growing swells of celebrity customers on Melrose Avenue continued to multiply by the night, along with the collective intake of alcohol and drugs on both coasts among Improv performers, patrons, and staff, although I was never a participant. I always had a zero-tolerance policy, as did Silver when she ran the New York club. However, it was a policy that was oftentimes overlooked, especially when we weren’t around.
JUDY ORBACH:
There was a guy named Angel Rodriguez who was really close friends with Chris Albrecht. He and his brother had a beauty salon around the corner from the New York Improv, and Angel was a coke dealer. We were all very much into cocaine in the eighties, and Angel would take a bunch of air conditioners down to Puerto Rico and come back with blow. We would snort the blow off of the tables in the Improv show room. He’d take it out, line it up, and we’d all sit around.
I remember doing cocaine behind the bar where there was a little liquor storage room that if two people were in it, it was crowded. I don’t know where we got it from, but we kept a tiny piece of marble back there and one of the male bartenders would open the service gate for the waitresses who wanted to take a coke break. Everybody got drunk and high and it was just accepted, although most of us weren’t addicts. We were just users.
EDDIE BERKE:
I can’t speak for New York, but it’s hard to say how rampant cocaine use was on Melrose, although it was definitely there and everybody and their mother was doing it. I know that when Budd found out about it, particularly if people were selling it, he kicked them out immediately.
I also know that the stall door in the men’s restroom went from a foot from the ceiling to the bottom of the floor. I remember Budd walked in there one day and found three guys snorting coke. He went ballistic and the next day he had the door cut down.
As these chemically induced incidents continued, so, too, did the surge of high-wattage celebrities we had on Melrose during much of the eighties, including John Belushi, who came in the night before his death of a drug overdose on March 5, 1982. Belushi’s tragic demise, like so many others, would cause many in the Hollywood community to take pause—and to try and find relief and refuge at the Improv during times of grief, although it was usually simply to unwind or be adulated. For a while, there was a time when just about anybody you could name was here for one reason or another, even if they hadn’t come to watch comedy.
LARRY MILLER:
One night, O. J. Simpson was in the audience. He was very happy to be there and he enjoyed the adulation of being well known. I’m a big sports fan, but not to the extent where I would say, “Look who’s in the audience,” so I just kind of smiled and waved.
Another night Mike Tyson was there, and when you see somebody like that who’s in such incredible physical shape, you can’t help but think to yourself, “Wow, this is pretty cool.”
ROSS MARK:
Before I started helping Budd book the comics, I used to do a lot of odd jobs at the Hollywood Improv during high school—busing tables, answering the phone, working the door. I did everything and it was great because I got to see everybody. Christopher Lloyd from Taxi would come in, and for some reason, he used to give me twenty dollars every time he went to the men’s room.
The Improv was also where Mike Tyson brought Robin Givens on their first date. He asked me for the best seat in the house and gave me a hundred-dollar bill. When he left, he gave me another hundred.
In addition to names like Barbra Streisand, Michael J. Fox, Denzel Washington, Brad Pitt, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, two of our most regular regulars were John Goodman, who usually drove to the Improv in his Volkswagen Beetle, and Bruce Willis. Both were at the height of their fame on Roseanne and Moonlighting. Together, they came in almost nightly to sing and play the harmonica accompanied by the jukebox, although at times, the resultant media attention this attracted was not of the kind any of us liked.
EDDIE BERKE:
Back then, I used to get offered money all the time from the tabloids to talk about this one or that one, but I never did it because as far I was concerned—and not to sound cliché—I, being the bartender, thought of myself as their shrink. Celebrities came in to let loose and unwind, which is what we wanted.
So I was always very careful about what I said, and there was never enough money for me to answer their questions, and I didn’t. But one time Bruce Willis came in after having a little too much to drink and the first words out of his mouth without even saying hello were, “I’m pissed at you.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because you talked to the National Enquirer about me.”
I was floored, so I said, “I didn’t talk to anybody.”
Before I even had a chance to defend myself, he shot back, “Yeah, you did. The reporter told me you told him I come in every night and play my harmonica at the end of the bar.” Which turned out to be true in the context of what was written, because the very next day, I went out to buy the paper and that was exactly what it claimed I said—“Bruce Willis comes in every night and sits at the end of the bar at the Hollywood Improv playing his harmonica.”
Only I never said it, and then that same night Bruce came in and he ordered a beer. When he asked me for it, I said, “Bruce, I don’t even think I want to serve you.” But he had no idea what I was talking about. It was as if his accusation the night before had never occurred, so I said, “You were on my case all last night about the bartender at the Improv.”
But as upset as I was, I tried to keep my composure when he said, “I don
’t remember that.” And he didn’t. I later found out his reasoning was because at the time I was the only male bartender at the Improv. All the others were women. The article said bartender—not bartendress—so that was his whole beef. I can’t remember if we immediately made up, but I became even more careful about what I said after that.
By the mid-1980s, stand-up comedy had become what rock ‘n’ roll was in the 1960s, and the residual press coverage we were receiving was almost always positive. A prime example of this was an April 1986 article by legendary Variety columnist Army Archerd, who wrote: “What a night at the Improv! First Eddie Murphy came onstage, then Byron Allen followed with Murphy remaining onstage. Next Bruce Willis jumped up, followed by Whoopi Goldberg, and to cap the evening: Robin Williams and Rick Overton came up for a finale.”
But for us, this was now considered just another typical evening at the Improv.
Two years earlier, The Cosby Show had premiered on NBC and was instantly the biggest hit of the decade that would also be credited for saving the sitcom genre itself. Though comics had always flourished on sitcoms, largely because of the characters they played, none of the shows had ever been built on their act. That would forever change after producers Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner saw the 1983 concert film Bill Cosby: Himself and decided to develop a sitcom about an upwardly mobile African American family that was essentially Cosby’s act. For me, it also represented another jewel in the Improv crown, where suddenly the autobiographical, observational style of comedy that for so many years had been a mainstay on our stage would reach unimagined new heights.
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