How to Succeed in Business Without Really Crying

by Leifer, Carol

  A blank stare from Harry Dean greeted me back. But I was not to be deterred, so I went on to elaborate.

  “We ate at the Palm recently? Bunch of comedians, with Belzer and you?”

  Harry Dean just shook his head no. And not in a searching, friendly way, I might add. More in a can-you-get-the-hell-outta-here, I’m-with-Jack-Nicholson way. I should also say at this point that if Jack Nicholson were ever given the role of the Sphinx, he would crush it. The man, behind his requisite sunglasses, did not even swivel his head one degree to acknowledge my presence in any way.

  I was stuck.

  In these socially awkward situations, you find yourself relying purely on the moment to tell you what to do. And for some strange reason, my moment told me to stay there. And dig myself into an even bigger hole than I already had.

  I marched on valiantly.

  “We were all drinking a lot and telling jokes and stories, and …” I practically listed what each of us had ordered that night. “You had the T-bone and I had the chopped Italian salad with a side of broccoli rabe?” Nothing was breaking this guy. And so I just kept babbling like a mental patient, “It was a Wednesday night, so the valet parking wasn’t all that jammed up …” I was like someone with Tourette’s, except I kept it all clean.

  At some point, though, I had to admit defeat. Any nearby usher could have told me that. So after probably mentioning all the specific types of bread that had graced the bread basket at the dinner table, I put an end to it. I simply said, “Well anyway, Harry Dean, I thought I’d just come by and say hi. Enjoy the concert.”

  I turned around and embarked on the long walk of shame back to my seat. I could see in the distance that Lori’s head was bowed—even from that far away, I’m sure she experienced some of the peripheral frostiness from the encounter.

  Then, after I had walked about ten rows, I heard a voice shouting loudly: “I REMEMBER NOW!!” I turned back around to see it was Harry Dean, now standing up and yelling to me. I gave Harry and the Sphinx an acknowledging wave and settled back into my seat while paging the beer guy for another extralarge brew.

  Whew. Believe it or not, the moral of this story is still that you should always say hi and be sociable to those you see when you’re out and about. “See and be seen” is old show biz lore, but it makes good business sense, too. The reason being, a lot can be achieved with a simple run-in.

  I’ll give you a good example this time. Lori and I went to a party not long ago at Jimmy and Molly Kimmel’s house. (They have their own pizza oven—how cool is that?!?) Louis CK was there, and the two of us BS’d for a while. I was bitching to Louis about how my agent at the time was great with writing gigs, but didn’t have great contacts for my stand-up and corporate connections. Louis went on to sing the praises of his agent, who excelled in both areas. And then he said he would be happy to mention me to him. That led to me signing with his agent, who got me a book deal. So a casual conversation at a party turned into me selling this very book (to you).

  I make a point of mentioning this detail because I know Louis only casually. He opened for me a couple of times when he was coming up and I was a headliner. Calling him about my agency predicament would’ve been nothing short of weird. We’re not close enough for that kind of exchange. But at a party, it wasn’t a strange conversation at all. And when things like that happen organically, through the course of simply talking at a party, it’s pretty stellar.

  There’s no predicting which encounters will be the ones that take your career to a new and interesting place. So always be social. Get up and go across a room to say hi. Great things can result. Even if all you get out of it is a cool conversation, it’s worth doing. As for the awkward, uncomfortable outcomes … well, they’re valuable in a different way. This wouldn’t have been much of a story if Harry Dean Stanton had immediately greeted me with, “Of course I remember you, Carol. How you doing, Mommy?”

  Richard Belzer and Harry Dean, from my end of the dinner table at the Palm.

  HOW TO MAINTAIN YOUR SANITY WHILE STUBBORNLY ADVANCING AN EVER-ARDUOUS CAREER

  “There’s not just one thing, Carol.”

  —Jerry Seinfeld

  CHAPTER 9

  THE SINGER, THEN THE VENTRILOQUIST, THEN THE CHICK

  The question I get asked the most—besides “What is Jerry Seinfeld really like?”—is “What’s it like being a woman in a male-dominated business?” From day one of my journey till now, my response has always been the same. Being female is a tremendous advantage, and always will be.

  People are surprised by that answer, especially women. Many want to hear me complain about how it’s a tougher road, the opportunities are not equal, and so on. But instead of focusing on all the negatives, it’s always been my philosophy to focus on the distinct benefits that being female brings to the workplace. Many times, women just don’t open their eyes to see them. So take a good look around, ladies, because they’re out there. And for you guys reading this, don’t skip to the next chapter. Some of these advantages are things you can emulate, too (without losing your inherent “dudeness”).

  The initial benefit I encountered as an up-and-coming stand-up was that I got onstage a lot more often than my male counterparts. Purely because I was female. Only a handful of women were doing stand-up back when I started, and the owners of clubs would put together lineups in this manner: “Well, we’ll start out with the singer, then the ventriloquist, then the woman comic, then the impressionist …,” and so on. As sexist as that was, putting not just a “comic” onstage, but a “woman comic,” I got on. Which is a lot more than I can say about the warehouse full of white male comics who littered the bar, waiting to get a break. (Not much has changed over the years; even today, stand-up has all the diversity of the crowd at the X Games.)

  As much as it didn’t feel good being marginalized as a “specialty act” just because I had a pair of boobs, I still got my stage time. Which is what any comic wants and needs. You’ve got to be terrible before you get good. And believe me, when I started I had some sets that ended so badly you could have put police tape around them. But that’s true in most careers—you have to be bad at it when you start (though not, hopefully, if your career is cardiac surgery). So the more I got on stage, the more I knew I was on my way to becoming a better comedian. If you’re working in a mostly male environment, being a woman might get you noticed, as unfair as that may be. So be prepared to use that time in the spotlight to gain the skills and experience that will further your career.

  Here’s another advantage: women see the world differently than men do. (Maybe it’s because when we look at the opposite sex, our eyes aren’t focused six inches below the face.) We have unique experiences that are worlds away from those of a man. I exploited that quality in finding material for my act. Not in an “Am I right, ladies?” way (although I am right about this, ladies), but from the observational approach that everyone uses in creating a comedy routine.

  For example, I talked onstage about how women would go on dates with guys, order a “dinner salad,” and then go home and binge their face off. (Maybe not the most radical observation today, but thirty-five years ago, not many people were talking about this stuff.) It got big laughs because women, as well as men, knew how true it was. Maybe some couples in the audience that very night were about to experience this particular quirk together.

  So club owners started to see that it was a good idea to put women comics in their lineups, because the audience would hear a perspective that hadn’t been expressed in comedy very often, even though it was a perspective held by half the audience.

  I also developed a good habit back in those days, one that I continue today—I steal from the tip jar. No, just kidding. The habit is this: I ask for help. And that’s another advantage a woman brings to the workplace. Now, to be clear, I’m not positing this idea as a “poor me/I’m subservient” fallback to make up for a woman’s supposed physical weakness. Quite the contrary. I’m suggesting it as a very powerfu
l tool for professional success that you should have in your arsenal. Whatever the career path, at some point everyone needs feedback, advice, and occasional TLC to help them advance. And I do think women have been socialized to ask for help more easily than men. (When’s the last time you heard a man under sixty ask for help opening a stuck window? Or with anything else, for that matter?)

  Make no mistake: men can be especially helpful to women, because guys can help us understand men. That’s key for any female who’s in the minority at work. I can point to clear examples of how getting that kind of help created huge gains for me.

  Here’s one. As a comic, I always asked other comics to watch my act, to get a realistic gauge on my progress and lend an objective eye to stage problems I was trying to fix. Early in my career, I was having a hard time with groups of men in the audience. If three or more guys came in and sat together at a table, at some point during my set they would inevitably give me a hard time and heckle me. (At comedy clubs—like most everywhere else, I suppose—anytime more than two guys get together, they take on a packlike mentality. The difference being that pack animals don’t wear too much Axe cologne.) I swear you could have set your watch to it, especially if the guys were on the younger side. I just never had the right comebacks or attitude onstage to make it stop.

  So one night at the Improv I asked a fellow comic, whose act revolved a lot around guys and their way of thinking, if he would watch my set. (I had seen a bunch of bridge-and-tunnel guys waiting to come into the showroom, and I had a pretty good hunch they would hassle me that night. Which they did.) When my set was done, the comic came over, and after first kindly consoling me (sets like that, where guys pummeled me from the audience, were brutal, and comedians are a surprisingly fraternal bunch), he went on to pinpoint where I’d gone wrong in my attempts to shut them down. He told me, “They’re guys out on a Saturday night, and there are no women with them—that’s their Achilles heel. They don’t want to be reminded of that, much less in front of the crowd. So there’s your assault weapon right there.”

  Sure enough, the next time I went onstage and was heckled by the Young Guy Table, I responded with, “Hey, guys. Where’s all your dates tonight? Still parking the car I guess, huh?” Like I’d waved a magic wand, anytime I used this line, the heckling usually stopped. (The one or two times the heckling did continue, I just had to add “Well, no wonder you’re alone tonight,” and that would end it for good.) It’s a survival strategy I still use onstage to this day. It took a guy to show me that zeroing in on the stag status of these bozos would be enough to shut them up. I don’t think I would have ever found the solution had it not been for the camaraderie of someone who knew what makes the male brain tick, because he had one of his own.

  Another way that I believe I’ve made gains compared to my male colleagues, and how you might, too, is that I’m a good listener. I do think that quality was encouraged in me as part of my upbringing as a girl. As biased as that might have been, I’ve found it to be a tremendous asset, especially in the business I’m in. No one listens in the entertainment business, because they only want to talk about their next project, or in the case of comedians, they don’t pay attention to what you’re saying because they want to try out new material, even during normal conversation. (“Glad to hear you had a great vacation, Carol. And speaking of flying, have you ever noticed …”) So annoying. I can’t tell you how many lunches and meetings I’ve had where I’ve just been a sympathetic ear to a man who seemed to want to vent about anything and everything, especially his love life (they have no idea how many times I’ve secretly agreed with the wife). After the encounter, I’ve been in a good place with that person work-wise, and I always credit it to being an engaged audience for them. Who doesn’t like to talk and be heard? (That’s a founding principle for the organization Hadassah, by the way.)

  So, to me, your attitude as a woman at work can always be distilled to a half-empty or half-full perspective. You can bitch and moan about being outnumbered, or you can find the scenarios in which being female is the biggest break you could ever hope for. Granted, not all the advantages I had will apply in your situation; you’re probably not taking numbers to get a turn telling jokes at next Wednesday’s sales meeting (though maybe you should; I hear the quarterlies aren’t looking too good). But once you start thinking about it, I’m sure you can come up with some XX-chromosome-related benefits of your own. Take the things that made you cringe about being raised a girl and spin them into your own Wonder Woman powers.

  If your comedy club is named Tickles, is it really necessary to include a feather?

  CHAPTER 10

  DON’T DEVELOP A DRINKING PROBLEM

  I don’t have a drinking problem. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a time when I drank too much.

  It started slowly, back in 1982. Paul Reiser and I were booked to do a gig at a college in Vermont. I was set to open the show, with Paul closing. We left New York City early, estimating an arrival time of six p.m., giving us plenty of time to relax before our eight o’clock show.

  But with one wrong turn somewhere off US-7, we were screwed. This was a primitive time, before cell phones and GPS. We had to use maps. Which, as anyone over thirty knows, are just evil pieces of origami.

  As a result, we didn’t pull onto the campus until eight-fifteen or so. We scrambled to find the student union, made our apologies, and hustled backstage. (Which wasn’t even a true “backstage,” just a stairwell off the auditorium.)

  As we waited to go on, Paul asked how long a set I was planning to do: “A half hour each? Does that sound about right, Leafless?” (His nickname for me.)

  “I can’t go on just yet, Paul,” I answered. “I can’t.”

  “Do you need a few minutes?”

  “I need more than a few minutes. For sure.”

  I guess I said it with such stark desperation that Paul never even questioned me. The moment registered, and then he just calmly told me, “Okay, I’ll go up first. Take whatever time you need, Leaf.”

  And as Paul stepped onstage to the waiting college crowd, I did what I needed to do: I pulled out the two mini-bottles of white wine that I had taken from a recent airline flight, unscrewed the twist-off tops, and downed both pretty quickly. As I sat there in that musty stairwell, I knew something had gone horribly wrong.

  Drinking before going onstage had started innocently enough, about three years earlier. I’d gotten one of my first big breaks. A booker had come into the Comic Strip in New York City and auditioned acts for his West Coast club called the Laff Stop (are the names for comedy clubs epic or what?), which had locations in Claremont and Newport Beach, California. It was a big deal, and an honor, to be booked out there. I had done only local gigs up to that point. Flying out to California at twenty-two years old, all by myself, to perform in a comedy club that I wasn’t familiar with turned my normal preperformance jitters into near paralysis.

  So I got to California. And there I was with some time to kill before my first show, pacing nervously by the bar, when a friendly bartender asks, “How ’bout a drink?” I’d never had any alcohol before going onstage before—sure, maybe a glass of wine or two afterward. But this bartender was nice, and offering. And as I was, conveniently, scared as all hell, I figured why not.

  Lo and behold, one glass of wine later and the first set of my California adventure was a smash. I was loose and in the moment. All my anxiety melted away, and I was having big-time fun onstage.

  Stand-up comedy is a monster. Performing it is like walking a tightrope with no net. Or at least, not a very big one. When you’re killing, you feel like Leonardo DiCaprio standing on the bow of the ship in Titanic. And when you’re bombing … well, you feel like you’re on the actual Titanic. You’ll never feel as small in your life as you do when your set is going badly. You literally count the seconds until you can get offstage and disappear far, far away. And here was this easy fix: drinking. It removed all the risk and bad stuff. It was a magic way to make
everything exactly the way it should be.

  Until that moment in the stairwell …

  The thing I was naive enough not to know was that the one glass of wine that first got me buzzed and feeling good during a performance soon became two glasses. And though at the beginning I would just grab a glass here or there before going onstage, before long I had to be sure to get to a club a good half hour or so before I went on, so I could time my buzz just right. This elixir was proving tricky to manage.

  It all came crashing down in Vermont as I pounded down that wine, listening to the laughs that Paul was already getting out on stage. This little shortcut I’d thought I’d found was making things mighty complicated. Thanks, United Airlines! Maybe if your peanuts hadn’t been so heavily salted, I wouldn’t have been so thirsty before that first California set, and I could have avoided this mess to begin with.

  So, right then and there, I decided to stop drinking. Just like that, cold turkey. (Which, of course, sounds like a drink itself or, at the very least, Wild Turkey’s emotionally detached brother.)

  This decision turned out to be quite fortuitous, because two weeks later I got my first booking on Late Night with David Letterman. I was to appear on the show in three months. Getting smashed before my network television debut, in an NBC green room with bottles of bad airline wine piled everywhere, was not going to be part of the plan.

  At first, it was hard to do stand-up without getting snockered. I basically had to relearn how to perform, removing alcohol from the equation. I needed to take all that raw nervousness and anxiety and use it to fuel my act. It took a few months, but when I finally internalized this concept, it was quite a revelation. I learned that the nerves and fear never leave a stand-up comic (except for Jay Leno, who is hands-down the most relaxed comedian I’ve ever known). It’s a part of the game that, for some foolish reason, I thought would go away with time. But it doesn’t. And as a comic, when you can learn how to harness the engine of that fear, it makes your performance that much better.