I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era

by William Knoedelseder

  The following Monday, he showed up at the Improv for open mike night. As it happened, he was the last to go on, and his performance brought down the house. He was still taking his bow when Budd Friedman bounded onto the stage to bask in the applause. “It looks like we’ve found a new all-star,” the club owner announced to the standing, cheering crowd.

  In the following weeks, Lewis and Lubetkin were on a sustained high. Against long odds, the two best friends had become performers at the Improv. They were brothers in comedy, embarked on a kamikaze mission to make it in show business and never look back. They would live on the streets if they had to, but nothing was going to keep them from accomplishing their goals—unless, of course, by some unforeseen circumstance, they somehow “got fucked over by the business.” That was always the nagging fear in the back of their minds. In an attempt to guard against that possibility, they took out a small insurance policy.

  One inebriated night at the corner of West Fourth Street and Mac Dougal, in faux Godfather grandiosity, they took a blood oath that whoever made it first would help the other one.

  It was a pact that would haunt Lewis in the years to come.

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  The Hippest Room

  Lewis and Lubetkin arrived on the stand-up scene at a propi-tious time. As the 1970s dawned, the baby boom generation was turning to comedy as a favorite form of entertainment. The boomers had stood the music business on its ear in the late 1960s with their embrace of progressive rock ’n’ roll. Now they were looking for their own countercultural heroes of humor.

  The first one they found was George Carlin. A former disc jockey turned clean-cut, coat-and-tie nightclub comic, Carlin went through a kind of “road-to-Damascus” conversion in 1970

  when he was fired by the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas for, in his words, “saying ‘shit’ in a town where the big game is called ‘crap.’”

  That quip was the opening line of his groundbreaking 1972 album, FM and AM, which pictured him on the cover dressed in bell-bottom jeans and sandals, with shoulder length hair and a beard. His follow-up album later that year, Class Clown, included the now legendary routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV” (“shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, mother fucker, and tits”).

  Both albums quickly went gold, meaning they sold at least 500,000 copies, which was considered huge at the time.

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  After Carlin came Robert Klein, whose best-selling 1973 debut album, Child of the Fifties, established him as the hippest and brainiest chronicler of upper-middle-class uptightness.

  Richard Pryor made it a triumvirate. He’d been a middling success as a kind of nonthreatening Bill Cosby imitator until one night in Las Vegas in 1970 when he stopped his routine in mid-sentence, stared at the audience for a few seconds, and asked,

  “What am I doing here?” Then he walked off the stage and dis -

  appeared from the mainstream comedy scene for several years. He spent the time reinventing his act at small black clubs—the so-called chitlin circuit—and reemerged in 1974 with the Top 40 album That Nigger’s Crazy, which introduced the style of incendiary, race-based, and profanity-laced material that would earn him acco-lades as one of the most brilliant and influential stand-up comics of all time.

  Carlin, Klein, and Pryor were in their early to mid-thirties, but they managed to tap into the sensibility of an audience at least a decade younger. They proved that stand-up comedy didn’t have to be structured around jokes, setups, and punch lines. It could be conceptual, observational, absurdist, sociopolitical, and scatolog-ical all at the same time. That was a mix that struck an immediate chord with the college crowd.

  The first evidence that a youth renaissance was underway in American comedy could be seen in the age of the patrons at the Improv and the hopefuls who lined up to audition for Budd Friedman. Monday was the club’s official amateur night, but after midnight during the week, if the crowd was thin and no headliner comics were waiting to go on, Friedman would let anyone try out on stage for a couple of minutes.

  On one such night, a long-haired college student from Boston walked up to the usually brusque club owner and whined, “Mr.

  Friedman, my name is Jay Leno, and this is the third night in a row that I’ve driven down here from Boston to go on, and I keep 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 21

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  not getting on. I really wanna go on. Could you please put me on tonight? ”

  Friedman looked at him in disbelief. The kid was wearing glasses, a big-collared, open-neck shirt, and bell-bottom jeans secured by a wide leather belt with a huge turquoise-studded buckle, and he was affectedly cupping a curved tobacco pipe in his right hand.

  “Wait a minute,” Friedman said. “You’re telling me you drive all the way down here, four hours, don’t get on, drive all the way back and then turn around and come back again the next day? ”

  Leno nodded. “You’re on next,” said Friedman. Leno did five minutes, after which Friedman told him “You can come back any time.”

  That same night, a seventeen-year-old senior at the Fiorello LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts also passed his first audition and was added to the regular lineup. He had recently changed his name from Freddie Pruetzel to Freddie Prinze, and he promptly dropped out of school.

  Andy Kaufman was twenty-three and living with his parents in Great Neck, Long Island, when a local music club owner called Friedman and said, “You really should see this guy.” Kaufman showed up at the Improv in his “foreign man” character and introduced himself to Friedman in badly broken English.

  “Where you from, kid? ” Friedman asked.

  “An island in the Caspian Sea,” Kaufman replied in the voice of a five-year-old. Friedman didn’t get the joke because he didn’t know there are no islands in the Caspian Sea, but he put Kaufman on anyway and watched as he stumbled through a series of egregious celebrity impressions while members of the audience either giggled nervously or stared in slack-jawed silence. After what seemed like an eternity, Kaufman announced, “Now I would like to do the Elvis Presley,” and ripped into a dead-on impersonation of the King singing “Treat Me Nice.” The crowd 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 22

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  went wild over the extended put-on and Kaufman became an instant Improv regular.

  Elayne Boosler had no thought of doing stand-up when she first walked into the club. She was a twenty-one-year-old part-time dance and acting student who was looking for a waitress job so she could move out of her parents’ house in Brooklyn and get an apartment in Manhattan. Friedman insisted that all his waitresses (there were no waiters) had to be able to double as singers so that there was always someone on hand to fill in between comics. He didn’t think a comic should follow a comic onstage.

  Fortunately for Boosler, there was an opening, and she managed to sing well enough to get the job.

  From the start, Boosler felt as if she had entered an alternative universe. What she knew about stand-up she’d learned from watching Ed Sullivan and The Tonight Show growing up. She knew Jackie Mason, Shecky Green, and Jackie Vernon; she knew Totie Fields, Phyllis Diller, and Joan Rivers. The material was invariably hangdog, self-deprecating, married. She enjoyed it and laughed at it, but it bore no relation to her life. Now she was watching attractive young men onstage every night talking about sex and dating, their mothers and school. Oh, my God, she thought. This all relates to me. I think just like that. It was a level of funny she never knew existed. She couldn’t stop laughing.

  From her vantage point working tables, seating customers, and sometimes singing between acts, Boosler got to see not only the stage performances but also the cre
ative process. She saw that the guys were driven by their creativity. Whenever a singer was performing in the back room, the comics would be gathered at the bar in front—running lines, critiquing, feeding off one another, jotting down ideas on cocktail napkins. It wasn’t unusual for a comic on stage to suddenly fish into his pocket, pull out a wadded napkin, and start reading from it.

  One night, after Boosler had been working for a few weeks, Andy Kaufman took her aside and told her she was more funny 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 23

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  than tuneful. “In fact, you should never ever sing again in public,” he said. With his encouragement, she began working on a stand-up routine. They were soon a romantic item, and Boosler was eventually accepted as the sole female member of a boys’ club that included (in addition to the aforementioned newcomers) David Brenner, Steve Landesberg, Jimmie Walker, Richard Belzer, Ed Bluestone, and Michael Preminger.

  Brenner, at age thirty-six with a dozen Tonight Show appearances under his belt, was the grand old man of the group and a generous mentor, especially to Richard Lewis. They were sitting in a neighborhood deli one day when Lewis lamented that if he could only put together $1,000, he could quit his three part-time jobs and devote all his time to working on his act. Brenner quickly wrote him a check for the grand. “Congratulations,” he said, “now you are a full-time comedian.” Lewis quit all the jobs.

  Another night, Brenner and his girlfriend drove Lewis home to the guesthouse he rented in the backyard of a home in Paramus, New Jersey. Lewis was mortified when they insisted on coming in because it was a twelve-by-fourteen-foot, one-room hellhole with orange curtains and mushrooms growing through the walls. He was in the bathroom checking to make sure there was no pubic hair on the porcelain when he heard Brenner say to the girl, “Tell him you love the place.”

  All the younger comics were poor, partly because the Improv didn’t pay them. Budd Friedman couldn’t afford to when he first opened the club with a borrowed $3,000 and only seventy-four seats. Over time, not paying had become a tradition. The Improv was considered a “showcase club” where performers could get up on a professionally equipped stage, create without interference, and potentially be seen by agents, talent scouts, and other very important people in show business. The club was a favorite after-hours hangout for performers and producers from the nearby Broadway theater district. It wasn’t unusual to see the likes of Danny Aiello, Vincent Gardino, Jason Robards Jr., and Albert 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 24

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  Finney in the audience or drinking at the bar. One magical night found Dudley Moore and Christopher Plummer playing duets on the sixty-six-key piano, while a slinky Tuesday Weld draped herself across its top.

  In the early 1970s, the Improv was the hippest room in town, possibly in the world, which was why comics didn’t complain about working there for free. If you were a regular at the Improv, you could get paying jobs at all the little clubs in the area. And if you played enough of those places, you could earn enough to almost not starve. In a way, the comics didn’t think of the Improv as a real nightclub. It was more like their own gym where they worked out and got in shape for the big game. And the big game was always The Tonight Show.

  At the time, Johnny Carson was the prime arbiter of comic worth in America. If he thought you were funny and put you on his show, then you were instantly marketable, positioned to land rela-tively high-paying gigs as an opening act for pop stars in Las Vegas or rock bands on tour. If Carson didn’t think you were funny, then you were dead in the water, consigned to eke out a living in small clubs. Not surprisingly, Carson was a common obsession among the comics. Putting together five minutes of solid, clean material for Johnny was their mission in life, whether they were trying to get on for the first time or the tenth. Other TV shows featured stand-up comedians, but only The Tonight Show launched careers.

  Of all the young comics he’d seen, Budd Friedman thought that Jay Leno might be the best of his generation. He was particularly impressed with Leno’s work ethic. Leno kept up the com-mute between Boston and New York—every weekend and often during the week—while he finished his senior year at Emerson College. He had a part-time job at a car dealership that sold Rolls Royces and sometimes had to travel to Rolls Royce headquarters in Paramus to pick up new cars. On those occasions, he risked getting fired by stopping in New York to perform a set or two at the Improv before heading back to Boston.

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  Leno was relentless in his pursuit of new stand-up venues, pitching himself like a door-to-door salesman to any place that offered a raised platform, a microphone, and a few chairs. He worked everywhere from skuzzy strip clubs in Boston’s notorious Combat Zone to earnest folk clubs in Cambridge. He got his foot in the door of the latter by offering an unusual deal to the reluctant club owners. “Here’s a $50 bill,” he’d say. “Put it right there on the bar, and let me go on. If I don’t do well and people start to leave, then you can keep the fifty.” He never lost the money.

  Leno reminded Friedman of Robert Klein, whom the club owner respected above all other comics. Leno had the same casual observational style and no gimmick. Other young stand-ups sweated to develop twenty minutes of solid material, but Leno seemed able to walk on stage and riff for hours if he had to. He made it look easy, like he was making it up as he went along, and sometimes he was. Already the other comics at the Improv were starting to quote him to one another. “Did you hear what that guy from Boston said last night?”

  Friedman liked Leno so much that he was thinking about becoming his manager. But first he wanted to see him perform some-place other than his own club. The problem with the Improv was that it didn’t reflect the rough-and-tumble real world of stand-up comedy. People came there expecting to laugh, which usually made for a supportive, forgiving audience. You could kill at the Improv and still bomb at the Hilton with the same material. As Rodney Dangerfield liked to joke, “If you do well at the Improv it means you ain’t got no act.”

  So Friedman drove to a little jazz club called Lennie’s on the turnpike outside of Boston, where Leno was opening for Buddy Rich. The place was packed with fans of the famed drummer, and Friedman was happy to see Leno holding his own with the much older crowd that hadn’t come to see a comic. But he couldn’t figure out why Jay kept hopping up and down during his routine. He moved closer to the stage and saw that a patron in the front row 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 26

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  was trying to pound on Leno’s toes with his balled up fist. Friedman had seen some weird stuff during his years in the nightclub business but never anything like this. What amazed him the most was that Leno kept his composure and timing while managing to avoid most of the blows. He decided right then and there to manage him. It turned out that the toe-pounder was the owner of the company that manufactured the cymbals Buddy Rich used, and he wanted this hippie comic off the stage so his product could be seen in action. (Leno would write later in his autobiography that on his first night of opening for Rich, an impatient fan of the drummer jumped up on the stage during his set and punched him out. And for this, he was paid $75 a night for two half-hour sets.) Incidents like that were another reason comics didn’t mind playing the Improv for free. You didn’t get paid, but at least you didn’t get hurt. The club was gaining a reputation among young comics all across the country as a place where you could work in a collegial atmosphere and not have to dodge projectiles from the audience. What’s more, word was going around that talent scouts from The Tonight Show came in regularly looking for new blood.

  All that sounded almost too good to be true to Tom Dreesen in Chicago, so he and his comedy partner, Tim Reid, hopped a Greyhound bus to New York to see for themselves. Arriving in Manh
attan, they checked into a shared room at the Warwick Hotel and then went directly to the Improv. They met Jay Leno standing outside with a handful of young hopefuls waiting to audition for the first time. Always affable, Leno introduced them to the others, and Dreesen and Reid immediately felt a sense of camaraderie in the group that they’d not experienced before among comedians. There was no wariness or posturing on anyone’s part, none of the edgy competitiveness common among the old-school comics they’d met on the road. Leno was a font of useful and funny information about club owners he knew and clubs he’d worked all over the Northeast.

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  Dreesen and Reid had their own colorful tales to tell. Together since 1969, they billed themselves as “Tim and Tom,” the world’s only black-and-white comedy team. They worked charities, churches, and any room that would have them, from Playboy Clubs to chitlin-circuit hotspots like the High Chaparral in Chi -

  cago and the Burning Spear on the Southside, the 20 Grand in Detroit, the Sugar Shack in Boston, and Club Harlem in Atlantic City. In the black venues, Dreesen was often the only white face in the crowd, and they killed with a routine they called “Superspade and the Courageous Caucasian,” in which Reid introduced his partner as “the world’s fastest human from parking lot to the stage.”

  Then he’d attempt to teach Dreesen “how to be a brother” so that he would survive the night. Dreesen, of course, would screw up all the mannerisms and street jargon to great comic effect.

  In one of their most far-fetched bits (at the time, anyway), Dreesen played a reporter interviewing the first black man elected president of the United States:

  Dreesen: What’s the first thing you are going to do when you take office?

  Reid: Enact a law that dead people can’t vote in Chicago.

  Dreesen: What’s the second thing you are going to do?