I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era
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And she made herself into the impresario, personally putting together each night’s lineup and determining the order and length of more than a hundred sets per week, based on her knowledge of each comic’s act. Unlike Budd Friedman, she believed that a comic could follow a comic if you carefully managed the mix of material and the pacing, always building to a big finish at the end.
“You have to produce the show,” she said. “You can’t just let it happen.”
The one thing she didn’t change was Sammy’s policy of not paying the comics. The way she saw it, the Comedy Store was a place for them to find opportunity, not their employer.
After a month in Vegas, Sammy arrived back in town and was astonished by the changes Mitzi had wrought. For starters, the place was packed; there was hardly an empty seat. The bar was gone, the room was black on black, and the only thing you could see clearly was the young comic onstage. Instead of a middle-aged bartender, young waitresses slung drinks right and left. Mitzi sat at the cash register just inside the entrance, barking instructions.
Everything was very neat and clean, with plants hanging all around. Fucking plants! He greeted her with his best, “Hi, Honey, 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 38
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I’m home,” and she looked at him and said, “Yeah, hi, Sammy, could you give me a minute and step out of the way there.” Then she turned to a young comic he’d never seen before and said,
“Okay, you are going on at 10:15 for fifteen minutes and then you get off, understand?”
Sammy felt the ground move under his feet. “Oh, my God,” he thought. “She’s finally found something she’s been looking for all her life, and she doesn’t need me anymore. She doesn’t want to get off that seat. I’m history.”
He was right. Within months they were in divorce proceedings.
Mitzi hired hotshot divorce attorney Marvin Mitchelson, who would later pioneer the concept of “palimony” for unmarried co-habitants. In the end, Mitzi got the house and the club. Thanks to Mitchelson’s penchant for publicity, it was reported that Sammy
“lost” the club. In fact, he voluntarily relinquished his share of ownership in exchange for a reduction in alimony from $1,100 to $600 a month. Though ridiculed as “the man who gave away the Store,” he really didn’t care that much about the club. It had been fun, but he felt no emotional connection to it. No one had discovered him there. And he thought Mitzi deserved it. After all, she’d turned it into a business.
Steve Lubetkin was one of the first of the New York Improv comics to head west. “All the action is out in California,” he told his father. “If I’m really going to do something with this, then I have to go to the Comedy Store.”
Jack Lubetkin and Steve’s brother, Barry, were concerned. Jack couldn’t see how you could make a career out of comedy when it didn’t pay a living wage. Ten or twenty bucks for a night’s work?
You could do better at McDonald’s. Barry knew Steve had talent—
he’d seen him on stage many times and been filled with pride that his little brother could get up in front of a room full of strangers and make them laugh. But he also knew that Steve was a fragile soul, sensitive to rejection, with a tendency toward sadness. He’d seen how Steve reacted whenever he bombed: he’d be angry and 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 39
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hurt, and you couldn’t even talk to him for a few minutes. Steve had never really been away from home. He’d gone to college on Long Island. How would he fare in a tough town like Los Angeles?
But Steve was determined and convincing. He pointed to Freddie Prinze and Jimmie Walker, who’d just been cast in a new sitcom called Good Times after auditioning at the Comedy Store. “I know these guys; they’re my friends,” he said. “I can do that, too.”
So, Jack Lubetkin flew to Los Angeles with Steve to help him find an apartment for between $100 and $200 a month. They settled on a one-bedroom with a few pieces of shabby furniture in a building located where La Cienega Boulevard dead-ended at Sunset Strip. It was a dump, but to Steve it was better than a pent-house on Park Avenue because he could walk to the Comedy Store in eight minutes. He was there the very next Monday night, standing in line with several dozen others waiting to take their first step toward comedy stardom: auditioning for Mitzi Shore. He couldn’t quite believe it when he got on that night or that he did as well as he did. But Shore said to him afterward, “You’re funny. Come back next week.” He did, and every night in between. Soon he was getting weeknight time slots, not prime-time spots but more than Budd Friedman ever gave him. He quickly became part of Shore’s inner circle of young male comics who doted on her and ran her errands. She invited him to dinner at her house, and he was among the few she allowed to join her in her special booth at the club. In his mind, she became as important to his future as Johnny Carson.
He felt like he was finally on a roll, in the right place at the right time. It was all going to happen for him, he was sure of it.
Lubetkin fell right in with other recent comedy émigrés, including George Miller, who’d come down from Seattle the year before and lived in an apartment building directly across the street from the Store. Johnny Dark lived in an apartment a few blocks away on Laurel Avenue. Dark, a Philadelphian, had come to Los Angeles from Atlanta, where he’d been the drummer and lead singer in a lounge band called the Johnny Dark Thing. Now he 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 40
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was trying his hand at stand-up, and Mitzi Shore liked him. Dark’s wife, Suzy, was a waitress at the Comedy Store, which meant that she got paid, but he didn’t. Half a dozen other Comedy Store performers lived in Dark’s building, including Steve Blue stein, who was a buyer for Macy’s by day, and Alan Bursky, the youngest comic ever to appear on The Tonight Show (he was eighteen at the time but looked twelve). Bursky’s parents, Herman and Helen, managed the apartment building, which would eventually house more than twenty comics and become known as Fort Bursky.
With their new TV shows being produced in Los Angeles, Freddie Prinze and Jimmie Walker started showing up at the Comedy Store all the time, either to perform or hang out. Prinze moved in with Bursky. Another Improv alum, Steve Landesberg, began coming into town regularly to do showcase auditions at the Store, trying to land a TV job.
It was all getting too much for Jay Leno. Back in Boston, he was watching The Tonight Show when Carson introduced another
“young comedian who is appearing here in town at the Comedy Store.” It was Walker. Leno had performed on the same bill with Jimmie many times at the Improv and other clubs, and he’d done as well, if not better, with the crowd. So why was Jimmie now performing ten feet away from Johnny while he was sitting on the couch in this crummy apartment? He would later describe it as a
“pivotal” moment in his life and career. He stood up and announced to the empty room. “That’s it. I’m going to the Comedy Store.” He booked a flight to Los Angeles, and the next day he withdrew his $1,500 in savings, packed a single bag, and walked out of his apartment, leaving the door open behind him. “Take whatever you want,” he told the neighbors.
In Los Angeles, he instructed the cab driver, “Take me to Sunset Strip.” He spent his first night in town sleeping on the couch of a comedian pal, Billy Braver, who lived in the same building as George Miller. For the next few weeks, he lived like a vagabond, bouncing from couch to couch, crashing for several days at Fred-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 41
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die Prinze’s place in Fort Bursky, even sleeping on the back stairs at the Comedy Store several nights. The police stopped him one night at the corner of Hollywood and Vine.
“Where do you live? ” one cop asked him.
“I’m a comedian, and I don’t really live anywhere yet,” he said.
All in all, Leno’s transition was fairly painless. He quickly won over Mitzi Shore and became a regular at the Comedy Store, getting prime-time spots in the lineup. He vowed to himself that he wouldn’t take a straight job to support himself. He was going to sink or swim as a comic.
Richard Lewis made his first foray to Los Angeles in February 1974. He flew in to do a paid gig at the Ice House in Pasadena and took a bus from the airport to Lubetkin’s apartment. The first thing Steve did was walk him over to the Comedy Store to show him around. Lewis was shocked by how many comics there were—standing in the back hallway waiting to go on or hitting on girls as they came out of the restroom, gathered in groups around the front entrance or in the parking lot, sitting in cars smoking pot. It was almost overwhelming. Steve’s fixation on Mitzi Shore, about whom he talked incessantly, seemed a bit extreme, but he appeared to be in his element, happy and confident. Which was surprising, con sidering that, according to Steve, he’d just been rejected by The Tonight Show.
Once again, it had been a case of almost but not quite. The way Steve told it, a Tonight Show talent coordinator had caught him at the Comedy Store and asked him to call the office the following week. But the next night, the same guy happened by a little club where Steve was trying out some new material that didn’t go over with the audience. So, when Steve called, he was told, in effect, “Never mind.”
“Oh, man, I’m sorry,” Lewis said, trying to imagine the dis appointment of being turned down by The Tonight Show. But Steve 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 42
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shrugged it off, saying he wasn’t that upset about it because he had something bigger in the offing.
“I’m making a movie,” he said. “I wrote it, and I’m starring in it. It’s called Dante Shocko, and it’s a bizarre comedy about this guy who competes in a Man of the Year contest to see who’s the best athlete, chess player, lover, killer, and a bunch of other things.”
“You’re making a fucking movie? ” Lewis replied, astonished.
Not only was he making it, Steve said, but he was also helping to raise the money and auditioning actors for the supporting roles.
He was hooked up with an experienced producer and director, and they were hoping to sell the movie to a major Hollywood studio.
He had even conducted his own market research into its earning potential: He had asked nine of his friends to watch Mel Brooks’s smash hit Blazing Saddles and to mark down each time they laughed and to note exactly what kind of laugh it was. Then he asked them to do the same thing while reading his Dante Shocko script. The result, he reported proudly, was that while Blazing Saddles elicited an average of 7 “killer laughs,” 15 “mediums,” and 27
“chuckles and strong smiles” for a total score of 49, Dante produced an average of 60 killers, 106 mediums, and 126 chuckles for a total of 292. Which meant that Dante was five times funnier than a movie that had grossed more than $100 million at the box office. “It’s staggering to think what Dante can make,” he said.
Steve never ceased to amaze Richard. First, he had the balls to just pick up and move to Los Angeles, and now he was trying to be the next Woody Allen or Mel Brooks. Lewis admired his friend’s courage, his drive and ability to dream large, but he worried about him, too. It seemed that Steve’s expressing himself creatively was never a means to an end, a step toward a certain career plateau.
Rather, it was as though Steve viewed each gig, each set, as a test that he took too seriously. For Steve, every night was Hamlet.
Lewis did well at the Ice House, so well that Tonight Show talent coordinator Craig Tennis contacted him the next day. “I caught 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 43
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your act last night,” Tennis said. “We’d like you to be on the show.”
It was the call every young comic dreams of getting. He immediately phoned practically everyone he knew back East. “I’m going to be on The Tonight Show in two weeks!”
For his national TV debut on March 27, Lewis wore an aqua blue, Western-style leisure suit with a yellow turtleneck. It was an era-appropriate outfit, but, as he would say later, “I looked like a Jewish marionette that was stalking the Muppets.” Lubetkin and Steve Landesberg accompanied him to NBC Studios in Burbank and sat in the green room with him during the taping. With time starting to run out, Carson and actor George Peppard became engaged in an interminable and decidedly unfunny discussion of their respective smoking habits, puffing on cigarettes the whole while. At one point Peppard said to Carson, “Well, John, my cancer is slower than yours.” You could have heard a pin drop in the audience. With seven minutes remaining in the show, Lewis got his cue. At the curtain, he froze for a second, but Landesberg literally put a foot in his butt and pushed him through.
Lewis had his five minutes down pat. He’d run the lines a thousand times, until he could do the material in his sleep—from the shiny yellow raincoat his mother made him wear to school “so child molesters could see me through a dense fog” to his high school coach “Moose Blechas,” who wouldn’t excuse a kid from gym class for any reason: “But, Coach, I have the measles. . . . Walk it off!”
Sensing correctly that the smoking conversation had left the audience down, he tried to get them back up, working the room as if he were at the Improv, playing to the three hundred people present instead of the millions watching at home. As a result, on the small screen he seemed to be trying too hard, looking off camera and waving his arms frenetically.
When he was done, Carson smiled and clapped politely but didn’t invite Richard over to the panel or even give him the big okay sign. Word came the next day that Carson was upset with 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 44
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Craig Tennis, saying, “You brought that kid on too early. He wasn’t ready.” Johnny thought he “needed a little seasoning” before he could come back.
Lewis was devastated. After three years of working day and night, he’d finally gotten his big break, and he’d blown it. He knew Carson was right. On TV, if you move around a lot, you look like an amateur. “I was like some escaped mental patient from a comedy jail,” he wailed to Lubetkin.
Lewis flew back to New York in a funk, knowing he was going to have to serve some time in purgatory before he got back on The Tonight Show. He returned to headlining at the Improv and watched as two former headliner pals of his scored big in Los Angeles.
Chico and the Man and Good Times were smash hits out of the box, making Freddie Prinze and Jimmie Walker the breakout stars of the 1974 television season. Their characters’ trademark expressions—“It’s not my job” in the case of Prinze’s Chico and
“Dy-no-mite” from Walker’s J. J. character—entered the American lexicon, picked up and repeated by millions of young viewers.
The word quickly went out from the TV networks to all Hollywood agents and production companies: If you want a show on the air in the 1975 season, then bring us your young and hungry stand-up comedians.
With that, the Great California Comedy Rush was on in ear -
nest, and few would be able to resist its pull. Not even Budd Friedman and the Improv.
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Tom, Dave, and George
America’s only black-and-white stand-up comedy team broke up in early 1975 when Tim Reid told Tom Dreesen that he needed to strike out on his own. Dreesen probably should have seen it coming, but he didn’t. He was devastated and scared. He had a wife and three small children to support (ages four, seven, and ten), and without Tim, he had no act; he was just another white comic with barely five minutes of material.
As he sat downing beer after beer in his favorite Chicago hangout, the Sulky, Drees
en pondered his choices. He either had to find a new black partner or come up with an hour’s worth of new material, which could take months, even a year. Or he could do what his wife wanted him to do: give up his comedy dream and take a steady, stay-in-town job in a local factory. He pushed his beer across the bar and got up off the stool.
“Is that it, Tommy? ” the bartender asked. “Are you quitting for the night? ”
“No, I’m quitting for good,” Dreesen replied. He was referring to the alcohol, not to comedy. He’d made up his mind. He was going to go it alone, and he didn’t want anything to get in the way.
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Tim and Tom’s last appearance together was at a club in Houston. The split was amicable. (Reid soon gained fame as the pimped-out disc jockey Venus Flytrap in the TV series WKRP in Cincinnati.) Dreesen hopped a plane from Houston to Los Angeles, where the twin beacons of The Tonight Sh ow and the Comedy Store beck-oned. He told his wife he’d only be gone for two weeks, just enough time to establish a beachhead, and then he’d be back for her and the kids.
He hustled up free lodging by house-sitting for a girl singer he knew, Pat Hollis, who was going on the road for a few weeks. For transportation, he used his thumb, hitchhiking from Hollis’s house in West LA to the Comedy Store. He’d been there before, when he and Reid played the Los Angeles Playboy Club in 1973, so he knew the drill. On his first Monday night in town, he lined up with all the other hopefuls on the sidewalk in front of the club. It didn’t matter that he’d been a working comic for nearly six years.
He had to prove his worth with five minutes of material in front of Mitzi Shore. If he passed muster, then he could use the Comedy Store stage as a springboard to Carson. If he didn’t, then he could always be a factory worker in Chicago. No pressure or anything.
It took him a month of Mondays and every day in between to get an audition with Shore. “Well, you’re funny, and you’ve got some polish from working before,” she said (he had never heard such a voice). “We can use you here.”