Comedy Land

Stand-Update

2011-02-28T16:13:00.005-07:00

BOOKS: First One Digital Publishing has published Dick Gregory’s 1964 autobiography, “Nigger,” as an electronic edition for the first time.

Sally Wade, the parter of the late George Carlin, will share the decade she spent with Carlin in her book, “The George Carlin Letters: The Permanent Courtship of Sally Wade.” The book is due March 8.

Gilbert Gottfried’s first book, “Rubber Balls and Liquor,” is scheduled to hit stores April 26. St. Martin’s Press is the publisher. Gottfried will make stops in New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco to promote his book.

Brian McKim and fellow comedian (and wife) Traci Skene, the duo behind the long-running website sheckymagazine.com, are writing “The Comedy Bible: The Complete Resource for Aspiring Comedians.” Barron’s Educational Series has a Sept. 1 publication date. Both McKim and Skene appeared in season seven of NBC’s “Last Comic Standing,” with McKim making it into the semifinals.

Chelsea Handler will mark the publication of her fourth book, “Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me,” with a 19-stop tour of the same name beginning May 10 in Boston. Brad Wollack, Josh Wolf and Heather McDonald, regulars on “Chelsea Lately,” will join her on the tour. “Lies” is the first book to appear under her own publishing imprint, Borderline Amazing.

Comedian — and actor, writer and director — Albert Brooks has a first novel due out May 10 from St. Martin’s Press: “2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America.”

Gallery has signed publishing contracts with Louis C.K. and Joe Rogan, but don’t look for their books to hit the shelves until June 2012. Louis C.K.’s is still untitled, but Rogan’s is to be called “I Thought I Was Supposed to Be the High One.”

AUDIO: Lisa Lampenelli, the Queen of Mean, will release her latest CD, “Tough Love,” on April 5 on the Warner label.

Uproar Entertainment is experimenting with the release of comedy albums on vinyl. If enough buyers grab the first two releases, look for Uproar to press more albums in the future. Brian Regan’s first CD, “Brian Regan Live,” and National Lampoon’s “That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick” have a May 3 release date.

TV: IFC has ordered a season season of David Cross’ series “The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret.” Cross created the series, and writes and stars in it as well.

“John Oliver’s New York Stand-Up Show” returns for a second season on March 24 on Comedy Central with “Daily Show” regular John Oliver playing host to a roster of talented comedians.

Comedy Central on March 26 will air a tribute to the late comedian Greg Giraldo.

Public television stations will air specials highlighting two classic comedies during March. “SCTV Golden Classics” and “The Best of Laugh-in” will be shown on various PBS stations around the country.

Cable channel WE tv is fast becoming the place for comedians who want reality shows. The channel already is home to Joan Rivers’ “Joan and Melissa: Joan Knows Best” and Tammy Pescatelli’s “A Stand Up Mother.” WE tv has put “Sinbad’s Family Affair” on its schedule beginning April 12. The hour-long series will run for six episodes.

Roseanne Arnold is returning to TV with her second try at a reality show. Lifetime Television has ordered 16 half-hour episodes of an as-yet-untitled show that captures her life running a 40-acre macadamia farm in Hawaii. ABC canceled Arnold’s last reality show, “The Real Roseanne Show,” after airing two of the planned 13 episodes.

Kathy Griffin, late of Bravo’s “My Life on the D-List,” returns to the cable channel in mid-March for her latest special — this makes No. 11 — called “Kathy Griffin: 50 and Not Pregnant.” She plans to make three more specials for Bravo this year, one each quarter.

BROADWAY: Griffin has eight performances scheduled for her first theatrical production, “Kathy Griffin Wants a Tony.” The one-woman show will run from March 11-19 at the Belasco Theatre.

Rosie O’Donnell would like to return to Broadway, but not in as dramatic a fashion as when she brought Boy George’s musical “Taboo” to the stage. She reportedly lost $10 million on that 2003 venture. This time, O’Donnell is lobbying for the role of orphan wrangler Miss Hannigan if James Lapine directs “Annie” on Broadway in 2012. A more definite project: O’Donnell returns to television in September, this time on the fledgling Oprah Winfrey Network. She says the show will look more like Winfrey’s former show than hers. “It’s not going to be a bunch of guests coming in to promote a movie. It’s going to be a single topic, one hour, similar to hers. Although, you know, nobody can come close to doing what she actually did.”

DVD: Alonzo Bodden’s “Who’s Paying Attention?” is due out March 1 from Entertainment One. Also on the release schedule: Colin Mochrie’s and Brad Sherwood’s “Colin & Brad: Two Man Group” (March 8 from Image Entertainment), Aries Spears’ “Hollywood, Look I'm Smiling” (March 22 from Vivendi Entertainment), Whitney Cummings’ “Money Shot” (April 12 from Image Entertainment), and Angelo Tsarouchas’ “Bigger is Better” (April 26 from Lol Comedy).

“Who’s the Caboose” premiered in 1999 at the Aspen Comedy Festival, but hasn’t had a video release in the United States until now. The mockumentary follows Sarah Silverman as she makes a move from New York to Los Angeles to try to land a part in a TV show. New Video releases “Who’s the Caboose?” March 29. Sam Seder directed and co-wrote the movie, and the follow-up TV series called “Pilot Season,” which also starred Silverman. “Pilot Season” aired in 2004 on the now-defunct Trio cable network.

FILM: The documentary on Jonathan Winters, “Certifiably Jonathan,” continues to make its way across the country. Between March 2 and April 27, the movie will open in Irvington, N.Y., Scottsdale, Ariz., Rosendale, N.Y., Modesto, Calif., Memphis, Tenn., Los Angeles, St. Johnsbury, Vt., Taos, N.M., and Las Cruces, N.M.

FESTIVALS: Aspen will try once again to hold onto a comedy festival, this one called the Aspen Laff Festival. The festival will be March 16-19 at the Wheeler Opera House. On the roster: Christopher Titus, Jackie Kashian, Caroline Rhea, Stewart Hoff, Darryl Lenox, Auggie Smith and Roy Wood Jr., among others. The Aspen RooftopComedy Festival lasted for three years before calling it a wrap last summer. Before that, the US Comedy Arts Festival – now in Las Vegas and known as The Comedy Festival – had a run from 1985 through 2007.

Stand-Update

2010-11-19T12:04:00.012-07:00

ON THE SHELVES: Roseanne Barr turns essayist for her latest book, “Roseannearchy: Dispatches from the Nut Farm,” out Jan. 4 from Simon and Schuster imprint Gallery.

HarperCollins has a Nov. 22 sale date for Cheech Marin's new book, “The Chimichanga Chronicles,” with a Spanish version due out March 8.

Steve Harvey's newest advice book, “Straight Talk, No Chaser: How to Find, Keep, and Understand a Man” is scheduled for a Dec. 7 publication, with an initial print run of 750,000 copies.

“Bossypants,” Tina Fey's first foray into publishing, is scheduled to hit stores April 5.

The paperback edition of Sarah Silverman's “The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee,”

comes out March 8.
Demetri Martin's first book, “This is a Book,” is due out April 25, with essays, doodles, drawings and a self-portrait on the cover.

Chelsea Handler will write the forward for “Lies Chelsea Handler Told Me,” featuring as-told-by essays from her friends and family. The book is coming out in May from her own publishing imprint, Borderline Amazing Productions.

Paul Reiser, the author of “Couplehood” and “Babyhood,” continues his story in “Familyhood,” due out May 3.

ON THE AIR: The new six-episode series “Strange Days with Bob Saget” makes its debut Nov. 30 on A&E. Saget, who's also executive producer, will find himself riding with bikers, rush a fraternity and hunt for Bigfoot, among other experiences. The half-hour show is at 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific.

ON AUDIO: Comedy Central Records releases Dane Cook's “I Did My Best: Greatest Hits” on Nov. 22, and on Jan. 11 releases Louis CK's latest CD, “Hilarious.” The DVD release of “Hilarious” is due out Jan. 11 as well.

Image Entertainment releases the seven-CD audio version of Jeff Dunham’s new book, “All By My Selves: Walter, Peanut, Achmed, and Me,” on Jan. 11.

ON DVD: The documentary “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” is for sale beginning Dec. 14. That’s the same day her debut 1967 album, “Joan Rivers Presents Mr. Phyllis & Other Funny Stories,” gets a CD release.

Louie Anderson

2010-09-07T15:42:00.009-06:00

Louie Anderson spends his days far from his native Minnesota, with good reason. It’s in Las Vegas where Anderson has made his mark, notably with a theater named for him at the Palace Station Casino.

Anderson opened his new show, “Louie LOL,” in the 250-seat theater on Sept. 7.

The author of three books, and creator and star of the Emmy Award-winning animated series “Life with Louie,” Anderson’s career got a boost in 1981 when he met and began writing jokes for Henny Youngman. A year later, he was off to Los Angeles, where he struggled to make a trio of career goals come true. Since then, he’s achieved all those goals and more.

Congratulations on the new theater. That must be a big deal.

Yeah, it’s nice. It’s the thing that I’ve been wanting for a while and found a situation that would work out for me and would work out for them, so it was a nice mutual thing.

What’s involved when you have your name on a theater? Do you have proprietorship? Do you have responsibility for who’s there when you’re not there?

I have a producing partner, Joe Sanfelippo. We have a deal with the hotel that we’re running the room, so to speak. They like to know everyone that we’re having there, just as a courtesy more than anything else. And all big corporations have a point of view so if I booked someone who didn’t have their point of view that might be a problem but it’s unlikely with me that that’s going to happen. But basically what it is is it gives me a chance to showcase people I think are funny. There’s prestigue in it, but I’m the first headliner they’ve really had come to the Station on a permanent basis and I’m thrilled about it. I’ve been playing Vegas for 25 years and I feel it’s like my home away from home.

Out of an average year, how often are you in Vegas?

I would say throughout my whole career that Vegas was at the very minimum a third of my year was spent in Vegas at any given time. I worked 11 years at Bally’s and several years and at the Desert Inn. I had a real home at Bally’s and I had a real home at MGM there with the Excalibur. Now I feel like this is it. This is a permanent home for me. There probably won’t be another Vegas thing for me after this. I think this is it. I don’t see myself going to a different hotel or a different situation at all.

Do you have a contract for how many years you’ll have this theater there?

Yeah, I have an open-ended. You know how contracts are. Nowadays you have a year-to-year contract, like a five-year with a year-to-year deal. But in Vegas, if things aren’t going well, you’re out. I think Terry Fator has a 10-year deal, but if he stops selling tickets that thing would change in a hurry. There’s always a mutual thing with Vegas. It’s a different kind of place. It’s not like Broadway.

Was playing Vegas always one of your goals starting out?

Yeah. I had three main goals. I remember them. Get on the Tonight Show. Get my name up on the Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip. They put your name up on the wall permanently. And to become a headliner in Vegas. I was really lucky. I got on the Tonight Show. It took me a long time to get on the Tonight Show. And I’ve always loved working in Vegas because I have an act that people can enjoy. People from Iowa and people from New York City hopefully can enjoy the same show. My cartoon plays overseas now and a lot of the English-speaking countries where it plays people are coming to see my show because they grew up on the cartoon over there. I’ll get somebody from the Netherlands and several people from England because they’re showing my specials over there. It’s always amazing to me. It’s a nice thing. Comedy is a bigger playing field than it used to be and the world is also shrinking. There’s lots of people coming from other countries to Vegas.

Do you think people who come to Vegas will be looking to see your show specifically?

Two things happen in Vegas. You always ask what’s a good show to see from the cabdriver and you ask something else. You ask who’s here that I already like. You have fan-driven shows and there’s always a show, like people in Vegas go see every show usually, if they hear good things about it. I think word of mouth plays into about 30 or 40 percent of the tickets in Vegas. If you don’t have a good show, people will talk about, say it’s not a good show. If you have a good show, you’ll build your audience. It’ll get bigger. That’s my goal every night is to give people a great show so they’ll forget what their troubles are. That’s always my goal, for that 75 minutes you’re in my showroom with me that you’re going to have a good solid laugh and you’re going to forget your troubles for at least part of that time.

Are you going to reach out to cabdrivers?

Yeah. For the first month I’m going to take cabs to work and back.

Is having your own theater going to interfere with traveling and touring?

You know, I’m probably going to travel and tour a little less.

I’m excited about the opera house up there because I’m always wanting people to get performance places alive and not to tear them down because, in my mind, it holds the spirits of all the great performers who ever performed there.

Is the show the same?

I’m rehearsing. This is the first time I’ve ever rehearsed my show on a regular basis. I’m in a brand new showroom. I want to get the beats right. I want the show to feel great. I’ve put some new elements in that I hadn’t done before, so I’m looking forward to that.

What sort of new elements?

In two different parts of the show I’m highlighting my dad in one and my mom in another. I become them in a sense, but not in an overly theatrical way. Just a few personal things I think people will enjoy and will like to see. Just a glimpse into what my parents were like.

You said you had three goals initially. Of those three, was there one that was the most important for you to meet?

Well, it would have been rough to never have gotten on Johnny Carson. That would have been a rough one. That would have been extremely disappointing.

Not everyone these days knows how important that was to comedians.

I always explain it to them like if they were on “American Idol.” It’s that type of thing. Or in the top final of “America’s Got Talent.” One of those type shows, but not just trying out but making it. If you made it to the process of getting on the Tonight Show, everybody in show business watched the Tonight Show along with the public. So they were interested in who Johnny Carson was highlighting and introducing to the world. I still remember that day when he said “Making his national television debut tonight, on the Tonight Show, Louie Anderson.” I knew right then that was one of the biggest things. In that minute, not even minute, that 30 seconds from him introducing me to me hitting my mark out on stage, I now had my career and my destiny in my hands. I knew if I scored that night I would be well on my way to having a much different life than I had at that moment walking out there.

Obviously it did change for you, but in what respect did things change?

If you just want to take a simple thing like monetarily, I had struggled and made a few hundred dollars a week doing comedy. When I got the Tonight Show, I made a minimum of $1,000 a night doing comedy. That’s like hitting the lotto in a sense. And NBC gave me a holding deal. It was just an automatic. Automatically, everything changed.

I imagine things changed within yourself as well, with any doubts about whether you could make it erased once you got to that level.

Yeah, of course. I always thought I would do well as a comedian. Maybe I was egotistical. I don’t know. Maybe I was superconfident. But I had worked really hard on that set to do on the Tonight Show. In fact, my first five sets were ready to go. I always thought it was important to be prepared. I always tell comics now that I talk to, “You know, you can’t wait long enough to become successful. When you’re successful, the more prepared you are the most successful you’ll stay.” Now sometimes comics think if they get five minutes and get on a show they’ll get a TV show and the rest will be a home run. I think that works about one in a million.

You’ve been mentoring young comedians with your Stand-Up Boot Camp. How did that come about?

I joined Kyle Cease, who’d been doing it. I said I have all this information. I should put it to use. A lot of people helped me and gave me some information. I always thought I would have appreciated a little more stuff that would have been helpful to me as a comic growing up. One of the things I try to impart on these comics is to stay out of other business and be smarter about what you’re doing. I made a lot of mistakes. Comics tend to be egotistical and I think sometimes I got in my own way.

Can you give me some examples of that?

I thought I knew everything. I probably should have taken more acting classes, and trusted other writers to help me develop my voice and listened more than I talked to myself. I think I would have been better off. Maybe I would have been even more successful had I been more prepared to act. Or maybe I should have taken some improv classes. Maybe I should have done more work on myself as a person. I come from a very dysfunctional family so trust was a giant issue. So maybe I should have figured some of those things and done some hard work there. I try to impart some of that. And also I always worked really hard as a comic and I just want them to know that none of these comics that they see out there that are really successful walked it in. They worked really hard. Comics really work hard on developing and honing a point of view that you think sounds really natural. I would imagine it’s that way for everyone. I remember Rodney Dangerfield, right up to the time he would perform a joke on TV, would be asking you what you thought of it and do you think it could be better. “Do you think it’s right? Do I have it good?”

He would ask comics, because comics might have a take on it that would make it a better joke. Rodney knew a great joke, but he knew a great joke -- like all of us -- could be better. Like under every great joke is an even better joke. It’s very rare that if you dig you won’t find a better joke underneath the joke that you’re settling for.

Are the comedians you’re working for interested, eager to hear this advice?

They’re very, very eager and interested. The ones who are able to capitalize on it are the ones who go out and take the big chances. It’s scary as heck to do standup comedy. I don’t think it’s a very easy thing to do, and I don’t think anybody who does it isn’t brave. I think it’s a brave thing to do; to get up every time and think the things you are going to say are going to entertain people is pretty brazen. So I always tell people you should respect yourself for doing what you’re doing. Because it is a good thing. It is a noble thing. It’s something you can’t take credit for, except in the laughter. You can’t go I’m a great comic. You can’t tell people I’m really funny. The audience is under the idea that you’re just naturally funny, that you didn’t really work at it. A lot of people don’t want to know what you went through. Just like you don’t want to know what somebody went through to write a song; you just want to enjoy the song. But sometimes you hear a song and you go, wow, that was not an easy deal right there. That song came from some real pain. And I think that the comedy comes from a real place too. And I think that really great comedy comes from the searching of one’s self and one’s good and bad points and one’s life.

There’s the old cliché that dysfunctional people make great comedians and you obviously have had a rough life, but at what point did you think you could be funny? What made you jump into that?

People always laughed when I talked. People would say you’re so funny and I’d go well I’m being serious. And they’d laugh harder when I said that. I thought, huh, I wonder what’s funny about me. I didn’t know it innately. I come from a funny family. People all talk like I do, my voice is not distinctive inside my family. And people always know who’s related to me because they sound just like I do. I think that what happened for is I’ve always been a kind of personable person and as a fat kid I learned how to make people laugh instead of getting beat up. It worked really well and I was really a sharp-tongued guy who people, maybe they were a little afraid of what I was going to say but I tried never to be really mean about it but I wanted them to know that I was not afraid.

Were you actually afraid to go on stage for the first time?

I was a little nervous, but not really afraid for some weird reason. Kind of excited by it and enthralled by it. I’m a Norwegian and Swedish, so we’re conquerors by nature.

You were in the orbits of some of the comedy greats. Henny Youngman and Rodney Dangerfield. What do you learn from being with them, around them?

That you’re just as funny as they are (laughs). I’m just kidding. That they’re human beings. That’s the biggest relief I felt when I got to spend time with those people, that they are human beings. That was a giant relief to me because I had them up on pretty high pedestals. That they weren’t perfect, but they were really... all the comedians I’ve ever met were very vulnerable. I never met a comedian who wasn’t vulnerable like I am vulnerable. And it made me feel like part of something. It made me feel like I was a part of a group of people. I belonged there. And to have people like Henny Youngman and Rodney Dangerfield and Johnny Carson and Bob Hope think I was really funny was really a good feeling. It was like meeting I guess your mentor in one way. Like meeting the parents you never had, the family you never had. Comedians, as rough as we are to each other, are pretty protective of each other at the same time. What I noticed about those guys were they were always funny. They really made me laugh all the time. And they also, all of them were deep. All those guys were concerned with the people in their lives and in their family and always asked me how I was doing. They were gentle souls. They were good people.

It’s great that you had that experience with them.

It was really great. I was really lucky. Especially to know Rodney so well and to be thought of fondly by Johnny Carson always felt wonderful.

Rodney got almost a generation of comedians started with his Young Comedians specials, which you were on as well.

Absolutely.

You’re meeting all these young comedians who are trying to make it or become more successful. Now that you have your own theater, do you have a plan to give some of these guys a break?

Yeah, we definitely are going to have a Stand-Up Boot Camp night, a new person’s night. When somebody stops by my show that’s a comedian, I can’t help myself but to invite them up to do a few minutes. Every comedian wants to show off. Some comedians don’t want to, but rarely. I remember in Minneapolis we were performing and we really thought we were great. He was appearing at the Carlton Celebrity Room. We invited him back to our club afterward. He stopped and we all performed for him, like three or four of them. I went on last and I felt like I’d done the best I could have ever done. He got up and just made it really apparent of how gigantically great he was and what a big star he was. It was an automatic erasure of all of our acts (laughs). It wasn’t done in any kind of malicious way. He just went up, did five minutes, or 10 minutes, crushed the crowd. Then he did a little shout out to us. “These guys are good. You should come and see them. They’re good.” Just the nicest little thing. He hung out with us. He was a very, very sweet man.

How did you first meet him?

That night. I said, “Let’s go see Rodney. He’s going to be in town.” I knew he liked Scotch so I said let’s buy him a nice bottle of — what we thought was expensive Scotch — Glenlivit. I don’t even know if it is; I don’t drink. We brought that and believe it or not we brought all these giant balloons and we sent them back for him, like welcome and we love you, Rodney, and all that. He was very touched by that. He was very, very touched that we all came down to see him and he sent for us to come backstage. He’d bring it up all the time. For several years he would bring it up. “Man, you brought me that Scotch. That was nice of you.” I never forgot that. It really did affect him. Maybe nobody ever does anything like that, but as Minnesotans we’re nice people.

You and other comedians were doing this?

Yeah.

So he called me when I got to Hollywood and said I’m doing this thing. I know you’ve already done the Tonight Show, but I would really like you to headline the Young Comedians special that I’m doing. I’ll put you on last. And I was thinking, oh, I’d rather go on third or fourth.

Why is that?

Because 10 comedians, the crowd’s seen enough. It was a real monumental night, and I was nervous. About the fifth person that went on was Sam Kinison. Then it didn’t really matter what else happened that night, because people saw something absolutely brand new. Absolutely something they’d never seen before, comedy wise. Now that show did me a lot of good even so, but I even knew that night Sam Kinison had arrived. I watched the audience in their awe. Of course I had been working with Sam a long time. He and I had been working at the Comedy Store a long time up til then. We’d seen each other a lot of times and we were friendly. And good friends, really. I just knew that he was a giant star at that moment. That nobody had ever seen anybody like that. Everybody did well in that show. Don’t get me wrong. It was great for everyone. People still bring it up to me. But that was the kind of Rodney was. He wanted the world to know that there were great comics. He wanted to give people the break he never had. He was a generous people that way. He helped everybody.

What year did you meet him, when you gave him that Scotch?

Probably 1979. I don’t know. When was “Caddyshack”? It was after that.

I read you have a Showtime special coming up later this year.

Yeah. “Louie Anderson Presents”.

And whom are you going to be presenting?

It’s four comedians. It’s Lucas Seely. Chuck Roy. John Wilson. And Al Jackson.

How did you pick these four?

Chuck I’ve worked with a few times in Denver and he was at our last boot camp. Lukas Seely, he’s a boot camper. John Wilson, he’s a boot camper. Al Jackson, he’s a Florida guy. I just liked who he was. He has a great, sweet way of how he does things. It’ll be on in December, I think. It’s full circle, my life.

Is this going to be the first of a series of “Louie Anderson Presents”?

I would hope so. I would hope we’d be able to do more with that. I know somebody’s going to come out of boot camp and be a bigger star than I ever was.

Is that going to bother you?

No. I’d be thrilled. I don’t compete with other comics because I already know I’m the greatest (laughs). No, the great thing is I’ve always been very lucky. I’m not the kind of comic you compete with, because people might watch my act and say I can’t do that anyway. That’s not me. Because I’m not a joke-joke-joke-joke guy. Although in all my routines there are tons of jokes. I hide them very well. I’ve never been competitive with other comics. I’ve always been the first guy to go up to whether it’s Eddie Murphy or someone else and say, “Here’s a take you might use.” Because I love the idea of comedy.

Dan Schlissel of Stand Up! Records

2010-09-03T09:48:00.006-06:00

Lewis Black admits to being practically speechless when he won a Grammy Award for best comedy album in 2007 for “The Carnegie Hall Performance.”

“My blood sugar dropped,” he says. “All I wanted was a sandwich. I had prepared nothing to say.”

But what he did manage to get out resonated with Dan Schlissel, who produced Black’s CD and was listening to the acceptance speech via a streaming audio feed. Black made a point of thanking Schlissel, “who had the nerve to start producing my CDs before anybody else.”

“It was exhilarating,” Schlissel says. “I saw myself in the mirror; believe me, it wasn’t that pretty of a look, but I was overjoyed.”

The founder of independent comedy label Stand Up! Records, Schlissel has emerged as a key player in the world of recorded comedy, with a 65-item catalog to date, including a handful of vinyl pressings and DVDs. The online Punchline Magazine included three of Schlissel’s CDs on its list of the 10 best comedy albums of 2009: Matt Kirshen’s “I Guess We’ll Never Know” (No. 8), Doug Stanhope’s “From Across the Street” (No. 6) and Marc Maron’s “Final Engagement” (No. 3).

Black released his first three CDs — “The White Album,” “Revolver” and “The End of the Universe” — on the Stand Up! Records label, but now records for Comedy Central Records. Schlissel recorded and produced four of Black’s albums for Comedy Central.

Schlissel, Black says, “is meticulous to the point of insanity. He is a perfectionist. He is an innovative thinker in regarding packaging of a CD. He is excellent at culling the best version of multiple performances. He brought in a sound genius to work with us, named John Machnik, whose work is impeccable. And Dan works his ass off.”

Black says he tried without success to snag a recording contract with other labels before meeting Schlissel. “Dan found me way before I broke out.”

Stanhope had soured on recorded comedy after the release of an earlier CD, and “after that I had no desire to get into contract, but Dan worked out a deal that was mutually beneficial in a way that I haven't seen any other company offer an artist.”

If Schlissel was first to put Black on the national stage, it was his desire to work with Black that led to the creation of Stand Up! Records. Now 39, Schlissel began recording indie bands while at the University of Nebraska (he graduated in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in physics).

Schlissel’s original label was called ism, and he recorded an eclectic collection of artists he’d come in contact with while serving on the university’s program council on its concert and dance committee and managing an independent record store.

“My music label went from singer-songwriter to Slipknot, to hip-hop to blues,” Schlissel says. “There was no focus, so no one knew what they were coming to see or get when they got one of my records.” He noticed that successful labels, such as Sub Pop or Touch and Go, “defined what they were doing and they stuck within that definition pretty well.” (Schlissel renamed his label Ismist, after getting a cease-and-desist letter from the band Ism.)

“Sub Pop was big at the time, Discord was doing well — all these labels,” Schlissel says. “So I decided to give it a shot and the first record paid itself off in two months. I fooled myself into doing that for a good number of years, with various results. It seemed like I was always an inch away from something big, like I put out the record that gave the Saddle Creek record label its name. I distributed the first Slipknot CD. There are all these things where I was an inch away from breaking big, but things always seemed to conspire against me. Six years later, 1998, I’m sick of maintaining crappy-paying jobs in Lincoln, Nebraska, got laid off from the last one right before I came up here [to Minneapolis] to see Bauhas’ reunion tour. Liked it here, picked up a newspaper, saw a couple of ads, sent out a couple of resumes, got a job here that doubled my pay, moved here Thanksgiving of 1998.”

Schlissel’s commute was a long one, and he spent his time listening to Howard Stern in the morning and whatever was on that station in the afternoon. Driving home in March 1999, Schlissel heard an advertisement that Black would be performing in town. By then, Black had been attracting attention from his rant-filled appearances on Comedy Central’s faux news program “The Daily Show,” but Schlissel was already familiar with Black’s work from years earlier.

“There was this show on Comedy Central called ‘Tompkins Square.’ It was hosted by Jeffrey Ross. In one of the episodes, Lewis was the last comic. He spoke with such a firebrand way. It wasn’t political. He was talking about how New York was a crazy town and there was a big blizzard that Al Roker had gotten wrong and how it was so quiet and he didn’t move to New York because he wanted quiet. He moved there because it was the loudest city in the world and he didn’t want to hear the voices in his head. I told my fiancé about him. One day he was on and we both saw him. He became that guy. ‘That guy’ is on ‘The Daily Show.’ I love ‘that guy.’ I kept saying I’d love to work with that guy, he’s so brilliant, but I’ll never get to meet him while I live here in Lincoln, Nebraska.”

When Schlissel heard Black was appearing that night, he raced home and left his car running in the apartment complex parking lot while he grabbed a couple of CDs and called the club to get directions.

“I went down to the club and wrote him this note saying, ‘I’m a big fan and I’ve been a fan since “Tompkins Square.” To me, you’re the living embodiment of Carlin and Hicks and Lenny Bruce. This is the progression and I see you in that progression. And even though I don’t work with comedy and these bands aren’t representative of what I care about right now, I’d really like to have the opportunity to work with you.’ And then I handed that off to the seater at the club. I kind of assumed comedy clubs were like rock clubs — you never got to see the main act because they’re on the way out the door to their bus or a van, back to their hotel after a show.”

After the show, Schlissel spotted Black drinking at the adjoining bar and made his pitch in person. “I explained the whole story and he said that Comedy Central and Warner Bros. had both passed on wanting to work with him, so why not? He and I were talking through his management for a few months, and then right before Thanksgiving of 1999 we recorded in Madison, Wisconsin.”

“I showed up on the second day of recording with my wife and Lewis was just floored how good things were turning out,” Schlissel says. “We had dinner together and he was like ‘I want to keep working with you. I want to get you a contract signed. We’re going to do this so that eventually you won’t have to do this crappy tech support job that you’re doing.’ He got up to go to the bathroom and I looked at my wife and I said, ‘Did I just hear all that or am I hallucinating?’ I was wiping tears of joy out of the corner of my eyes and trying to compose myself before he got back from the bathroom. It was like this fantasy thing was playing out.”

Black’s debut CD, “The White Album,” came out in June 2000, with one glitch. One track was missing from the original pressing.

“I remember I was so stressed out that I burst a blood vessel in my eye,” Schlissel says.

On the Ismist label, Schlissel released “The White Album” and thanks to Lewis’ connections, hooked up with other comedians. Black’s managers also managed Stanhope, and Stanhope’s publicist also handled Jimmy Shubert. Schlissel released “Sicko” and “Something to Take the Edge Off” for Stanhope and “Animal Instincts” for Shubert.

Those first four comedy CDs, Schlissel says, paid off the previous eight years of debt he’d built up running a music label.

Initially, though, Schlissel didn’t have much hope for life beyond “The White Album.”

“I expected that it would probably be one of the best sellers my little label did, and my label would probably wither and die after that,” he says. “I really expected that Lewis would be right off to bigger and better things because I thought he was as big he is now back then. Turns out he wasn’t but he was happy to keep working with me. The expectation was one comedy record and out. It was just going to be an experiment because I’d done so many other types of things that never seemed to gel or take off.”

Black’s second release for Schlissel was “Revolver,” a 20-minute collection of outtakes from “The White Album” recording session. The cover shows Black with a prop gun in his mouth. “The End of the Universe” was next, and became the label’s best-selling recording so far.

At the time, Schlissel says, a label could expect to make its money back after selling 200 copies of a CD. To date, “The End of the Universe” has sold more than 45,000 copies. The first 30,000 copies were sold without a distribution system in place.

Schlissel says his best experience was recording “The End of the Universe” in Atlanta. “It was great and it was bad because we recorded two weeks before Sept. 11. So automatically at that point there was a lot of material that we couldn’t release in the big welling of patriotic support of the president, which was the appropriate response of the nation right then. So we waited six months until Lewis was back at the same venue and recorded again and that album was edited together from two weeks’ worth of material. But that was the best of it because at that point in time there was not a better room in America than the Punchline. It was the right layout for the audience. The construction of the room was the best to reflect properly to where the mike locations were; it was the easiest place to wire up to. The management and staff were super great to work with. To me, that was the best.”

Schlissel’s first exposure to the world of standup comedy came in 1983, when he saw the Eddie Murphy special “Delirious” on HBO.

“I was in junior high school when it came out,” he says. “One of the first things for me was that it was the first comedy routine I had heard that was aimed at adults, so it opened a new world of subject matter and language to me. It struck me right at that age where you are defining who you are and what you like. I think in that regard, it steered me toward things like Rodney Dangerfield, George Carlin, Sam Kinison and then Bill Hicks, pretty much in that order, which then set me on my path for what I do now.”

Like when he first connected with Lewis Black, Schlissel seeks out the comedians he wants to work with, although Maria Bamford was an exception to his rule. Bamford was interested in recording a CD, and the manager of the club where she was appearing called Schlissel.

“So I went in. I met Maria Bamford. She was nice,” he says. “I had new equipment I was going to start recording with the next week. I figured this was a good way to test out all the new equipment and see if it works. So I set it up. I offered to do it for free and while I was recording I was like, ‘Wow, this woman’s great.’ I kept her in the loop and we kept talking and sure enough, she let me do the album. But generally, I have to hear the comic first and know who they are. I don’t have to know them personally, but I have to know who they are.”

Schlissel released Bamford’s first two CDs — “The Burning Bridges Tour” and “How to WIN!” — as well as her first DVD, called “Plan B.”

Stand Up! Records has released a handful of DVDs, but the company’s mainstay is CDs. Editing the material recorded over two or three nights down to a release Schlissel likes takes about 40 hours. “I am pretty retentive about pretty much everything. I try and make the CD seem like it's one show.”

Being a record producer comes with a bag of worries, Schlissel says. “I’m worried about if the material’s ready, first and foremost. I’m worried about the comic’s attitude going on stage. I want them to think they’re going to knock it out of the park. I don’t want anything defeatist, because that comes across, and the audience feels it. I’m worried about microphone placement. I’m worried about if all the gear arrived and is working properly. I’m worried about a lot of technical stuff.”

Kelly Carlin-McCall

2009-12-30T17:19:00.008-07:00

Kelly Carlin-McCall has stepped into the spotlight once dominated by her father, George Carlin, who died in June 2008. With his passing, Kelly’s accepted honors for her father, first in November 2008 with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, and in February with a Grammy for Best Comedy Album, for “It’s Bad For Ya.” Now she’s speaking on behalf of his posthumous autobiography, “Last Words,” which Tony Hendra co-authored.

As “Last Words” and Carlin-McCall’s own words reveal, being George Carlin’s daughter wasn’t easy.

What was your role with the book? Did you do editing and proofreading?

Yeah, that’s pretty much what my role was. It really was Tony and my father’s project. I did some proofreading and just some accuracy checking. I had a few changes but for the most part we really wanted it to very much stay in my father’s words and let him be the one who gets to be the final editor, in some ways.

Were there things you’d rather have been left out of the book?

No, not really. I’ve written a bit about my own background. I’m actually working on a book of my own right now. I’d done a one-woman show 10 years ago where I talked about my own struggles with drugs and alcohol and crazy relationships. So no. I felt comfortable with what was in there.

What was your one-woman show called?

It was called “Driven to Distraction.” It was about how our parents and our culture distracts us, gives us a false sense of who we are because of just the way life is, how we have to survive. It was my past and how that kind of built up in my life. The bad choices I made in men.

Sounds like a very heavy topic.

And yet did it in a very light way. There was a real balance between the light and the dark. I’m not a standup comedian but, like my dad, I’m a real thinker and I think about life, this journey and what it’s all about.

I took great pains and went to great lengths to do a show that was in no way finger-pointing or blaming or victim-hood because that does not work for me at all, but I took a strong stand for myself in the show. It did change our relationship.

For the better, eventually?

Absolutely, because we became two equals, two peers, two adults with each other instead of me at times being the adult and him the child.

When I wrote my one-person show and when I gave it to him to read, although he was uncomfortable with it and said, “I don’t think I can be in the audience and in some ways I feel uncomfortable, I really respect you as an artist and I wouldn’t ask you to change a single word of it.” So there was an incredible equality that happened through that process for us.

What is the status of your book?

I’m working on an outline right now. I’d written about 50 pages of a memoir about five years ago. I ultimately put it on the shelf and said to myself this is really going to have to wait until dad goes, whenever that is, because I didn’t want to make him feel uncomfortable about it.

Interestingly enough, he put his own memoir on the shelf also until he died. I think that’s kind of the way he liked those things. I know he wanted to share his life and his journey but at the same time I think he was from a generation that wasn’t comfortable necessarily sharing a lot of their private life. And of course as we know from my dad, he didn’t share a lot of his private life. And that’s why this book is so revelatory and interesting for fans because he is so raw and honest about everything in his life in this book. It’s a gift that he left us all.

I’m working on the outline and trying to find my way into this book. This is not going to be the tell-all George Carlin’s daughter book. This is really my book and a book about my life and my journey, which includes both my mother and father. I’m very interested in the human journey and what it takes for us to find our true selves and our voices in the world. In some ways it’s about my dad because it really is about my struggle of being in the shadow and the journey that I’ve gone on to find my place as a person who has a voice.

There was some talk about a year ago of you working on an oral history of your father. Is that not going to happen?

We’ve been working on that. That has actually been put on the shelf for now. We decided to go with this project first. We really wanted his voice to be the first voice. When he had started the oral history we didn’t really know what would do with Tony’s manuscript and what he wanted to do. It became clear we wanted to put Tony and my father’s words out first. This other book, I think is going to be a great addition to this story my dad has put out because it will be a lot of those same experiences, but told through the voice of myself and his brother and his friends and colleagues and peers and people along the journey. We don’t have a date yet for that, but that is in the future.

How did you hear about your father’s death?

My husband called me. I was in Hawaii. I officiate weddings. Both my father and I had this funny thing we did. We were both ministers of this Universal Church of Life or something, whatever it’s called. He got this from the back of a Rolling Stone magazine in the ’70s and of course I got mine off the Internet. I was in Hawaii marrying another comedian, Craig Shoemaker and his wife Mika. I had spent a few days there and strangely enough I unplugged my cell phone for a few hours to get a massage and relax and take a nap.

My Dad had been rushed to the hospital that Sunday, the 22nd. My poor husband couldn’t get a hold of me for hours and was frantic and finally found me through Craig at the condos we were staying at. I pretty much knew because there was such a big deal about my husband trying to call me that something really bad had happened.

An incredible thing ended up happening the weekend before he died when I was in Hawaii. You know that story in the book about being in the Napili Kai and my parents are going at each with knives and I make them sit down and I write out a treaty, basically, is what we used to call it. The family treaty. So the weekend he died, I was in Maui and I went to the Napili Kai and I went back and walked along the property and walked where we had stayed. All of the pain and grief and anger -- all of that from that time in my life -- was completely gone. It was a miracle.

I called him on the way home from having this experience and told him about that. That was the last phone call we ever had. He died two days after that and it was a very poignant time we had on the phone together talking about all that stuff.

Your father, to me, seemed like he was someone who would be going forever. He was George Carlin, bigger than life.

And he believed that himself. He kept saying he was going to replace every part of his body.

Obviously, no one lives forever although his legacy certainly will be around for generations to come. But were your surprised, after all his heart attacks and problems over the years, that he finally was gone?

Yeah. I’d certainly been prepared for years. I’d literally been waiting for that phone call. Whenever the phone would ring in the middle of the night, you’d have to peel me off the ceiling for fear it was [his manager] Jerry Hamza calling and saying, “We’re at a hospital in Wichita and it doesn’t look good” or something. The last few years, he had been struggling with congestive heart failure. That had been a new wrinkle in his heart disease. Unless you can get a heart transplant, it’s one that you don’t recover from. I think it was 2006 when he did his second-to-last HBO show, he looked very puffy in that show and people could see it. It looked like he’d aged 10 years. That happened pretty quickly. There was a four-month period where that aging happened. His heart was really struggling. That HBO special, he was actually in pretty much full congestive heart failure. He should have been in the hospital and actually wound up going in the hospital after that.

You can never fully prepare for the day it happens. I just remember thinking when my husband told me on the phone -- in the middle of this big emotional reaction I was having – “Wow, so this is the day. This is what this day looks like.” It’s a very difficult thing. Surprised about that particular day? Yes. Shocked that it happened that year? No.

What do you miss most about having your father around?

I think it’s a two-fold answer, one of which is I really want to know what the fuck he’s thinking about this world right now. Because every day it gets stranger. I know he would revel in that. Then personally, I just miss my dad. My whole life is completely changed 180 degrees. I miss his being my dad, being someone I go and have coffee with, someone I shoot the shit with, to get to see and hang out with. He used to take care of his career. And now I take care of it. So that’s a little strange too.

I would imagine that he left volumes of ideas, notes, paperwork, archives behind. What’s going to happen with all of that material?

We don’t know yet. We’re still dealing with closing up all the stuff you have to after a death, so we’re just sitting on it all right now. There are a lot of ideas and notes and half thought-out things and lists and folders on this computer of his. What that could turn into at some point, I do not know. I don’t even know what I might want it to turn into. I’m assuming there will be something at some point. But right now we’re just letting it rest in peace.

He was extremely prolific and very disciplined. He thanked his OCD tendencies for really shaping his career because it helped him be such a prolific creator. He was very good and disciplined at writing things down and categorizing them and filing them, and then having the good fortune every few years either in a book or an HBO show to start pulling out his files and start playing and shaping them. That was biggest joy.

Are you as organized?

No, unfortunately, I am not. I don’t have quite the rigidity he had and he needed in his own coping strategies. I’m not quite as organized, and I’m not as focused. He had this one thing he did, which was standup comedian. I’m a bit more an electric nature. I’m a writer and a performer but I also have a need to be a facilitator and a teacher, so I’m also a life coach and I facilitate workshops. Even though all that work is umbrella of Kelly Carlin it makes my life a little more scattered. Nowadays I also have the category of the keeper of George Carlin’s stuff, so that takes some time out of my day.

With his passing, there’s been this increase in my visibility in the world because I am the one who now speaks for him. There’s opportunities coming my way to do things in other media. I want to pursue a career in radio. I’d love to do that. I’ve also started Interviewing legendary comedians for Laugh.com and their CD series “On Comedy.”

How did you get involved with interviewing these comedians? I know you’ve talked to Phyllis Diller and Sid Caesar and others.

My dad was one of the founding partners in Laugh.com, with Marshall Berle, who’s Milton Berle’s nephew. Marshall approached me and said, “I wonder if this is something you’d be interested in doing. We’d like to start updating the catalog and there’s some people we’d love to talk to that we haven’t gotten a chance to yet.”

I’m a really good listener and conversationalist. I’ve got this kind of innate thing that’s been given to me, which is I’m a child of comedy. I grew up in it; not that I spend a lot of time in clubs or hung out with a lot of comedians but there’s a trust there among comedians, so these people really get that that I know their DNA, I understand some aspect of who they are because it’s in my DNA, so they feel very comfortable around me instantly and we end up having conversations that I don’t think anyone else would ever get to have with these people. It’s just a pure joy for me to do those.

Who have you interviewed that hasn’t been released on CD yet?

Jonathan Winters is coming up. Once the new year swings around, I’ve got a list of about six people that I want to do this year, some of whom I’ve talked to already and they’ve given me a nice tentative thumbs up. And there are some wish lists there too, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner being two on my wish lists that I haven’t pursued yet but hope to.

Do you go and see them? How does it work?

So far I’ve been in LA and I’ve gotten to sit with them in person and that’s what we do. We go and sit in their living room or wherever they feel comfortable and I bring an audio engineer. We just let them go. I literally sat with Sid Caesar for almost three hours, and he was the first one I did. It’s really a beautiful thing because he really wanted to talk a lot about his life, not just about comedy, and I felt like I was giving him an opportunity to share and to share with someone in a younger generation and talk about his life. I felt really honored and privileged to get to do that.

The original interviewer of a lot of these comedians who were part of the “On Comedy” series for Laugh.com was, I believe, Larry Wilde, who published a book of his interviews.

Yeah.

Obviously you can’t put a three-hour Sid Caesar CD out, but any plans to eventually put these out in a book form?

You know, we have not talked about that at all. I haven’t thought of that. Who knows?

Are there stories or events in your dad’s book, “Last Words,” that you wanted to hear more of?

I’m trying to think. It was such a rich read for me because I did learn about him and certainly the time before I was born. I heard highlights and little stories of the big events, but never the rich context and his inner life around a lot of that stuff. I don’t have anything specific where I think I want to know more about that. I think part of his own struggle -- and he talks about it in the book -- are those years of drug use. He didn’t really remember a lot of it and to be frank, I remember some of it but I didn’t remember a lot of it. It was really a dark period for our family, and I wish that maybe he and I had been able to sit down and piece some of that together more.

It’s kind of like a highlight reel in my head with some peak moments, good and bad, during those years, but for him I think it was really frustrating because he was really stoned and wasted solidly for a good four or five years there. There’s just frustration about that, I guess.

In part of the book you were the voice of reason as a young girl, trying to get your parents to stop with the alcohol and the marijuana.

And the cocaine, lots of cocaine. Anyone who grew up in an alcoholic or pretty majorly dysfunctional family, that’s what we did as kids. You look around and the adults are not acting like adults and if you have any good survivor instincts, the adult in you kicks in.

It’s a curse and a gift. You are cursed with not really getting to have somewhat of a childhood and getting to focus on your own needs and your own wants, but the gift is you are resilient and you’re really good in a crisis

Obviously you had a problem with your own addictions. Was that the nature of being in that environment that led you down that path as well?

Yeah. It’s silly because as a kid you’re sitting watching this insanity and thinking “I will never do this” and then age 14 comes around and I’m steeling roaches from my dad’s collection. He would smoke his joints and he had this little bowl of roaches and I just starting stealing them and really self-medicating because there were so much unmetabolized emotions from this journey I had just gone on.

By age 14, my mother had been sober a few years and my dad was more and more stable. It was almost like OK, the adults are OK now, now I get to feel all my feelings and I guess I didn’t really want to and I started self-medicating. I did.

I had a real struggle in my teens and 20s with drugs and that stuff and had horrible panic attack syndrome for a few years, became agoraphobic, had monumental panic attacks where I was having trouble leaving house and driving my car, all symptomatic of not really being able to heal these earlier wounds.

Finally at age 29, I’d already gotten clean and sober and was enrolled at UCLA and was putting my life back together, I left my first husband and first marriage. I really felt like in some ways my life started at 29.

Were you ever angry at your parents about how you were exposed to all these things?

Absolutely, but that took a while. It’s part of the process of healing. Because we were such a small family, a lot of my role was not only to be the diplomat between them but to also put on a good face to the world. “No, everything’s fine and mom and dad are great and they’re the greatest parents in the world.”

On some levels they were because they were amazing people, but I did finally get angry and I think that was part of my drug use, trying to mitigate that anger.

When did you realize that your dad was George Carlin?

Was there a conscious moment where I went, “Wow, my dad’s George Carlin”? I don’t have a memory of that moment, but I certainly know there was an acknowledgment at a pretty early age. I think I must have been 5 or 6. My dad was doing a lot of those variety shows so he was on TV a lot and we would get to go to places and see him. I remember he opened for the Supremes in Las Vegas and being in the audience and seeing that. So there was an idea that my dad did this interesting job where he was either on the TV or on the stage. I remember then a few years later, once he’d made the big change and was doing colleges and “Class Clown” and “Occupation Foole” were out and we were touring at a lot of colleges, I remember getting oh, now my daddy’s really special. People were treating him like a god on these campuses and I was being treated as the god’s offspring.

I talked to Kitty Bruce recently and she mentioned she and you and Rain Pryor getting together and doing something together next year.

Yeah. We are. We’re contemplating something; we don’t know what it is yet. I came up with a visual, basically, is what happened, and a title, and the title is “Daughters of the American Revolution.” and there’s a Mount Rushmore drawing up on a scrim and it’s my father and Richard and Lenny because a lot of comics say they are the Mount Rushmore of comedy. Richard had other kids, but there’s something about these three daughters getting together. We haven’t talked about it, just very little, but we know there’s some sort of amazing synergy going on, and want to play with it a little bit. Sounds like fun, even if just a little bit of storytelling and some Q&A and showing some clips, something where we can honor our fathers and talk about the importance of carrying the torch for all of us. What does it mean to be the next generation and what is our job now?

Do you have an idea what your job is now in terms of your role with your father’s continuing legacy?

I believe that part of my job is to keep his words and his ideas alive because I see things that are 20, 30, 40 years old that he’s done and they are still extremely relevant because it’s the perspective he comes from that I think is essential.

Not every daughter thinks her father is funny, but what is your opinion about your father’s humor?

A genius. He was a genius. You put anything up, any clip up, and there’s not a single one that won’t make me laugh. Even the stuff that makes me cringe at times makes me laugh. We just screened “Jammin’ in New York” a few weeks ago. I was weeping with laughter. It’s such a joy. He’s a true, true genius, and thank god he knew how to make us laugh so much.

Kitty Bruce

2009-10-12T15:14:00.003-06:00

Every so often, Kitty Bruce returns to the public eye with a project involving her famous father, legendary comedian Lenny Bruce.

After giving us a collection of Lenny’s writings in the 1984 book “The Almost Unpublished Lenny Bruce: From the Private Collection of Kitty Bruce,” and the six-CD box set “Let the Buyer Beware” in 2004, Kitty is now auctioning off some 50 items that once belonged to her father.

Beginning Oct. 13 – what would have been Lenny’s 84^th birthday – and running through Oct. 28, Todd Mueller Autographs will auction off both one-of-a-kind Lenny Bruce items and objects donated by Chris Rock, Elizabeth Taylor, Yoko Ono and many others.

The money raised from the auction, and from an Oct. 28 comedy show at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood, will fund Lenny’s House, a residential treatment center for women.

“I have never been so intent on anything in my entire life,” Kitty says by phone from her home in Pittstown, Pennsylvania, where she also heads the Lenny Bruce Memorial Foundation. The foundation will fund the care of women unable to pay for a stay at Lenny’s House.

Kitty plans to open the first Lenny’s House no more than 40 miles from her home, a region she says is underserved by treatment centers for women.

“I don’t want to build the Taj Mahal,” Kitty says, “but I do want to get a building or a place that can house up to 10 women where they can stay for four months at a time and learn living skills aside from getting a very strong foundation for sobriety. ... I think this is a very necessary to have to happen. It’s going to help a lot of women and therefore a lot of families, because this is somebody’s mother, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s girlfriend, somebody’s wife.”

The items Kitty’s parting with are personal. Her father’s bedframe. His trenchcoat, seen in photos of Lenny getting arrested. A letter Lenny wrote to his father.

That letter, Kitty says, was hardest for her to part with. It tells of Lenny’s first thanksgiving with his wife, a stripper who went by Honey Harlow (she died in 2005). Lenny enclosed a lock of Honey’s hair.

“You could really tell he wanted normalcy so bad,” Kitty says. “It was a regular letter from a son to his father about his wife and about his new mother-in-law.”

The auction is a one-time event, says Kitty, who’s been working on it since March 2008. To find out more about the auction and Laugh Factory show, go to lennybruceofficial.com.

Kitty’s focusing her efforts and attention on the auction, but she has other plans. Sometime next year, she plans an as-yet unspecified project with other offspring of legendary comedians: George Carlin’s daughter, Kelly, and Richard Pryor’s daughter, Rain.

Kitty’s wrestled with some of the same addictions that gripped Lenny, who died of a drug overdose in 1966.

“Being in the throes of an addiction or in the throes of alcoholism is probably one of the saddest places to be,” Kitty says. “And in recovery is the best absolute place best to be, as far as I’m concerned. I think if you asked anybody who walked up on the street: “Do you have an alcoholic or an addict in your family?” you’re going to get a yes. You know, it’s not anything to be ashamed of. It’s a shame if you don’t get any help.”

In previous interviews, Kitty reflected on her father’s legacy, her own problems and meeting comedian Freddie Prinze, who idolized Lenny. The interviews are excerpted here for the first time.

You have done other things about your father in the past. You wrote a book. You published the “Unpublished Lenny Bruce.”

Uh-huh.

And I read something about you singing a tribute to him when you were about 12.

Oh, my god. That was on Capitol Records. It was two authors, Lawrence Schiller and Albert Goldman. Albert Goldman later had written “Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce!” and all those other books on John Lennon. He and Larry Schiller, I guess, had formed a partnership and they did a record called “Why Did Lenny Bruce Die?” They asked me to sing a song. I played guitar when I was little. I sang the song “Yesterday” by the Beatles, by Paul McCartney. I didn’t realize how appropriate that song was until a lot of years later, but I guess I really felt that way at the time.

That’s not a record I’ve come across.

I don’t know where you’d find it. It’s obscure.

This is a strange question. But are you Lenny Bruce’s daughter or are you Leonard Schneider’s daughter?

I’m Lenny Bruce’s daughter. That’s a great question. That is the best question everybody has ever asked me. Do you know why? Because they were two separate people. I am Lenny Bruce’s daughter because that’s who he was and developed into when I was born. Leonard Alfred Schneider.

Have you ever gone by Brandi?

No. I don’t know what possessed my parents. I really don’t.

It was Brandi Kathleen and then – get this -- my father said he thought Brandi was too stripperish. like Kitty’s any better. Hortense or something would be a stretch. Kitty’s pretty close. I don’t know what those two were thinking.

What prompted you to write “The Almost Unpublished Lenny Bruce?”

At the time? Finance. And a state of mind and a state of the way that I was living my life at the time. It was just stuff put together out of the archives. I thought it would be a good idea. … I had a lot of chemical dependency problems at the time and it just could have been a lot better. But if anything, my father’s work carried it through.

I hope your life is a bit steadier now.

Oh, absolutely. No, I’ve been clean and sober for a long time.

Good. Is that the legacy of being Lenny Bruce’s daughter?

No. I can’t lay that on my father or my mother. I don’t know whether it was genetic pre-disposition. To be honest with you, I don’t know why. I know it was in my genes. I know that my experience as a recovering addict and alcoholic has been a growing and a very learning experience for me and probably the best way of life I could ever imagine. It’s the greatest gift I’ve ever had. My father knew about recovery, but I don’t think that he was ready.

What was your addiction?

Drugs and alcohol. When I stopped with the drugs, then it was alcohol. That’s about all I want to talk about that.

I’m wondering if it went through your mind what happened to your father when you were starting to get into that stuff.

I hated drugs. I hated them with a passion. I’m not kidding. And I don’t know what happened. I really don’t. I know one thing -- I was under the influence of alcohol from the first time I picked up a drug, though. And had I not been drinking, that would have never happened. They say that what happens happens for a reason. I believe with all my heart the reason that I survived is to pass on that message and help other people that have gone through it and to help people to get out of it, to lead better lives.

My father died when I was 16 and my father-in-law’s died when he was 5 and I’ve always wondered what’s worse? Knowing your dad enough to know how much you miss him as an adult ...

Knowing.

... or never knowing him at all?

For me, definitely knowing. Yeah. Knowing my dad, I think, was worse than if I hadn’t known him at all. However, the later on in my life that I go and the older that I get, the more that I know him because I spend more time on his work now than I did with my 11 years with him. So I’m a lot closer because of the work. You get to learn a lot about people when you listen to that many hours of tape. You really do. The inflection, the tone, the timing, the rhythm.

What made you decide to do the box set?

The idea hit me. It just came to me. I don’t know how to stay it any clearer without sounding crazy. Do you ever just get a solid thought that just hits you like bam?

Oh, yeah.

OK. It was one of those. And I thought I wonder what the hell made my Dad say what he said and what made him tick. I wonder what made Lenny Bruce tick. While I’m wondering what made Lenny Bruce tick, I’ll bet other people are wondering what made him tick and how he arrived at certain decisions in speaking in such a conservative climate at the time. Why did he say what he said?

I thought well, if I start from the beginning of his career to the very last days of his life, then I’ll give the listener and opportunity to get to know him in the house, to listen to him live, which you don’t get on the other albums because they’re all edited, and some for content and they’re not free-flow. This is seven and a half hours, 119 tracks, of straight full-on, full-force Lenny Bruce, uncensored, unedited, just pure. And that’s something that’s never been done. It would be like blasphemy for his own child to censor him in any way, shape or form, so I wanted to make sure that everything stayed intact. I never got to answer my own question of what made Lenny Bruce tick because I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m just glad that he did tick.

I think I know where he got a lot of his ideas or his prejudices against certain organized religions, things like that, but his quick thinking — that was just him. I laughed.

Where did his prejudice against organized religion come from?

There was not enough money for — in the Jewish religion, it’s called a bar mitzvah, when a man is coming of age at age 13. My grandmother went to the local rabbi to set up an appointment for the bar mitzvah. He asked for $200 and my grandmother didn’t have it. My father, he imagined a party and kids coming and the whole thing and he invited people to come and now there’s no bar mitzvah. He formed resentment very early.

However, here’s the shining part of the story. My grandmother, she said, “Do you want to be a man?” She took him to a house of burlesque. She said, “These are pretty women, these are pretty ladies, and this is how I’ll introduce you into your manhood.” So that was his entrance.

Did you gain greater insight into your father after listening to these tapes?

Oh, absolutely. It was like quick 12 easy steps to getting to know your dad fast. I have to tell you that I got to know him as an adult. A lot of things were explained to me, a lot of the pieces in the puzzle just didn’t fit when I was growing up and they came together in working on this box set because I had to listen to hours and hours of tapes and I had to look at miles and miles long footage of archives of newspaper clippings and what had happened from the arrest in the beginning to the end.

What were the pieces of the puzzles?

When I was little I had no idea, really, why he was constantly getting in trouble. Nobody ever sat down and explained it to me. When I was going through the archives, I’d see “Lenny Bruce jailed,” “sick comic,” “blue comic” and it just continued to get worse and worse.

Then it finally dawned on me. It was like the analogy of Al Capone and tax evasion. What my father was saying, the content was very unsettling and disturbing to the conservative listener and to the not-so-conservative listener. The government couldn’t bust him on his content, so what did they do? They went for the obscenity, which was the law. But by doing that, they violated his free speech and that is when literal war broke out because his rights were being violated and he took great pride in being an American. They were taking away his right to speak; they were taking away his right to work.

How many hours of tapes are there total?

I haven’t counted. I would estimate hundreds. At least over 200 hours.

You’ve only given us a small taste, then.

My dad talked a lot. He taped everything. If he did two weeks at the Gate of Horn live, three shows a night, for two weeks, you’ve got three shows an night for two weeks at 45 minutes a pop. That’s a lot of hours. Then you multiply that by all the different clubs plus stuff at home, plus stuff between the district attorney and him, plus hidden tapes. He taped everything.

You had hidden these tapes all over the place, left them all over the place.

I didn’t leave them all over. I was very specific. I had three different locations, God forbid something should happen. There was, and it was good because there was a fire. Oh, god. The other producer, Hal Willner, his apartment burned way back when we first started the project and everything burned up in his house except my dad’s tapes and a Federico Fellini picture, or letter. That is strange, isn’t it?

Who did you trust to leave these with?

Well, it’s going to sound funny but Robert Blake was a friend of my dad’s, so Robert had some. When I first started making copies of them, Keith Richards had some. And then my stepgrandmother Dorothy had some. And my cousins in Michigan. It wasn’t out of paranoia. It was just out of Murphy’s law. And I couldn’t afford Murphy to have his law on Lenny Bruce’s time.

How does Keith Richards figure into this?

I met Keith, and he was a really big fan of my dad’s and at the time I had just started copying the originals onto two-inch and I made copies on cassettes and I gave Keith the whole lot of it on cassette form. I entrusted him with these tapes. I gave them to him. I said, “Keith if anything ever happens to these originals, at least you’ll have them.” That’s how he figured into it.

Any more recordings coming out?

No, not that I would like to put out. He did an awful lot of talking, but he did repeat himself sometimes. In order to get that seven and a half hours in the box set, there was a lot of listening. A lot of listening.

Growing up and listening to your father, did he make you laugh? Or did you not understand the references?

Didn’t have a clue. I remember I was taken to go see his act. I was really so sad. “What’s the matter, Kitty?” I said, “Daddy didn’t say hello to me, not once.” I didn’t understand. Kids just don’t get it. I thought the Three Stooges were funny. That’s what 8-year-old kids watched. I’d be concerned if I had an 8-year-old and he listened to Lenny Bruce.

As you got older, you obviously thought he was funny.

Oh, my God, he’s like one of the funniest people ever. I definitely get my dad. I definitely get him.

Is humor genetic? Do you think in funny terms?

Yeah. I think it’s genetic.

But you’ve never had an interest in going up?

I’ve been asked. People say, “Kitty, you’re so funny.” But no, there’s enough there. I’m a pretty introverted person at times. I’m quiet. Then I’ll be real energetic and outgoing and I’ll be quiet. That’s my nature.

How did you and Freddie meet? I never heard that story.

My father was lovers with and good friend with Gloria Stavers. She was a photographer. She, at the time, was editing 16 magazine, which was a teenybop magazine. She introduced me to New York and a lot of the New York clique. The quote-unquote right people. She called me one day and said, “There’s a comic who’s really, really cute. I’m doing a story on him. He’d like to pick you up from the airport.” That’s how I met Freddie.

Dennis Regan

2009-06-15T15:08:00.009-06:00

Dennis Regan, the older brother (by three years) of comedian Brian Regan, traded one family business for another.

He swapped the harsh sunshine of south Florida, where he and his dad owned an asphalt company called Tars & Stripes, for the darker recesses of comedy clubs, and found his calling.

Despite the shared last name, Dennis, 54, doesn’t have Brian’s name recognition yet. Having a brother already in the business did help Dennis along the way, but don't compare the two. Few comedians, Dennis says, could stand up to being measured against Brian. "Not too many comics are having the success that Brian’s having," he says.

Dennis, who’s opened for his brother as well as for Ray Romano and others, headlines comedy clubs around the country now. He's worked behind the stage as well. He wrote for the Kevin James comedy “The King of Queens,” from its sixth season to its ninth and final season.

All of it certainly beats the asphalt business.

I saw you and Brian together at the Paramount when he was taping his special. How often do you two work together?

I just started opening for Brian again after not doing it for a few years. It’s fun! I like Brian’s crowd and visa versa, I guess. It’s nice to do theaters once in a while. The audience is all facing in the right direction. No one is stuffing nachos into their mouths. The focus is great!

What made you decide to get into comedy, because originally you were in the asphalt business, right?

Well I did a lot of things before the asphalt business. It was just something I did for a short time. I was doing it when I started doing comedy. So it was an easy transition because I hated that asphalt business.

Was it Brian that inspired you to do stand up?

It was. I probably never would have gotten into it if he hadn’t. Brian started six or seven years before I did. I had never dreamed about being a comic. It was just one of those things you wondered about. I got to a point where I started doing things I was afraid of in my life, to challenge myself, and that was one of the things that I could do. You can go to an open-mic night for free and give it a try and that’s what I decided to do. Over the years, I had given Brian a few jokes. He’d come back and say, “Yeah, that joke kind of worked.” But his style was a bit different from mine. Sometimes he would keep them in his act but most of the time he wouldn’t because he had a different sensibility. I had a little bit of a – I wouldn’t say head start — but I had tried a couple of jokes through Brian over the years.

So you knew what would get a laugh and what wouldn’t?

No, it wasn’t that so much. When I started I had an idea that you needed punch lines and laugh points or whatever you want to call them. A lot of people, when they’re brand new, go up with rambling premises and haven’t really got the idea that there has to be some place where the laugh is supposed to be. At least I knew that.

Did Brian give you some pointers, once you decided you wanted to do this as well?

He did, but he wasn’t really around. He was in New York and I was starting in Miami. I’d call him up and I’d say I did this and I did that. When I look back on it, he was really – not just supportive – but very cool about things because when you’re new you don’t realize that some of the bits you’re doing may have been done a thousand times or a million times. I’d go, “Here’s this brilliant idea I’ve been doing” and he would let me find my way rather than going, “Oh, Jimmy Robertson’s doing that bit” or anything like that. He just kind of let me find my own way.

How hard was it the first time you went on stage? Or how easy was it?

It was hard. It was hard. In fact, I drank three or four glasses of wine. I’m not a wine drinker, but for some reason I decided some wine would help me up there. The second time I did it, I think I had two glasses of wine. Then I told myself if you need to drink to do this, then you’d better find something else to do. So I never drank before performing, really, again. On occasion I might have a beer or something like that, but for the most part I got away from it right then. The first time was hard, but I tell people who are thinking about trying to do comedy that you’re never going to wake up and say, “I’m ready to do it today. I am ready.” It’s not going to happen that way. What’s going to happen is you’re going to get up the nerve to just go and do it and it’ll be hard but you will have done it and you’ll know you can do it again. But you’ll never wake up and go, “I’ve got the confidence and the material and everything. Let’s do it.”

What was it about that first experience that made you want to do it again?

I got laughs. I got enough laughs the first time to think: “I’ll go back and do it again.” But it wasn’t a career thing. I wasn’t thinking I was going to be a comedian. I was just doing it for fun. And it was just fun. I was going up three, four times a week and doing my five minutes or whatever, and it was just fun. It wasn’t until one night when I’d been doing it about six months and there was a small crowd – about 16 people – and none of the other comedians had done very well, and I got up and I did well with this small crowd and came off and thought I might be able to do this. Because that is hard. That’s what you’re up against sometimes. The big crowds are actually easier, much easier, than the small crowds.

Why is that?

For a few reasons. Small crowds are uncomfortable. There’s pressure on them to laugh and they feel it. If you can make them feel comfortable, let them know that they can laugh or not laugh and it will be alright, there is much more chance that they will laugh. You have to finesse it too and make this stuff sound less like material and more like a conversation with a small crowd.

Were you going back to the same club when you were starting out?

When I started in Miami, Florida, it was 1987 and, at first, there was only a couple of clubs. Shortly after I started, a bunch of new clubs opened and there were six comedy clubs in the area: Two clubs in Dade County, two clubs in Broward County, two clubs in Palm Beach County. I was driving a lot, but I was able to get on stage three, four times a week. Clubs were open more nights back then. Five, six nights a week, Tuesday through Sunday, that kind of thing. And they all had open-mic nights. After about four months or something like that I had my first pay gig.

Where was that?

It was a club called Casey’s Comedy Club in Fort Lauderdale and I got $30 a set to do 10 minutes. And that’s what I did. I did one show Friday and two on Saturday and they gave me $90. I thought, “Damn! This is alright!”

But that wasn’t enough to live on. You couldn’t quit your day job at that point.

No, but I was headed that way.

Did it click in your head that suddenly you were a professional comedian?

What clicked was I would have done this for free, and I got paid for it. Most people say if you can do for a living what you enjoy, then you’ve won half the battle. I was starting to think in that direction.

When your brother Brian went off to college to study accounting and then decided he wanted to be a comedian, what was the family’s reaction to that?

I don’t remember any reaction to that. It’s not like we sat around the table and had discussions about Brian. He walked to the beat of his own drummer, even back then. I don’t remember being that aware of it. I do remember when he started going to the Comic Strip in Fort Lauderdale. I was very supportive of him. It was never my big dream, but it was his. I remember when I started a few years later. I was in the asphalt business with my dad. I decided I was moving to New York. I’d been doing both, that business and comedy, for about a year and a half. My dad was sort of depending on me and I said, “I’m gone. I’m out of here, Dad. I’m going to New York and I’m going to do comedy.” He said, “Dennis, if I could make a living telling people jokes, that’s what I would do.” That was nice. He was encouraging.

Are you all funny? Is there a Regan sense of humor?

We’re all pretty funny. Except for my brother, Jack. He’s never said one funny thing and he tries all the time. I’m just kidding. I don’t have a brother named Jack. My dad has a very good sense of humor and my mom does, too. My mom was always a tough crowd. She would laugh, but she wasn’t an easy laugh. If you got her to laugh, you did good.

What happened once you got to New York?

I moved to New York after only doing comedy for about a year and a half, and started trying to break into the clubs. It’s not easy. It wasn’t easy then, but I had pretty good success. You’d audition at 2:15 in the morning or 2:30 and some club manager would watch you and say you could do the 2 a.m. slot tomorrow night or Wednesday night and you’d be going up when the crowd was leaving or there’d be five people left. Then, after you did the late night stuff at a certain club for a few months, they might use you for the opening spot at 9 p.m., which was equally hard for different reasons. I had good success breaking into the clubs. You work yourself into the prime spots of the night, like the 10:15 to 11:15 spots when the crowds were all kind of good and I’d try to develop material and gain confidence.

What was wrong with the 9 p.m. spot?

Well, There might be eight people in the audience. I’m talking about the Comedy Cellar in the Village. The emcee would just do a bunch of crowd work. “Where you from?” “Staten Island.” “Australia.” And then he would bring you up and you couldn’t do any more crowd work because he had already done that and he hadn’t done any material so it was hard to do any material. It was hard to transition. You had to try to do material but make it sound like it wasn’t material. Kind of tricky.

What were you doing to support yourself?

I was just doing comedy. At the time I moved up there I didn’t have any money but I could get middle work at clubs around the city or in Long Island or in New Jersey. Or Connecticut. Upstate New York. You could get a hundred bucks a set and you could make 600 bucks for the week and you could do that a couple of times a month. If you worked at clubs in the city, the Cellar, Catch a Rising Star or the Comic Strip, you could make a few dollars on the weekend, too. I didn’t need much money. I rented a room in Queens that cost me $330 a month. A room in a house. It was not the Trump Plaza, just a little room.

Was there a point at which you said you could make a living at this and not go back to Tars and Stripes?

There was a point where I said I really enjoy this and I made the decision, if I could, for the rest of my life just do what I enjoyed. That’s not an easy thing to do. There’s times when I didn’t enjoy headlining. I would just middle because I found that to be more fun. That was a lot less money but I just wanted to do what was fun.

Is there more pressure when you’re the headliner?

Yeah.

More expectation?

There’s more expectation and it’s harder. The people in the clubs, they’re more tired, they’re more drunk and sometimes you have to follow somebody who isn’t easy to follow for a variety of reasons.

Who did you have to follow who was hard to follow?

Once in a while, there will be a comic who is just real hard-hitting and he might be funny but he doesn’t require very much of the audience. He doesn’t ask them to think at all. The audience doesn’t know it. They just know they’ve having a good time. Then when you go up and you want them to think a little bit, they’re not in that frame of mind. They can freeze up on you. It takes a while, sometimes, to get them to transition from that guy’s frequency to your frequency. Most of the time they come along with you, but sometimes they don’t.

When you’re opening, like when you opened for Ray Romano at Carnegie Hall, how exciting is it to be a performer at Carnegie Hall, even as an opener?

It’s fun. It’s fun. I mean, you would like it to be your name up there, the person that everyone came out to see and hopefully that’s down the road a little bit. Carnegie was a pretty cool opportunity and it’s a real cool house. It’s a nice credit to have been on that stage where so many people have been. A comedy audience that came out to see comedy in a place like that, it was great.

Do headliners give you any restrictions or advice before you go on?

No. For the most part you get the gig because they know what you’re like. They know you’ll set them up well. That’s why you got the gig. No, I’ve never had anybody say do this or don’t do that. But if a guy does a bunch of married material, I just won’t do mine. I won’t burn that stuff for them. That helps me get those sorts of gigs. It’s also a matter of professionalism and appreciation for what they do. I don’t think that enough comedians think that way. When you’re the opening act your job is different from going out there to kill. Your job is to help set up the show.

What do you learn from working with other comedians who have been doing it longer and have had more success?

Starting out, I learned a lot from watching other comics. And I learned by watching them more than once. If there was a comic in Miami when I was new, I would go to the open-mic night on Wednesdays and then I would try go to back on Sunday to watch them. I would watch them both nights. The reason is on Wednesday I would just enjoy his act. I wouldn’t really get anything out of it. I would just enjoy it. But if I went back a second time and watched it, I would kind of go to school. I would see that he always looks for a lady with a big purse up front. Or he decided not to do that tagline for some reason. He decided not to do this bit with that crowd. You would learn things about the act in that way.

What about when you’re in the regular orbit of comedians, like when you were working on “King of Queens” and you were working with Kevin James and Patton Oswalt and Jerry Stiller and Ann Meara on occasion?

You mentioned the actors. I was around the actors some. I was around during the taping, but I was a writer. Most of my time was spent with the other writers. I learned a lot about writing. All the little things, the techniques and things like that. For the most part it was discipline that I learned there. It’s different from standup. With standup you might wait for inspiration. There it was: “You people go in that room over there and come back with some funny stuff about this or that. Come up with something for this scene or this character.” Then you would do it and you would come back with something.

How did you get that job?

They were looking for somebody to bring in. I think they interviewed a few people. And I got the job. I think they liked my standup. I think they had seen a set I did on “Letterman” which dealt with married stuff. Since that’s what the show was about primarily, that kind of got them interested in me.

Does your wife get veto power over any marriage jokes you tell?

Yeah. I wouldn’t want to do anything that upset her. I can’t think of anything that she’s vetoed to this point, but I try to find some balance so it’s not all just my point of view. Well, it’s all my point of view, but I try not to come across as being right all the time.

You mentioned earlier trying to get your mom to laugh, the competition between your siblings. Is there any competition between you and Brian as the only professional comedians in the family?

I think mostly we’re just supportive of each other. We give each other bits once in a while. I get advice from him when I’m going down a path that he has already been down. And if he needs somebody beat up, then I’ll step in and do that. But I wish, like most comedian do, that I was doing as well as Brian.

Did having him as a brother open any doors?

Maybe a few. Not too many. You gotta remember that when I was getting started, he wasn’t that much farther along. I mean, I might have gotten an audition at a club because he had worked there. But an audition is just an audition.

If you could rank on a scale of 1 to 10, and 1 is open-mic night and 10 is a household name in comedy, where would do you see yourself and where do you see Brian?

I get compared to Brian sometimes and I would rather be compared to the 9 million other comedians. Not too many comics are having the success that Brian’s having. In fact, I can’t think of any who are having the success Brian’s having without having a TV show. Brian’s built a base, an audience of people that love him, but he’s worked his butt off for a long time. I’ve done different things. The writing job took me out of standup for a few years. And I’m not sure how hard I want to work at it. I have a little boy and I like being home and it’s hard to get material working being out there one or two weeks a month. It’s hard to get that stuff going. Stand-up is not the kind of thing you can do into your 60s if you haven’t had some sort of significant amount of fame. If I don’t get a little more popular in the next few years I’ll probably find something else to do.

How do you make the transition from being on stage to writing, having to be funny on command?

The writing room at the “King of Queens” was a good room. It was the only writing job I had, but I heard other writers talk about rooms where it wasn’t appreciated if you threw out a less-than-stellar idea. I was in the type of atmosphere that allowed you to throw out any kind of idea you had — whether it was lame or just off the top of your head — without a lot of pressure. I think that’s important because even if your joke wasn’t that good, it might give somebody else an idea and that idea would be good. Where I was was a lot of fun and you could feel free to throw out whatever idea occurred to you. I really enjoyed my writing job.

You had to know the characters. Early on I would pitch a joke for, say, a character like Deacon as an example. I thought it was funny joke and it was, but it wasn’t something he would say. It wasn’t true to his character. I had to learn the ropes.

Was it hard writing for someone besides yourself?

Yeah, it’s hard. Because I was only used to writing for myself, things that I thought were funny, and here I am writing for these characters.

Having seen this side of a sitcom, would you want to be the front-and-center star of a sitcom?

I would like a part in a sitcom, maybe a supporting role. but at this point I couldn’t carry the ball like Kevin James did. There’s a lot more to it than people realize.

Are there more in the family who are going to be taking the stage?

My oldest brother, Mike, has gotten into Toastmasters. He’s always been intrigued by comedy. He’s been doing that and getting his laughs.

When you’re trying a bit out in your act, how many times do you try it before deciding to keep it? Is it a three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule?

That’s a good question. A lot of comics ask that question, too. It’s not an easy question. You can ballpark it around there, three times or something like that, but you would probably change it a little the second time. It depends on how well you told it the first time, how much confidence you have in it. It depends on how funny you thought it was. You probably wouldn’t go up and try it exactly the same way. If it starts to catch a little bit, you might think you have something to work on. And if you decide to lose it because it’s just not working, it should still stay in your notebook or in your head because, as you get better, lots of things come back and you look at it a few years later and you go “I know how to make that work now.” I’m also finding that for me, I have to give the audience a little bit more information than I had previously. That’s sort of the guesswork. How much do you want to give and how much they need to think? I’m finding I just need to give them a little more information. I’m finding that a lot of my stuff is working that wouldn’t have worked for me before.

Ralphie May

2008-10-20T13:13:00.004-06:00

Ralphie May didn’t take home the prize in the first season of NBC’s “Last Comic Standing,” but he walked away with acclaim, recognition and new fans.

May finished second to Dat Phan, whose own career hasn’t equaled May’s success to date. May has recorded two stand-up specials – “Prime Cut” and “Girth of a Nation,” released two CDs with those names and been embraced by legendary comedians.

In an interview, May takes a stand against political correctness, reflects on meeting some of the legendary names in comedy, and expresses the hope that his daughter, April June May, won’t follow in her parents’ career path.

What was the process for you to get on "Last Comic Standing"? It wasn’t as big then as it is now.

If you’re well known in the comedy community, you get invited to come in; you’re given an appointment time. I was actually in Hawaii two days before and Jay Mohr called and goes, “Hey, dude, I want you to audition for this show. They’re going to call it ‘Last Comic Standing’.” I said OK. When do I got to audition? “On Friday.”

In the comedy world, your gigs go from Wednesday through Sunday. Friday you can’t take off. I’m like, what are you talking about? I’m in Hawaii. He goes, “Well, you’ve got to audition.” I’m like, you’re crazy. You know my act. Just tell them. He said this is a legitimate contest. If you want to be a part of it, you’ve got to come and audition. I said well, who am I going to audition for? He said Bob and Ross from The Tonight Show. I said well they know my act, too. Just tell them. And he said, no, you’ve got to come.

At that time, I was so broke. I didn’t have a lot of money. My rent was 1200 a month and the gig I was working was 1600. My girlfriend, now my wife, she put it on her credit card. She believed in me. She sent me back. I showed up at NBC at 1 o’clock in the afternoon after flying all night long. And I get there and they gave me three minutes. I walk on stage and the first line is “They only gave me three minutes and it took me a minute and a half to get my fat ass up on stage.” And I started my act and I’m killing. They said, “That’s enough Ralphie.”

I said, “You sons of bitches. You made me fly all the way from Hawaii and you don’t even give me my full three minutes.” I started cussing and they said, “No, no, no. We want you.”

How important was it for you to get a spot on that show?

It was huge. I was making inroads. I’d done Kimmel 11 times and I’d done the Late Late Show with Craig Kilborne before and I was doing some stuff but I hadn’t gone over the edge. That show, it was an opportunity I went after full bore. It took me 14 years to become an overnight success. Because of that show, it launched me in the stratosphere. Not winning was actually a benefit for me.

How so?

Because it galvanized people. I was a fan favorite. Every performance, I got standing ovations. When I didn’t win, it upset people so much that they went out and bought my album and my first album, Just Correct, went platinum in 11 weeks, which is huge for a comedy album. My special, "Girth of a Nation," was the top-rated special on Comedy Central in the 2006-2007 season. My other special, "Prime Cut," which was released last November, was the highest rated of the month and continues to get high ratings.

Did Comedy Central come looking for after your success on "Last Comic Standing"?

I think they were a little apprehensive. I’ve never been one to be invited to the festivals. I was in LA but the young people at Comedy Central knew me but the ones who had been around for a while weren’t really aware of me and they wanted to be in business with me once they saw "Last Comic Standing." What happened was we took that success and we did two specials in one night. They saw the first one. It was supposed to air in September. And they wanted to push it to November. I thought that was disrespectful until I found out that’s what you want because that’s November sweeps. That’s huge. That’s what you want to be part of. They got behind me with their whole big marketing machine and they made "Girth of a Nation" huge. They did the same thing with "Prime Cut"; they aired it in November sweeps.

Oftentimes people in Los Angeles and New York forget what the rest of America looks like and they discriminate against people based on their looks, or if they think you’re overweight. I’m not just a little overweight; I’m a lot overweight. And I was a lot more. I think you’ll see in the next couple of years more bigger people on Comedy Central because they're not so focused on it at all anymore. They‚re very progressive for a network, what they're allowing as far as content and who they’re allowing to say it.

There are a lot of fat comedians. Gabriel Iglaesis and John Pinette, among others. They seem to focus more on their weight in their act than you do. You mention it, but you don’t dwell on it. Is that a conscious effort?

To a degree. I’ve always thought of myself more as a comedian who’s fat than as a fat comic. Honestly, when I was coming up, Louis Anderson and then later on, as I was developing as a young comedian, John Pinette, had the market on it. They were doing better fat jokes than I could even think about. So I decided I just wanted to do material that anybody could get from anybody. Where I interact with the world. I sometimes mention I’m fat, if there are funny circumstances. Like, I personally love to take a bath, but the truth is I don’t get to take a bath very often because I can’t take a bath in a regular bathtub. I look like a loaf of bread. That’s a fat joke in and of itself, but it’s also the truth and it says more about the state of things and gives people a better perspective into who I am and what somebody fat has to think about and be around as opposed to just being a fat joke or something that degrades people.

You recorded both concerts the same night, one after the other?

Yeah. We switched the curtain behind me. I switched jackets, we switched the audience and we loaded more tape in and we shot it.

That’s fairly unusual, isn’t it?

Yeah. I think that was the first time any comedian has ever done that. But I have a lot of material. I write all the time. I’m constantly writing, coming up with material.

Has the attitude toward you changed? Does the average person on the street, instead of seeing you as the fat guy, now see you as the famous guy?

Yes. Yeah. It’s very weird. I used to get looks and ridicule and scorn and now I get “Oh, my god” and people coming up to me and taking pictures and wanting autographs in the airport. I’m walking around the mall. People come up to me. Literally, I’ll have 40 or 50 photographs taken during a trip to the mall, and that’s a lot of time.

Is that an enjoyable problem to have?

I’ve always been a people person. My grandfather was a politician. I was honestly just happy to be around folks, and getting that kind of acceptance is always wonderful. Getting that immediate feedback: “Oh, my god, you’re my favorite comedian.” Wow. It’s a real tickle, honestly, when you think about it, how much fun it is.

I read you wanted to be a comedian since you were 9 years old. What sparked that desire in you?

In the summer, my grandmom would let me stay up past the news, because we always had to watch the news and discuss it a little bit. And we’d get to watch Johnny Carson‚s monologue. I was watching the news all the time, so I knew about topical events.

The first time I did it professionally was at the University of Southern Alabama in Mobile. It was at a Methodist youth retreat. We came from Arkansas down there and did a show. I did it and I did so well. I was 13. I was hooked. I knew I wanted to do it. At 17 I got picked to open for Sam Kinison. He told me to go to Houston. My mom moved down there. I did a comedy showcase. Danny Martinez taught me how to be a comedian.

What kind of things did he teach you?

Timing. Respect. How to write. He gave me face time, guidance as far as jokes go. He was instrumental.

You never got to go on Carson, but you’ve done Leno.

Yeah. I’ve been on Leno. I got the first standing O in over 10 years on Leno. I don’t even remember it. I had viral meningitis. After that, I went to the hospital. I did it with a 104 fever. The meningitis kept knocking it all out of me. I don’t really remember anything.

Did you watch a tape afterward?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Snoop Dogg was banging on the couch, he fell on the floor. Jay was crying. The audience just rose up and gave me a full standing ovation. After the whole thing, I asked my wife in the hospital, how did I do on Leno? She said, “You killed.” I said how did I do? “You killed.” Finally they brought in a tape. I was in an isolation ward. My wife had to come in with goggles and a mask and gloves and an apron. It was serious. I was in there for a long time. They let me watch it and I would watch it every couple of hours because I couldn’t remember anything. My short-attention span memory was getting burned out.

Why didn’t you cancel if you were sick and do it a different week? Or was that not even a thought in your head?

Not even a thought. I’d waited 14 years -- and my whole life -- to do the Tonight Show. I was at the precipice, for me, of my whole career. It was like full circle, from being a little kid, 9 years old at grandma’s house watching the Tonight Show, to being on it.

It used to be an appearance on the Tonight Show would make a comedian’s career. It’s not so much the case anymore. Which was more important for you? The Tonight Show or Last Comic Standing?

Last Comic Standing. Last Comic Standing, because it put me in prime time and it opened me up to 14 million people’s homes every week. I took that as a great responsibility. That’s why I always did different material and I gave them the best performance I could.

I don’t consider comedy to be a competition, but they made it that way on that program.

Which is really weird because comedy is very subjective. What the masses will vote on and think is great, most comedians probably wouldn’t. They would disagree with Last Comic Standing, the way the winner’s been chosen, every time. But that’s neither here nor there. You can always second-guess things. But I agree. I don’t think comedy is great as a competition. I think it’s subjective. It’s like if you like action movies. Nobody just goes to the movies. You go to see a specific movie.

People who see you in person won’t see the same material that you do on television. In person you’re edgier, you’re dirtier. How do you embrace something like Comedy Central that doesn’t let you do everything you want to do? Do you have to pull the punches?

No, no. What you do is you just change the vernacular. Instead of saying blow job -- and I did about five minutes on blow jobs on the album I just did, “Prime Cut,” instead of doing that I said oral.

Is it a conscious thought that you have to tone it down for television?

Yeah, a little bit. It’s more challenging to me to switch my material around and switch my vernacular. And they’ll get the full meaning and the full punch out of it.

What‚s your writing process like when you’re trying to think of new material? Do you work every day?

To a degree. I’m always working on it. It’s like the white noise of my mind.

Do you try to write? Or do you jot it down when it comes to you?

You know, I don’t even write it down anymore. I just memorize it. A lot of topical stuff. Or stuff that bothers me. That’s where my motivation comes from: something angers me or topical humor. I’m upset with the way the nation is with this racial stuff right now. It just pisses me off how people think It’s better that someone’s a blank-American: You’re not black. You’re African-American. Well, ask most black people. They ain’t never been to no fucking Africa. They don’t know shit about that. You were born in Mexico. Now you’re Mexican-American. Asian-American’s the most offensive because how you do you determine who looks Asian-American? It’s the eyes. But if you consider asia as a continent it goes from the Ural Mountains in Russia where they’re whiter than me to Malaysia where they’re darker than Barack. And a lot of people don’t have the eyes. This political correctness, people think it’s better. It’s a new religion. People believe in political correctness.

The fact is that political correctness has a long history of being wrong. People don’t remember, but it was politically correct 150 years ago to own black people. It was politically correct 100 years ago to deny women an education over the sixth grade or the right to vote or to own property. Fifty years ago it was politically correct to have different water fountains for whites and coloreds. It’s ridiculous. Political correctness is wrong most of the time. Not enough people realize that.

You say a lot of things in your act that other comedians might not cross that line. Is there a line for you? Are there things you won’t joke about?

No. I’ve done jokes about the tsunami and the pope dying. Once you do that, it’s all open. There’s no getting around it. You’ve gone past the limit. You’re talking about the largest natural disaster and largest loss of life in recorded history. I joked about it. You’re talking about the death of one of the most beloved religious icons in the modern history of the world. Yeah.

When you decide to talk about the tsunami, what’s the process?

I’ve got to get different angles, I’ve got to get more angles than any other comedian. If somebody else is doing it, I don’t want to know about it, and I don’t want to do it like them. I want to be my own individual. So I couldn’t just do a tsunami joke. I had to talk about gambling with it and the huge loss of life and I’m picking the under. I said I’ve been to the beach in Thailand. There were like seven people on the beach and I was three of them. There’s no way It’s going to hit, so the line was 180 and I said 165, so when it went to 300 I was like damn it, damn it, I lost 10 large. I joke about that. I joke about the Kennedys. JFK, he was an idiot. “We’ll take the convertible. It’s a sunny day.” Bang! Back and to the left. Robert Kennedy: “I know a shortcut through the kitchen.” How about Teddy Kennedy: “I’m a great driver.” JFK Jr.: “Fuck the second day of flight school. I’m a Kennedy.” People get mad at that joke until I hit them with: Do you know who the happiest person in the world was? Darryl Hannah. “Woo, I’m so glad he didn’t marry me.” That’s kind of messed up because that bitch was a mermaid ; she could have saved his life. It makes people laugh; I take it past the point of ridicule. I make the point and I then I just exacerbate it so far that they‚re just blown away by it.

Your wife, Lahna Turner, is a comedian as well. Is there any rivalry between the two of you? How does it work with two comedians in the house?

The only rivalry is about jokes. Because we’ll be talking and we’ll both go, “Oh that’s great and then it’s who’s going to take it on stage first? We’ll talk about it because we both know each other’s act so well. I wrote a joke that I couldn’t do anything with, so I gave it to her. One of her jokes that she couldn’t do anything with and was too hard coming out of her mouth works great in mine. The joke I wrote for her was “Is it wrong to tell an AIDS patient to stay positive?” And for me, I was talking about my Mexican maid. “She’s fantastic. No racial pun intended, the place looks spick and span.” That’s the joke she wrote for me. It’s this type of give and take we have. It’s really, really fun.

I imagine your daughter is going to have a lot of fun bringing the two of you to career day at her school when she’s older.

Oh, yeah. I think so. I think so. We just hope she’s not serious. That’s what we’re scared about, that she’s going to grow up and be an ultra-right wing Republican and serious and not funny at all and be a lawyer. God forbid. Most parents, that would be one of their dreams.

If she decides to become a comedian, what advice would you and your wife give her?

Don’t. Every good comedian is damaged from their childhood. I am and my wife is as well. We’re going to raise her right. We’re going to read to her and hug her and love on her. We’re staying together because we love each other. We’re going to make her a great person. I never would want my child to be a comedian because they would never have the opportunity to live a life by themselves. They would never have the opportunity to be their own person. They would always be Ralphie May’s baby. Or Lahna Turner’s baby. God forbid there be another Ben Stiller. If she wanted to be an actress, maybe.

What’s your damage? What messed you up when you were younger?

So much. There’s not even enough time to talk about it. So much. So much. Youngest of four, divorced mom. I saw physical abuse. I was six years old; my uncle and his whole family decided to come down and visit us in Clarksville to see me. They made a special trip to see me. When leaving, their plane hit a mountain. My grandfather passing away in front of me. A whole host of trauma. Stuff that children shouldn’t see, I saw. I saw people die in a tornado. I saw way more than I should. It’s a typical southern story. I used to say if it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.

I’m going to say the names of some comedians. I want you to give me your opinion about how they impressed you or what they taught you.

OK.

Sam Kinison.

Sam Kinison was tremendous. I don’t think people in comedy recognize how far he was ahead he really was. What he was doing was not only a whole style, it was something I don’t know if comedy’s even gotten close to it now. Sam Kinison was a genius. He was a rock star.

How about Bill Hicks?

Wow. The only guy I’ve ever seen who made me want to quit comedy. It’s like what the fuck am I doing? I think Bill Hicks, it’s a shame that he’s not a household name but Pauly Shore is. It’s a real fucking crying shame because he was beautiful. His jokes were like music.

Buddy Hackett.

Hack was a legend before I even knew him. I just knew that as good as he was on stage, he was as good as that with his time with young comedians. I loved Hack. I learned so much from Buddy, just so very, very much. When he died, I cried like when I lost my grandfather and like when I lost my father. That’s how close I was to Buddy.

What did you learn from him?

Wow. How to tell a joke, how to write a joke, how to edit a joke. Nuances. How to do a pussy joke without saying pussy. He taught me everything.

How did you come into his orbit?

Through Jeffrey Ross at the Friars Club. He came over and I made him laugh. He goes, [doing an impression of Buddy]: “Not very many people make me laugh at all, especially young guys. As a matter of fact, I don’t think there’s been a guy under 40 years old that’s made me laugh in maybe 20 years. You’re really good. What’s your name? My name’s Buddy.” Then Kenny Moore would bring me over and Jeffrey Ross would take me over. And Buddy said, “You can come over too sometime.” We could drink tequila and talk. And I’d take him for a ride and we’d go goof off. Talk man stuff. Talk about women. Talk about jokes. Talk about everything. He was tremendous.

What about Jay Mohr. You worked with him before “Last Comic Standing.”

Oh, yeah. Jay, Jay was very instrumental. When I met Jay I was having a hard time in LA because I couldn’t make any money. I was selling weed and making ends meet through that but that’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a comedian. And I’d gone to where I was a headliner, being able to get 2000 a week, to going out to LA to making $15 a spot and only getting like 10 spots a week. You’re making 200, 300 bucks, depending on gigs, a week and it’s not enough for living in LA. Then night after I met him the first time – it was a Friday night, I met Jay on a Friday night and he liked my comedy.

On Saturday I was walking to the Laugh Factory down Sunset and he pulled over and stopped and picked me up. He goes, “Dude, what are you doing walking?” I said I’m too broke to put gas in my car, I’m too broke for a valet, so I’m walking down here to get a spot and try to make some money. He said, “What do you mean? You’re phenomenal. Why aren’t you working all the time?” At that point the clubs would not give me work because as the feature act I would blow the headliner off the stage and they wouldn’t headline me because I didn’t have the TV credits or movie credits to sell tickets. I go, the headliners are week. They won’t follow me. He goes, “I’ll work with you.” Right them on the spot he called his agent up and got me 17 weeks of work. He changed my life.

Other people might have decided to quit after moving to LA and not having immediate success or much success. What kept you going?

Heart. Heart. It’s the same mentality that I got hot women with: I wanted it more than anyone else. And when you want something more than anybody else, that’s the difference. When it gets hard, the people who don’t want it as much will quit, then there’s just one less person getting in your way.

Milton Berle. I forgot to ask about him.

Uncle Miltie, he was phenomenal. I didn’t get to spend as much time with him as I wanted to. Miltie was a helluva comedian and a helluva showman. The stories he told about the old Friars’ Club and how it used to be, it just gives you a sense of perspective and it makes you admire what you do more as a career choice, as an art form, as an American art form.

Was it intimidating sitting around and talking to those guys?

To a degree. But at the same time, they’re just comedians. Comedians, no matter the age or who you are, we’re just comedians. We’re all cut from the same cloth so when we get together it’s like the quilt’s come back together. That’s when we all felt like ourselves is when we’re all hanging out together.

Are there other comedians we haven’t talked about who influenced you or inspired you that you got to meet and hang out with?

Rodney Dangerfield. He was phenomenal. And guys like Doug Standhope was very instrumental to me. Dougie’s always been a champion of mine. He told people I was funny a long time before they knew it. And Jeffrey Ross, he was extremely helpful.

John Oliver

2008-04-17T13:47:00.003-06:00

Since John Oliver made the successful leap across the Atlantic from his native Britain in 2006, he has made about 100 appearances on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

Now Comedy Central, which airs “The Daily Show,” is pushing Oliver further into the spotlight. Oliver’s first standup special, “John Oliver: Terrifying Times,” airs April 20 on the cable channel, with a series of repeats scheduled.

Oliver first rose to acclaim through a series of appearances at the annual comedy festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, beginning in 2001. His last run at Edinburgh, in 2005, was again with his longtime collaborator and comic partner, Andy Zaltzman. The two also worked together on the BBC radio series “The Department,” featuring a think tank that tried to solve the world’s problems. And despite the ocean between them, Oliver and Zaltzman are partners in a weekly humorous podcast called The Bugle, produced by The Times of London.

In an interview conducted via e-mail, Oliver reflected on angering the queen of England, working on “The Daily Show” and why you won’t see his face on any T-shirts.

Your website address is mrjohnoliver. Why the formality?

I’m trying to introduce some formality to the Internet. In its current state it is overly familiar. It certainly has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that johnoliver.com was already taken.

Your bio says you received a letter of complaint from Buckingham Palace. What did you do to anger the royal family?

It was something to do with editing one of her Christmas addresses to the nation. Apparently you can’t do that. To be honest, I did know that you couldn’t do that, but ran into the insurmountable problem of not caring enough. I think if I ever go back to England now they’ll put my head on a spike outside Windsor Castle. So you have to let me stay.

Does that mean your eventual knighthood is less like than likely now?

It is indeed less than likely. But to be honest, even before the complaint it was only slightly above impossible. In relative terms -- I’ve not fallen that far.

How did you and Andy Zaltman meet?

We met doing a college stand-up tour together around Britain. Performing poorly received stand-up to various groups of heroically drunk students. Those kind of emotional scars can really bond two people together.

What was it about Andy that made you decide to work together?

I think we ask ourselves that at the start and end of every day. Still haven’t come up with anything close to an explanation yet.

You and Andy have done several projects together, including “The Department,” “Political Animal” and The Bugle. What is the writing process like when you¹re working with a collaborator, and what's the division of labor?

We have different processes for each project. For "The Department," we would write a very detailed storyline for each episode, then write a table of jokes which we would try to fit into the script. Then it would just be a case of editing it down for time. I’ve made it sound easy, when in fact it took months.

For the Bugle, we write ideas separately due to being an ocean apart now. That way, when we’re recording it there is a good deal of improvisation around each other’s ideas.

How did The Bugle podcast you're doing with Andy come about?

We were asked to do it – then did it – and it has now become both fun and a contractual obligation. There is no better motivator than a contractual obligation.

How is the podcast done, considering you're in America and he's in England?

Andy is in a studio in London – I’m in a studio in New York and we do it down ISDN. If we were doing it hundreds of years ago, we’d have had to send jokes back and forth with carrier pigeons. So for that reason, as well as a few others, we’re lucky we’re alive now.

"The Daily Show" has proved a stepping stone for other comedians to go on to other things, such as Stephen Colbert getting his own show. What do you hope "The Daily Show" leads to for you?

I hope it leads to working for "The Daily Show" a lot more. This was my favorite show before I moved out here to work on it – so I am merely in a daily battle to not get fired.

How did you come to the attention of "The Daily Show"?

I can’t really give you a full answer on that. I’ve avoided asking in case a mistake was made and I’m sent packing.

What have you learned about comedy from working with Jon Stewart and the others on the show?

A great deal. The learning curve has been extremely steep – but I’m gradually getting used to it. I still admire the show even though I’ve now slightly ruined it for myself by working on it.

You're the lone Brit on the program. What do you see your role on the show as?

Accurate pronunciation.

Do you have a favorite piece you've done for "The Daily Show"?

There are a few pieces in the studio that I’m very proud of. Larry Willmore and I always have fun working together as well.

What's your schedule like on the show? Are you there every day when you're not touring?

I’m there every day. I can only really do stand-up gigs occasionally as the show has a fairly intense schedule.

Who comes up with the ideas for the segments you do? Do you think of them? Do you have to pitch them to the higher-ups to get their OK?

The whole staff is involved in the overall creation of the show. It really is an extremely collaborative process, with the final decisions being made by Jon. And you couldn’t really get a better person to make a final decision for you.

You work alone when you're doing standup and you work with a partner when you're talking with Jon Stewart or Andy. You're obviously comfortable doing both, but do you have a preference as to alone or with a partner?

I like doing both. It’s easy to get very sick of the sound of your own voice when you do stand-up too much – and the isolation of it is a recipe for psychological meltdown – so it’s good to collaborate with people you admire and genuinely like.

One of the first things you purchased on eBay was a poster advertising a Lenny Bruce show. What made that a must-have item for you?

I always admired how creatively ambitious and fearless he was, and in a time when he was almost alone. Stand-ups of every style owe a huge debt to him now. And all of this often overshadows how incredibly funny he was.

Where did you hang it?

It’s in my office at work. Actually, it’s leaning against the wall at the moment, but now you’ve mentioned it, I’ll hang it up later.

What was your first validation that you were funny?

Making a kid at school snort milk through her nose.

At one point did you realize you could make a living at comedy?

I’m still not 100 percent convinced.

You like to learn interesting facts about every state you visit. What's the most unusual thing you've learned while traveling America?

That Colorado is the least obese state. To be honest – when you see people walk around there – you begin to have your doubts.

Now that you have a Comedy Central special, what¹s next? Will you release CDs? DVDs? T-shirts?

I think I can safely say that I will not be releasing any T-shirts. This is due to what I will safely assume is absolutely no demand for such an item whatsoever. Also due to the fact that I have no desire so see my face on someone as they walk down the street.

Would you like to see "The Department" released on CD?

That would be terrific. I think it would be very difficult though – as there would be a great deal of music clearance to do.

Are there any plans for its release?

Not really – for the reason I mentioned above. So I would encourage anyone to download it illegally from the internet. I’d love people to hear it – we’re very proud of it. Download away for free with my blessing. I’m like a comedic Radiohead.

You're living in America now. Do you have to have a sense of humour or a sense of humor?

Humour. Of course. You people seem allergic to the letter "u".

Do you have to take a different approach to comedy for American audiences vs. British audiences?

Not at all.

How important was the Edinburgh festival to your career?

Absolutely essential. I learnt a huge amount taking shows there. It’s still a major reason to do comedy at all as far as I’m concerned.

Any plans to go back and perform there again?

I’d love to. I won’t be able to this year – due to the election season being so intense. But I’ll be back the first opportunity I get.

David Brenner

2008-04-11T10:50:00.011-06:00

David Brenner originally tried stand-up comedy as a lark. Tired of writing, directing and producing television documentaries -- 115 in all -- Brenner took a year to try his hand at comedy. As the year drew to a close, Brenner found himself on "The Tonight Show" -- the first of 158 appearances -- and with $10,000 worth of job offers.

That was in 1971, and Brenner emerged as a founder of the movement toward observational humor, a style now familiar to fans of Jerry Seinfeld and Gary Shandling, among others.

Brenner also emerged as a fixture on television shows. He fondly remembers one week when he acted as guest host for Johnny Carson, co-hosted the "Mike Douglas Show," appeared on Dinah Shore's and Merv Griffin's programs and filled in for Paul Lynde as the center square on "Hollywood Squares."

Brenner's father watched every appearance. "He gave me the greatest compliment,” Brenner said. “He said, `You didn't repeat one joke on any of those shows.'"

When did you first realize you were funny?

I never thought I wasn’t. From the time I put sentences together, I was making people laugh, making grownups laugh. When I was a little boy, when I was up to people’s knees, I was already making ‘em laugh.

It’s a genetic gift. It’s not a talent. I don’t have any talent. I got a genetic gift from my father, who was the funniest human being I ever met. It was passed on genetically to me.

Your father was a performer too, wasn’t he?

Yeah. Originally he was a vaudeville song and dance man and comedian and was brilliant and had a big contract to do movies. But he came from a rabbinical family and his father came down on him about working on our Sabbath and he quit. But he was the funniest guy in the neighborhood, the funniest guy on the street, the funniest guy in the crowd. He was just absolutely the funniest person I ever met. I did nothing but scream my whole childhood, no matter how bad things were. It was my father who taught me that there’s something funny in everything and that is the best medicine.

Plenty of people are funny, but not everyone has the nerve to try standup comedy. What made you decide to take that leap?

I had heard it all my life, “Oh, you should be a comedian.” Everybody who’s funny at the office, they hear that. I never took it seriously. First of all, I came from a rough neighborhood and I didn’t think anybody ever became successful there. Unless you’re a gangster you’re not going to have success from here. So I never considered it.

But I was a writer producer director of documentaries and I reached a brick wall where I realized nothing’s changing because no one wants it to change. I mean every documentary I ever did has been done how many times over since I did them. I realized I wasn’t going to change the world, but then I came upon an old movie. It was about this guy, I think his name was Krup. He was going to go to the electric chair and they were trying to stop it. It was a corny movie. There was this one guy marching in front of the governor’s house with a placard: “Don’t kill Krup” or whatever it said. He asked the guard who’s guarding the governor’s gate for a light for his cigarette. It was snowing. As the cop gave him the light, the cop said to him, “Mister, what are you doing out here in the freezing cold?” He said, “You’re not going to change the world.” The guy said, “Officer, you don’t understand. I’m not trying to change the world. I’m just trying to keep the world from changing me.” And that was the line that enabled me to quite documentaries.

Do you recall what movie that was?

No. I don’t remember. It was an old movie. I can see the actor’s face. He was never a big star. I can’t remember his name. It was just a B movie, but seeing that old movie and hearing that line justified me dropping out of documentaries.

So to make a long story short what I did was I dropped out of documentaries. I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit and twiddle my fingers. I thought well I’ll probably go to Hollywood and be a writer-producer-director of feature films. That could be fun. Then I thought well I’ve got to do something. I used to go to comedy clubs in New York and see comedians. I thought I always thought I was funny. Funnier than they were. Why don’t I just get up there and goof around and do standup comedy for a year? So I did for a year and it was a lot of fun. I ran out of money. I had a little cult following in New York.

I thought I should do one TV show to validate the year’s effort. And also when one day my friends would say to me, “Oh, come on. You were never a standup comedian,” I’d dig in the drawer and I’d get out the tape and I’d put it on. I was a comedian then a little over a year. I went on “The Tonight Show.” By the close of the next business day, I had $10,000 worth of job offers.

You say I went on “The Tonight Show” like you would say I went to the kitchen to get a sandwich.

That’s a very good observation on your part. Yeah, that’s how I thought of it. I was quitting the business. I was going to do “The Tonight Show” and then I was going to stop working at comedy. I was going to do something else. So I was not lackadaisical, but I was very non-caring in the sense I wasn’t worried about it. I wasn’t nervous. I just went out there and laid it out like I knew I could and that was it.

As a matter of fact, right before I was going to go on, I started running down the hallway back to my dressing room and the agent who was handling me then said, “You’re going to do fine. Come back here.” I said, “I know I’m going to do fine. I left three dollars in my jeans.” All I was thinking about was: “Oh, my God, I’ll go out there on stage and while I’m telling jokes some bastard is going to rifle my jeans and take the three bucks and I’m going to have to walk from 30 Rock all the way home.” So that was my only concern.

How did you get on “The Tonight Show”?

I had this young, hip agent who eventually smoked some good stuff in India, shaved his head and lives off an island off of Washington or somewhere. Without telling me, he brought a gentleman named Craig Tennis, who was the chief talent coordinator of “The Tonight Show.” He brought him down to the Bitter End in Greenwich Village. The Bitter End is a very hip club for musicians and comedians. I remember the Chapin brothers played there. Woody Allen. They only had the hippest guys. I was on the bill.

I didn’t know that this guy was in the audience. So I was doing my very hip material at that time. And don’t forget I was a documentarian so I had that social consciousness. I killed the audience. I killed them. But he said to my agent, “David Brenner does vomit material.” That’s what he called it: vomit material. “Not only will never be on ‘The Tonight Show,’ we wouldn’t let him in the building at 30 Rock.”

So when I heard that, that was the best thing that could have happened to me because I got pissed off and the street part of me came back and I said fuck him. I’ll show him. So I really got myself really in great shape and did material and I went and did a cold audition with every other act at the Victor Jay Theater in New York. They used to hold them every Wednesday. The reason I knew about it is I used to go there on Wednesday in my one suit, not even a suit, it was really a nice sweater, and they had finger sandwiches and drinks. That’s where I ate on Wednesday night. I made believe I was a manager and I’d go in and I’d sit down there and I’d watch these acts. Sometimes I wouldn’t even watch the act. I’d just slip out again. So I knew where they held “The Tonight Show” auditions.

I did the audition and I killed at the audition. I did the audition right before Christmas. I think it was actually the 24th, and I got a call Jan. 7th from the agent handling me and he said, “How would you like to do ‘The Tonight Show?’ Are you ready for tomorrow night? They want you?” I said all right, I’m ready, and that’s how I got it. Every young person would blow their brains out if they knew that story because it’s tough to make it. I just didn’t know it.

How did Craig react?

I went on “The Tonight Show” and it turned out to be I get the second largest number of letters of any new performer in the history of the show up until that time. After my shot, Craig Tennis walked up to me. Jerry Lewis was in a hotel room in the neighborhood and he put on -- I’ll never forget it -- a camel hair coat and he ran over. I was still in the greenroom. He charged in. He said, “You’re so good I almost hate you.” He ran out of the show and he said, “That was the greatest kid I ever saw.”

Buddy Hackett was home. He called to Vegas. He got me booked into the main room in Vegas. You couldn’t write it in a script any better than it was. As a result, Craig Tennis walked in and he shook my hand. He said, “I want to tell you you made a hero out of me. That was the best anyone’s ever done on ‘The Tonight Show’ and I get the credit for it. I want to thank you and I’m sorry for my opinion of you and what I said.” I said, “Hey, man, we’re clean now. That’s all right. Forget about it.”

Could you have walked away from comedy at that point?

Not when I heard about the $10,000. I could have walked away if nothing happened the next day. Yeah, I could have walked away. I thought the whole thing was a big joke. I mean, to get paid for doing what you got into trouble for doing all your life was ridiculous. I got thrown out of school over 200 times for being funny. My mother was always going to school. She’d be apologizing. She said, “A sense of humor is vital in my family. We’d sit around the dinner table and all we’d do is tell stories and laugh.” She said, “And I tell David there’s a time and a place for it but there’s no way I’m going to let him have this taken away from him.” She just said, “You just keep being funny. Try to control it but don’t ever let them change you. Don’t let them change your nature.” My father said the same thing: “Ttell them to go to hell.” He was a tough guy

I’m sure the younger comedians now don’t realize the power a “Tonight Show” appearance at that time had on a career.

No. I mean, I got Freddie Prinze’s first shot on “The Tonight Show.” And from his first shot on “The Tonight Show,” Jimmy Komack, the producer of “Welcome back, Kotter,” saw him and that’s how he got “Chico and the Man.” From one appearance. But it does happen

Does an appearance on “The Tonight Show” now or on Letterman have the same cachet it did it was just Johnny Carson?

Not even close. There is no comparison. Because what has happened is people are so jaded with all the appearances. I’ll give you the best answer to that. When I was getting ready for my HBO special, I went out on the road and I had opening acts. I would hear them get introduced: “You’ve seen him several times on Leno. You’ve seen him on Comedy Central. He’s been blah blah blah. He was in the show so and so.” And I’m thinking, who the hell is this guy? He’s making $400 for the night. You never heard “You’ve seen him 12 times on Carson.” Are you kidding? I mean, with 12 times on Carson you were sure heading for stardom if you weren’t a star already.

You were on 100-something times.

158.

You actually kept track.

Yeah, I actually kept track because that was the king’s castle. I did monologues, 157 monologues out of 158 appearances. I only did one panel only and that was because they were running out of time and gave me a choice of which I wanted to do and I didn’t want anyone interfering with my stand up because I ad-lib a lot and I didn’t want some guy giving me time signals. So I chose the panel.

I always did six, six and a half minutes. I can’t do short monologues on television. I’m not effective that way. Because I’m a builder. I don’t come out slam-dunking with jokes. So I did six and a half minutes. Johnny wanted to sit back in his chair every time I was on and enjoy six and a half minutes of laughs. So he always made me do a monologue, which is a hell of a challenge.

Panel is sitting there chatting with the host.

That’s easy. That’s a piece of cake. Standup, that’s putting every gem in the bracelet properly. Though I ad-lib all the time. My first appearance on “The Tonight Show,” when I came off, a friend of mine who ran a club in New York was with me. He said, “God, that bit about busses is so funny. I never saw you do that before.” I used to work his club all the time.

I said, “What bit about busses?”

He said, “That whole chunk of material you did about busses.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. I don’t remember talking about busses. I had to watch the show that night to find out what I did. I did 45 seconds about busses that I never talked about in my life. But I have a timing device in my head. I know when those six minutes are up. Anyway, with “The Tonight Show,” it would work this way: I would call up and give them the dates that I wanted to do it. And that’s how I got the bookings.

Getting on Carson’s “Tonight Show” was a pretty big feat for anybody in show business, but to be elevated to guest host, to sit behind the desk, that must have been pretty amazing.

Yeah. From the moment I did it and realized I was going to stay in the business, my goal was to guest host. I was offered a sitcom deal with CBS and NBC. They were both vying for me. The money was the same and I really wanted to go with CBS. They had Fred Silverman then. I really wanted to go with CBS because I thought they would understand me better. NBC tossed in the carrot. They said, “If you sign with us, we’ll let you host ‘The Tonight Show’ once.” Host “The Tonight Show” once. That’s all I wanted to hear. I hosted it and it was one of the highest-rated hostings they ever had and that’s what made me a regular guest host. That was the feather in the cap.

Ironically, the sticom we did, it was based on the movie “Shampoo.” I played the Warren Beatty part and Leslie Ann Warren was the costar. It was called “Snip.” The idea of it was I was womanizing. We were married. She divorces me. She takes everything I have and she goes up to New England to her aunt’s house, converts it into a beauty shop on the first floor and I go to win her heart back on the pretext of helping her with her business. It was hysterically funny.

The weekend before, the Friday before our debut, and we were being touted as the new comedy hit of the season, NBC pulled the plug. Why they really pulled the plug is in our beauty shop we had an actor who was gay who was playing a gay part. This was 1976. NBC was afraid to have a gay person in a television show. And so they pulled the plug. A couple of years later, “Soap” came out. That was the end of my sitcom career and I went back on the road. That’s when I became a major star, without the sitcom.

Would you want to do another sitcom?

No. What I wanted to do was a talk show. I had a shot at one in the ‘80s and unfortunately two people who were producing it, Motown and King World, they couldn’t stand working wth each other. They didn’t care how successful it was. They just got out of it.

I know you had the custody fight that kept you out of the public eye for a while.

Yeah. Four and a half years.

You’re still David Brenner the huge star. But did that affect your career at all?

Majorly. By law, I could only work 50 nights a year or I’d be an absentee father.

The judge said this?

Yeah. I mean, that’s the law. If you’re sitting there in a courtroom and they say how many nights a year are you away from home and you say 250, no judge is going to give you custody. So I cut my income down. I couldn’t compete. This was 1991 when “The Tonight Show” was being given out and I couldn’t even get into the competition for it. I had to figure out should I do a Letterman and keep my face in the public or should I pick up that money in Texas? I need the money because I’m paying lawyers. As a result, I cut my television way down. In those days, I was doing between 100 and 140 network appearances a year and I cut it down to, I don’t know, 10, eight. Well, the public, four and a half years of not seeing me, or seeing me so infrequently, and they don’t write about you and then new people come in and take over as agents, as senior executives with production companies and the network people change. All of a sudden they’re like, “Oh, yeah, whatever happened to Brenner?” Four and a half years later, I walked out with a crippled career, totally broke. I lost my townhouse, cars, everything I owned, but I walked out holding the hand of my son.

That sounds like that’s the important part.

Yeah. To hell with the other thing. And today I have this wonderful, wonderful son. I have three wonderful, wonderful, wonderful sons.

In the days when you were doing all these TV talk show appearances, was there ever any backlash? Did people not want to come see your act because they could see you on TV?

No. I’ll tell you why. The public was aware that when I did something on television, I never did it again. Or I waited years to do it. The night after I did my HBO special, I was working the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. I had an hour show to do. I went up there and did an hour. I told the audience right away. I said, “You know I had a special last night. Those of you who saw it, thank you for watching. I want you to know I have no idea how I’m going to do it but you’re not going to hear one joke you heard last night.” And that’s what I did.

I think the public became aware if they watched me on television, if they became fans and watched me on TV, they realized I wasn’t repeating the jokes. I remember one week, my father pointed this out to me, I was hosting “The Tonight Show” the whole week, I was the center square on “Hollywood Squares” because Paul Lynde was off on vacation, I was co-hosting “Douglas” that week, I had an appearance on “Dinah Shore” and “Merv Griffin.” In TV Guide I was on every page. He watched everything and taped everything. He gave me the greatest compliment. He said you didn’t repeat one joke on any of those shows.

Amazing.

It would be amazing if it were a talent. It’s not amazing if it’s a genetic. It’s as amazing as saying, “God, you’re 6-2. Oh, and you have brown hair and brown eyes. That’s amazing.” What is amazing? That’s my genetics. What’s amazing about it?

But you have the ability to take something and translate that and make everyone else realize that it’s funny.

Yeah, but I wish I could say to you that I sit and I think about it and I plan it. I don’t. I get up on the stage and it happens. I think whatever’s doing it inside of me is amazing. But I’m just a vehicle in a sense. I don’t feel amazing.

Do you have a process for writing jokes? Do you write jokes?

No. I cut things out of the newspaper and I paste them up on 5-by-7 index cards and I getup on the stage and I look at the article and I hope something funny comes out. And if it does, I remember it and I’ll use it again for the next few nights until the news is old.

Mort Sahl does a similar thing.

Yeah. He gets up there with a newspaper. It’s amazing.

So who can we say that you influenced?

I’m always tagged, I think it was a New York Times writer -- said I did observational material and I was an observational comedian. That was the beginning of that. I’ve had so many comedians come up to me and give me credit for their career, so many young ones that are unknown. The problem is I made it look easy. And that probably was part of the problems I had. Everybody became a comedian. They thought it was something you could become, like a dentist.

Does that bother you that you’re the first guy to do this observational humor and now everyone’s copied you?

It doesn’t bother me now. Someone once said, ”God, you opened the door to everybody. You opened the door for every comedian through the ‘80s and ‘90s.” I said thank you. Except that I wish I would have been going through the door instead of standing there still holding it open. I didn’t make the $450 million.

You’ve got 23 year olds running the business now. I had a meeting with one of them one time. It was an older guy, actually. He had a lot of 23-year-olds with him. He was the head of a major studio in California. He was about 35 years old. He opened the meeting by saying, “David I just want you to know that from the time I was a kid, my mother would let me stay up and watch you on ‘The Tonight Show’ and you have been my favorite comedian ever since then and I think you are the best still.”

That’s a nice compliment.

Yeah. And I said thank you very much. We’re talking, talking, talking. I’m tossing some sitcom ideas at him. He said to me, “You know, David, I just want to tell you that the business has changed. What we’re really looking for today is the flavor of the month.” Now, I had heard this several times prior to that. So I said well, I don’t mean to insult you, but I also love marshmallow chopped liver swirl cherry peanut butter American cheese ice cream as much as the next person. But the top selling ice creams in this country are still vanilla, chocolate and strawberry and you my young friend are sitting across the table from vanilla. Of course, I didn’t get the gig.

Who are your big comedic influences?

My father. That’s it really. He brought me up on a diet of old timers, because he was an old timer. I was raised with all the vaudeville comedians. So I guess their style or something, timing, something slipped in there. I’m a big fan of a lot of comedians, from Richie Pryor to Chris Rock, but I don’t think I was ever influenced by any of them. I don’t think anybody influenced me.

Can you point to anything and say you learned this from your father or from somebody else?

No. No. I learned everything from my father but subliminally. He would hang out on the street corner. When I was 2 1/2, 3, 4 years old I’d be standing on the street corner and my father would be joking around and people would be screaming, laughing, and then this is all getting inside of me somewhere.

Your father listened to his father about not working on Shabbat and stopped his career. Did he regret that?

Yeah. His whole life.

Did he give you any advice about working on Shabbat?

I was never religious so he didn’t have to worry about that. The only advice he said to me was, “What I used to do when I went out on stage is I used to twirl a button on my suit to keep me from being nervous and right before I went out I took a good shot of whisky.” That’s good advice except I didn’t listen to either one of them (laughs) because I can’t drink before I go on stage and I’m not nervous, so what am I going to twirl a button for?

What advice would you give to someone who wants to be a comedian?

Today it’s tough. I would tell them be original. Although you don’t have to be. Some of the biggest comedy stars are thieves. They stole everything. I used to say you couldn’t make it if you stole, but now, God, the guys who are superstars, they go in clubs with recorders and send people in and steal things from young comedians. But be original. And what I told Jay Leno: get up every single night you can wherever it is – two people, four people -- and practice because you learn something. Whether you know it or not, you’re learning something every performance, and you always will, your whole career. The other thing I told Jay Leno. I told him get out of Boston. Move to New York or LA. And that’s what I would tell a kid today: Go to New York and LA and just get up there and keep working. And don’t listen to anyone except the audience. Don’t listen to any professional in the business.

You say you’re not religious, but you’ve been labeled as a Jewish comic.

I don’t know what that comes from. I happen to be Jewish and I happen to be a comedian. They could have labeled me as a tall comic or a Philly comic, or something like that. I don’t think about that part of me.

Your religion doesn’t play a role in what you do?

Nothing. Nothing at all. Zero. Zip.

Lenny Bruce used his Jewish background for material, but you don’t really do that.

No. The Jewish people are funny because the most persecuted people are always the funniest. That’s why you have a lot of black comedians today and a lot of Hispanic comedians because whoever’s getting kicked around goes into sports and show business. And who’s been persecuted more than Jewish people? So who’s had the most reasons to laugh? Other than that, my religion plays zero factor in my career and in my life.

I grew up and read all the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran. I went through it. Zen, Buddhism and all that and picked something out from everything and keep an open mind.

How has your act changed over the years?

You made a point before: How does it feel with the guys with the observational material that went so far in their career? I had to reinvent myself. What I did is I had to stay true to my nature, which is to be observational. That’s when I decided to be observational with the news and to work live without a net. I just had the feeling there were enough young people out there saying, “Oh, he’s doing Seinfeld, he’s doing Shandling,” like I’m the guy following. I didn’t want that. I said I want to do something that no comedian I know today has the balls to do, and that is no safety net, work off the news, just wing it, go and take changes and slip in stuff and stick your neck out. And no one has the balls to do that. They all have to have a set act. They’ll do live but the have it down to a science, they practice it, they know every move, every line, they don’t deviate at all and it’s live! It’s all rehearsed, or else it’s an old act that they’ve been doing for 20 years and of course it’s going to be great. The difference is I work spontaneously and I work off the news and that’s the difference.

When you go out and work without that safety net, how often does it work? Out of a 90-minute show, how much of it is really great stuff?

Well, I would say out of the 90 minutes I do, 85 minutes is pretty crystal clear. There are nights when you’re off. You get into a subject and you kind of mire down a little bit or something. Boom. I get out of it right way. But I’m very comfortable up there. I’d say most of my stuff works.

At this point, how would you like to be remembered?

Oh, I don’t care about it. I don’t care. I really don’t care because I think we’re here in a flicker and we’re gone. I once had somebody call out, ”Davidm you’re going to live forever. You’re going to be remembered forever.” I said I appreciate that very much, but nobody’s remembered. I said let me ask you a question. This is in like 1985. I said by raise of hands, who can name the No. 1 actor, singer, and/or comedian of 1885? Let’s see the hands. And I said, Do you see? You don’t even know who was great 100 years ago, so no one’s going to know who is great now in 100 years, but I appreciate the sentiment. I tell you one way I want to be remembered. I want to be remembered by my three sons as well as my father is remembered by me. And then after that, I don’t care.

Bobcat and Tomcat (Bob Goldthwait and Tom Kenny)

2007-12-13T11:10:00.000-07:00

The late and legendary comedian Andy Kaufman liked to pretend he was foreign. He’d take the stage, stumble through a few attempts at jokes and bad impressions and leave the audience wondering what was going on.

But as Kaufman’s legend grew, and his role as the befuddled foreigner Latka on TV’s “Taxi” brought him national fame, he couldn’t do that act anymore. Everyone knew he wasn’t foreign. So Kaufman transformed himself into an insulting, untalented lounge singer named Tony Clifton.

Bobcat Goldthwait, famous for his screeching, nails-on-a-blackboard voice, has undergone a similar transformation. Gone are the days when he’d take the stage, read a “Dear John” letter and cry. That was Bobcat as a teen; he’s 45 now.

“I wasn’t really thinking if the crowd was going to necessarily get it or not,” says Goldthwait. “It was always more about trying to make them uncomfortable. It was very self-indulgent. I was trying to entertain myself.”

The early Bobcat, immortalized on the classic 1988 comedy recording “Meat Bob,” featured a snarling, manic personality, prone to uttering out proclamations such as “Scott Baio is the anti-Christ.” His voice alternated between growling and sounding as though he was about to cry.

“It was a character I did,” Goldthwait says. “It was just my idea of doing someone who shouldn’t be on stage. And I was a big Andy Kaufman fan when I was a kid.”

Tom Kenny remembers Goldthwait’s early appearances.

“Since he’s been around for a while, you’ve got to imagine the impact he had when he first started doing clubs,” Kenny says. “It was unbelievable. Here’s a guy who seemed like he just walked in off the street. He seemed like a mental patient who walked in off the street and grabbed the microphone and was just babbling.”

Kenny and Goldthwait, both members of the Bishop Grimes Class of 1980, attended the Syracuse, N.Y., Catholic high school together. Even then, Kenny says, Goldthwait enjoyed messing with people’s minds.

“In the morning you’d come in and Bob would have set up a lemonade stand in the front hallway of the school and be selling lemonade, just because he thought it would be funny to open a lemonade stand in the hallway,” says Kenny.

Kenny, who followed Goldthwait into standup, is best known today as the voice of the Nickeloden cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants. He also appeared as the evil clown Binky in the 1991 cult movie “Shakes the Clown,” which Goldthwait starred in as well as wrote and directed. The movie featured a cameo by Robin Williams and a performance by a young Adam Sandler.

Goldthwait says Sandler probably has the same reaction to “Shakes” as someone else would to finding their role in a porno film coming to light. “I can’t imagine he promotes the fact that he was in ‘Shakes’ when people ask him. … ‘Yeah, I was a young kid and I needed the money.’”

Goldthwait earned his fame — or notoriety, for once setting a chair on fire during an appearance on Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” — through decades of appearances on TV and at comedy clubs. He’s well known enough that “Entertainment Tonight” sometimes will remember to call attention to his birthday (May 26).

“When ‘Entertainment Tonight’ does your birthday, you go, ‘Wow. That’s weird.’ And the year they don’t do it, you go, ‘Hey. What happened? I’m still alive.’”

Goldthwait says he knew as early as the third grade that he wanted to be a comedian. He remembers he was 13 when he heard Rodney Dangerfield say comedians have to write jokes. So he began to write jokes. He says he met Dangerfield years later “and he ended up being a big asshole” so he didn’t tell him that story.

Goldthwait can’t remember the first joke he ever wrote. “I found some notes the other day from the early act and it was obvious that Steve Martin was a big influence.”

He was also a fan of George Carlin and “Saturday Night Live” and Monty Python, but it was Kaufman who Goldthwait wound up emulating the most.

“He wanted to mess with people’s perceptions,” Kenny says. “Especially back then, in the early ’80s, a standup comedian was a guy with a suitcoat or a sweater and maybe the sleeves rolled up. ‘Who’s on dates? Anybody on dates? Who’s dating? Men and women are different, aren’t they? Why do women take so long to get ready?’ There was this sort of hackneyed observational standup style and Bob just went up and blew that to smithereens. One of his lines was, ‘How’s everybody doing tonight? Scratch that. I don’t care how you’re doing. I’m never going to see you again.’”

“I just kind of was interested in what I thought was funny,” Goldthwait says. “I wasn’t really thinking if the crowd was going to necessarily get it or not. I was always more about trying to make them uncomfortable. It was very self-indulgent.”

After initial success in Syracuse, Goldthwait struck out for Boston. Kenny, who performed as Tomcat to Goldthwait’s Bobcat while still in school, wound up following Goldthwait, first to Boston and then to San Francisco.

“I was always kind of just a couple of steps behind him in his wake,” says Kenny, who reveals it was Goldthwait who pushed him to do standup comedy.

“He encouraged me,” Kenny says. “I wouldn’t have tried it if it wasn’t for him. He pushed me to do it. I always had this secret desire to do it but was a little shy about it. He was the more outgoing of the two of us. He pushed me up on stage and gave me the confidence to do it. I actually owe him for that.”

People magazine in 1984 singled Goldthwait as one of the stars of tomorrow, alongside such whatever-happened-to names as Patrick Ewing, Tom Cruise and Glenn Close.

“I first started out as trying to make fun of standup comedy,” says Goldthwait. “I’d be this guy who couldn’t get a joke out. Then I went on Letterman when I was 20 and then what happened was I started getting booked as a comedian. Before that, I was just in Boston, where I all I had to do was 15-, 20-minute sets so it could be very abstract. And I became a comedian. I became the thing I was trying to make fun of.”

“Since he’s been around for a while, you’ve got to imagine the impact he had when he first started doing clubs,” Kenny says. “It was unbelievable. Here was a guy who seemed like he just walked in off the street. He seemed like a mental patient who walked in off the street and grabbed the microphone and was just babbling. Then the more you listened to the babble, the more it was really great jokes and points of view that made sense and well-observed social criticism and topical humor.”

Goldthwait’s career began to take off, and he found his Bobcat persona in demand for a series of largely forgettable film roles, including three of the 1980s “Police Academy” movies and the 1987 movie “Burglar.” Based on the Lawrence Block mystery, “Burglar” offered Goldthwait as an unusual casting choice; in the book his character is a lesbian dog groomer.

“I think Whoopi [Goldberg] originally was supposed to play the lesbian dog groomer and Bruce Willis was supposed to play the burglar. And by the time it got made, I was the lesbian,” Goldthwait says.

Goldthwait says he’s only been in a couple of movies that don’t embarrass him. He was in the 2001 cocaine drama “Blow,” which also featured another manic comic, Pee-Wee Herman (in real life Paul Reubens). He also doesn’t mind “Shakes the Clown.” Goldthwait also voiced the character of Pain in the 1997 animated Disney movie “Hercules.”

“I do run into parents that go, ‘I am so tired of hearing your fucking voice,’” says Goldthwait, who adds seeing his character turned into a toy for McDonald’s Happy Meals was “pretty surreal.”

Goldthwait could be heard during the mid- to late 1990s as the voice of a stuffed rabbit named Mr. Floppy on the WB series “Unhappily Ever After.” The Antichrist himself, Scott Baio, directed an episode. “Oddly enough, I don’t think he even brought that up.”

Goldthwait also found himself as the voice of Charlton Heston’s penis during a segment on “The Man Show,” the Comedy Central program that co-starred Jimmy Kimmel and ended each episode with girls bouncing on trampolines. Goldthwait directed various segments of the show.

On the phone, Goldthwait is soft-spoken, thoughtful and funny. He admits he’s happier now than he was years ago, when he was facing more public scrutiny as he became more successful.

“There was a period when I was going from movie to movie,” he says. “I’m sure they assume that’s like people’s dreams, but I wasn’t very happy. Maybe I’m just happy now because I’m old.”

He limits his standup performances now, spending his time instead directing episodes of the ABC program “Jimmy Kimmel Live” and working on other projects. He brought his third feature film, “Sleeping Dogs Lie,” a dark comedy about bestiality, to the Sundance Film Festival in 2006. (His second film was “Windy City Heat,” a 2003 movie about a man who doesn’t know his Hollywood celebrity is all part of a big joke.)

Goldthwait released his long-awaited follow-up CD, “I Don’t Mean to Insult You, But You Look Like Bobcat Goldthwait,” in 2003.

Kenny says his friend’s act has “more Bob in it than Bobcat” these days but that “he still retains a fair amount of that punk rock tilting at windmills kind of sensibility.”

Goldthwait’s fans should appreciate the fact that Goldthwait isn’t the angry, bitter comic he appears to be on stage. Offstage, he’s just Bob.

“I like the fact that I have a persona,” Goldthwait says. “I’m not the life of the party. If I was at a party, I wouldn’t be the loudest guy, cracking jokes, or I wouldn’t be the guy sitting in the corner making fun of other people. I would just be an average guy. So I like having a persona ‘cause it’s like someone else does the standup comedy.”

Bill Dana

2007-09-04T14:13:00.000-06:00

He became a household name, but only after trying a couple of others out first. Born William Szathmary, Bill Dana adopted a shorter, marquee-friendly moniker when he went into show business. The real recognition would come with the introduction of another name.

“My name … Jose Jimenez,” Dana would say, appearing so many times on so many television programs that eventually just saying “my name” drew laughs from the audiences.

Jose, wide-eyed and innocent, lived the life of Walter Mitty during the 1960s. He passed himself off in his various appearances as a submarine commander, a piano tuner, and, most famously, as an astronaut.

“If you’re in your 40s or 50s today, you got exposed to Jose Jimenez,” Dana says.

Before Dana retired the character in 1970 amid mounting pressure from Hispanic activists, Jose appeared on a string of record albums and television shows and a starring role on his own TV program. Eventually — and briefly — an entire television network was built around Dana’s talents.

His portrayal of a reluctant astronaut — a routine he repeated during President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural gala — earned him the respect and friendship of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, who dubbed Dana the eighth astronaut.

But without Jose, Bill Dana might just have spent his career behind the cameras. In fact, he says he might have been better off without Jose.

Dana was born in 1924 in Quincy, Massachusetts, an event later to be celebrated by his inclusion in its Quincy Hall of Fame. The youngest of six children born to Joseph and Dena Szathmary, Dana benefited from the expertise of an older brother, Arthur, who was fluent in several languages and gave his sibling his second entry into foreign languages. The first was growing up in a polyglot neighborhood where Spanish and Italian were among the languages spoken and having a Hungarian immigrant for a father.

“My brother, Arthur, he taught me the correct pronunciation,” Dana says. “As long as it doesn’t get too grammatical, I can speak French, German, Spanish, Italian certainly without an American accent. If you learn it early enough, it stays with you. I’m in no way a linguist, but I wouldn’t get lost in any of those countries because I know enough. For example, when Jose was big if somebody came up to me and talked to me in Spanish, I had no problem in getting into a conversation with them.”

His linguistic skills came in handy during World War II, where he served as an unofficial interpreter for his infantry company. Dana’s official role in Company A of the 263rd Division was manning the 60-millimeter mortar and the .30-caliber machine gun as well. He was destined for the bloody Battle of the Bulge, where nearly 90,000 Americans died, when fate intervened.

“We were heading right to relieve the troops in the Bulge,” Dana says. “I don’t see how the hell we would have come out alive. The people we were to relieve got destroyed. I went south. There was activity down there. Guys were getting killed, but it was a cakewalk compared to the Bulge.”

Dana was aboard the British transport ship Cheshire on Christmas Eve 1944 when the Belgian troopship Leopoldville was torpedoed and started to sink. The Cheshire came to the rescue, although 802 still died.

After the war, Dana returned home with a Bronze Star and studied speech and dramatic writing on the GI Bill at Emerson College in Boston. He graduated in 1950, and then headed to California. He worked a series of jobs, including driving an ice cream truck, when hometown pal Gene Wood wrote to suggest they form a comedy team. Another Emerson grad, Wood went to New York after college and landed a job as an NBC page and an appearance on the TV show "Jerry Lester’s Broadway Open House." Dana made his way to New York, where he also found a job as an NBC page and formed a partnership with Wood. He was still Bill Szathmary then, so he tweaked his mother’s first name — Dena — to create a new name for himself.

The unproven Dana and Wood took an unusual path. Instead of polishing their act in nightclubs, the comic duo appeared on television first, including NBC’s "The Kate Smith Show" and "The Milton Berle Show." Unlike other popular comedy teams, neither functioned as a straight man.

“We were not like Martin and Lewis,” Dana says. “We tried to be like two Sid Caesars.”

A half-century later, Dana still remembers some of the bits he performed with Wood.

“We did premise stuff: ‘What would have happened if?’ ‘It must have been said.’ We would say that like with an echo: ‘It must have been said. Sometime during their life together, Mrs. Albert Einstein must have said to Albert Einstein, what do you know?’ ‘Sometime during their life together, Mrs. Thomas Edison must have said to Thomas Edison, the wizard of Menlo Park, I don’t care what it is, Tom, turn it off and come to bed.’

“Our act was — and is — very funny,” Dana says. “And it was timeless.”

Dana says the act was “moderately successful,” but it wasn’t without its problems. Chief among them was the audience’s perception that Wood was the straight man of the act. “We were supposed to be two funny actors, but I had the funny face and Gene had the good-looking face, so people made him the straight man. The audience wasn’t used to two people performing equally, and I looked I should be the funny guy and he looked like he should be the straight man.”

Wood didn’t like being taken seriously, so the chums went their separate ways, with Wood initially going on to write for "Captain Kangaroo" and Dana lending his comic talents to "The Imogene Coca Show" and "The Martha Raye Show." But after he aggravated an old back injury, Dana decided to find more sedentary work as a writer.

“Dana and Wood broke up and I wanted to be a writer,” Dana says. “I’d been writing for the comedy team, our comedy team, with Gene. We wrote all of our own stuff. Everybody stole everybody else’s material. There would be fights between two comedians saying, ‘You stole my Phil Foster routine’ within 10 feet of Phil Foster. It was a crazy time. But we did everything original and I had experience writing stuff.”

But who to write for? His agent sent a young comedian named Don Adams to Dana, who at the time was apartment sitting for Imogene Coca on Central Park West. Adams must have thought Dana was an eccentric type, this fellow wearing a smoking jacket with a lavishly decorated apartment complete with Picassos and a color TV, who would write jokes for $15 a week. But Dana’s poise dissolved when he reached into his pocket and out fell his unemployment check.

Adams and Dana became fast friends and, briefly. Dana wrote the classic line “Would you believe?” for Adams. During an appearance in late 1954 that Adams was making on "The Steve Allen Show," Dana tagged along to watch his material being performed. The other writers on the show — Herb Sargent and Stan Burns — liked the routine and asked Dana to join the writing staff.

Dana created such lasting features as the Answer Man, in which Allen would provide a humorous answer before hearing the question. (Johnny Carson would later reprise the bit as Carnac the Magnificent during his time as host of "The Tonight Show".) Dana also proved adept at recruiting talented people for the show. He’d worked with Don Knotts on Martha Raye's show, but Knotts’ career had hit a dry spell and the West Virginian was about to give up on show business and head home when Dana brought him over to meet Allen. Knotts became a regular on the show.

But Dana’s greatest contribution, to both the show and his own career, was to come in late 1959. Dana and fellow writer Don Hinkley used to write a recurring feature called the Nutley Hinkley Butley Winkley Report, a takeoff of news anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and their Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC.

“Pre-Christmas USA was the theme of that report and I thought if we had a school for Santa Clauses and one of the instructors was Latino, if he were to write out ho ho ho it would be spelled jo jo jo,” Dana says. “I chose the name Jose Jimenez to put on the top of this blackboard so that the audience would be reminded a J sounds like an H in Spanish.”

The roots of Jose Jimenez date to 1947, when Dana visited Puerto Rico and met a man who professed to be the “Dutch representative” for the island. Dana eventually figured out the fellow was talking about Dodge, and filed the accent away in his mind. Dana sometimes slipped into various dialects to entertain his fellow writers.

“This is a character Billy had been fooling around with,” says veteran comedian and actor Pat Harrington Jr. “He didn’t just invent it one week and he went out and did it the following week.”

Allen put Dana in front of the camera to portray the Latino instructor of Santa Clauses. Harrington played the straight man, newscaster Dave Hinkley.

HINKLEY: This is Dave Hinkley at Santa Claus school in Los Angeles. Many people do not realize that every year courses are given to prospective Santa Clauses to teach them how Santa Claus is supposed to act and speak. What is your name, sir, and what course do you teach?
JOSE: My name Jose Jimenez. I teach to ... to Santy Claus, I teach to Santy Claus, I teach Santy Claus to espeak.

The audience loved it, especially when Dana pulled a covering from the blackboard that showed exactly what Jose taught Santa to say: “Jo Jo Jo.”

“There was a tremendous reaction from the audience just from identifying myself,” Dana says. “They didn’t expect to hear that sound coming out this little innocent face, I guess.”

Jose originally was to be a one-shot character, but there was little chance of retiring him after such a reception.

“I remember Billy Harbach, the producer, was watching the rehearsal during the week,” Harrington says, “and he was just beside himself. Everybody was of one opinion that this was just a hysterical thing.”

Dana got plenty of laughs out of Jose switching his Js for Hs, like the time he fawned over singer “Hulie London,” and capitalized on the popularity of the character by releasing his first album, “My name Jose Jimenez,” which contained a collection of bits from "The Steve Allen Show." The album was released on Signature Records, which Allen had founded.

“My first album was on Signature and to this very day I have no idea how many it sold. It was a huge best-seller and I never got paid,” says Dana, who blames the label’s management and not Allen.

A TV Guide article from 1960 says the album sold 90,000 copies in less than two months.

Dana, who started his career earning $33.50 a week as an NBC page, saw his popularity and fortune rise. He made $35,000 in 1959, according to TV Guide, and was expecting to double that in 1960.

An appearance on "The Garry Moore Show" in December 1960 propelled Jose Jimenez into the stratosphere. The writers wanted to find a different occupation for Jose. Neil Simon, the future playwright and a staff writer on the show, suggested Jose play the part of an astronaut. Dana and Hinkley retreated to write the bit, which would become a classic.

Steve Allen wrote in his memoir "Hi-Ho, Steverino!" that “it never particularly mattered what his [Jose’s] alleged job was, but when he finally claimed to be an astronaut, the timing could not have been better. In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s the nation was fascinated by the space program and Bill apparently became the only comedian dealing chiefly with that subject matter.”

His appearance as a reluctant astronaut was included in the movie version of "The Right Stuff" (1983), in which Jose banters with Ed Sullivan.

ED SULLIVAN: Now what do you consider the most important thing in rocket travel?
JOSE: To me, the most important thing about rocket travel is the blastoff.
ED: The blast off?
JOSE: I always take a blast before I take off.

A month later, Dana was in Washington, playing the reluctant astronaut before President John F. Kennedy during the inaugural gala. Milton Berle played straight man to Jose. Dana had come a long way from his day as an NBC page outside Studio 6B, where Berle had filmed his "Texaco Star Theater."

“Jose the astronaut had become a phenomenon,” Dana says.

Mickey Kapp of Kapp Records was quick to recognize that phenomenon. He produced a 45 release of the astronaut routine, which quickly became a top-selling single in 1961, and an album called “Jose Jimenez at the Hungry i.” The cover features Dana against the brick wall of the Hungry i, with the album title painted across the wall in yellow. The H in Hungry has been crossed out and replaced with a J.

Kapp re-released the album with a cover image of a rocket blasting off and retitled it “Jose Jimenez the Astronaut.” During the summer and fall of 1961, the album fought for top position on the charts against albums by Jonathan Winters, Frank Sinatra and Bob Newhart. By September, “The Astronaut” was the top-selling album in America.

Wisely, Kapp shipped copies of the astronaut album to the astronauts themselves. He sent eight albums to Langley Air Force Base in California, where the original Mercury 7 astronauts were undergoing training. (The eighth album was for the publicist for the space program.)

But Kapp says he never knew if the astronauts received the album, until he read a Life magazine article from May 1961 in which astronaut Alan Shepard quoted two lines from the album.

Shepard was a big fan of the character. He took to quoting lines from the album and speaking in an accent like Jose’s.

“Smilin’ Al used to crack up over this routine,” Tom Wolfe wrote in his book about the early space program, The Right Stuff, on which the movie was based. “He liked do the Jose Jimenez part; and if he could get someone to feed him the straight lines, he was in Seventh Heaven, Smilin’ Al version.”

As Shepard waited for the lift-off on Mercury 7 on May 5, 1961, he had Jose’s astronaut routine piped through the intercom to ease the tension.

Dana befriended the Mercury 7, showing up at launches and letting them hang out at his California home. Some astronauts even played straight man to Jose during various appearances. And the astronauts quoted Jose’s routines during their trips into space.

“We were just good pals,” Dana says. “And I became kind of like the conduit. If somebody wanted to get to the astronauts, they would pick up the phone and call Bill Dana.”

Dana considers his acceptance by the astronauts among the greatest honors of his life. He remains a big booster of the space program. Dana sits on the advisory board of the Astronaut Scholarship Fund. He was inducted into the United States Astronaut Hall of Fame in Titusville, Florida, as the official eighth Mercury astronaut.

Dana keeps in contact with the early astronauts. He’s particularly close to Wally Schirra and Scott Carpenter.

“I love him like a brother,” Carpenter says of Dana. “He was good for the early space program. His humor helped us through some rough spots.”

Carpenter says in the early days of the Mercury program, a California jeweler designed and made tie tacks for the astronauts. The design is the Greek symbol for Mercury with a 7 in the center. “It’s a very precious thing for us,” he says.

Carpenter says the astronauts later had one made for Dana, “but we put an 8 in the center instead of a 7 and enameled it yellow to signify cowardice.”

Other comedians did jokes about going into space as well, though none ever caught on the way Dana’s Jose character did. Charlie Manna started doing a routine in 1961 about an astronaut that won’t go into orbit until he has his box of crayons.

Author Ronald L. Smith, who has an encyclopedic mind about standup comedy, and who has actually written encyclopedias on the subject, says Dana’s success “was bigger and more enduring because he actually was the astronaut.” He says Manna and most other stand-up comics can’t convince they are somebody else when they portray a character.

“With Bill, he really was Jose the astronaut,” Smith says. “He had a straight man setting him up, so all he delivered were the vivid punchlines.”

Through the 1960s, Jose was everywhere. Dana followed up the success of the astronaut album with “Jose Jimenez in Orbit.” For the summer replacement program "The Spike Jones Show" in 1961, Dana served as producer and regularly appeared as Jose. In one routine, Jose showed up to tune the piano during the show.

SPIKE JONES: Look, you don’t tune a piano now. You tune it before the show, not while it’s in progress.
JOSE: I don’t understan’.
SPIKE: Well, look, you wouldn’t change a tire on your car while you were driving it, would you?
JOSE: Not anymore.
SPIKE: That’s ridiculous!
JOSE: And also painful.

The Jose Jimenez character was straight out of vaudeville, Dana says, with a format of setup and joke, setup and joke. Jose became more three-dimensional beginning with his debut in October 1961 on "The Danny Thomas Show." Jose took a job as an elevator operator in the apartment building on the show.

Starting in September 1963, Jose was spun off into his own program, "The Bill Dana Show," in which the character played a hotel bellman. (In a similar fashion, "The Andy Griffith Show" was a 1960 spinoff from "The Danny Thomas Show.")

NBC gave an order for 39 episodes. The Sunday night show also featured Dana’s old friend, Don Adams, as the hotel detective Byron Glick.

“I was involved with every single episode, and I only took credit on a couple of them that I had done the total first draft, but I rewrote every one of them,” Dana says. “Because a lot of really great writers they get a gig and they come in and they don’t pay attention. You’ll find that any star of any show that’s survived has to do that.”

Dana didn’t let Jose get too far from his roots. He would insert into some episodes reveries in which Jose would imagine himself an astronaut or a deep-sea diver or other heroic figure.

Previously nominated for an Emmy Award for comedy writing in 1959 for his work on "The Steve Allen Show," Dana was up again for an Emmy in the same category for his own show. But again he didn’t win, and after a total of 42 episodes The Bill Dana Show was cancelled.

Dana recites a litany of reasons why: “The Westerns. Almost everything became a Western. My ratings. They gave me a bad time slot. You pick out any copout and it was appropriate.”

At the time the show was preparing to debut, Dana told a reporter he was gambling "The Bill Dana Show" would be a success. He would lose money by doing the show — the guest appearances and personal appearances paid him better than the TV show — but said he stood to make millions if his show was a hit.

“It’s funny,” Dana says. “Perception and truth don’t necessarily go hand in hand. The perception is that Jose Jimenez made me a very wealthy man. The truth is it cost me God knows how much money because it took me off the vector where the big bucks is.”

Dana says he would have done better financially had he stayed behind the scenes and created television programs. But he says he wouldn’t change anything “especially because of my relationship with the space program.”

After the cancellation of his show, neither Dana nor Jose faded from view. Dana appeared on a string of episodes of "Hollywood Palace" and "The Ed Sullivan Show," both as himself and as Jose. He did a cameo on "Batman" and showed his dramatic skill on an episode of "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."

Then, on May 1, 1967, Dana went on the air with a new show. "The Las Vegas Show" was a two-hour program that aired live five nights a week on The United Network, a fledgling effort to become the fourth national television network. With Dana as host broadcasting from the Hotel Hacienda in Las Vegas, the debut show featured such talents as Sarah Vaughan, Chad & Jeremy, Allen & Rossi and Dana’s old pal, Don Adams. The show was carried on 106 independent stations.

“It was going to be a marvelous cash cow,” Dana says. “All of us were going to get tremendously wealthy. That did not happen. The opposite happened. I cashed a check for a couple of thousand dollars and just sat there handing out 10s and 20s just to give people bus fare to get home.”

The United Network filed for bankruptcy, listing $1.1 million in assets and $1.8 million in liabilities, including $25,000 owed to Dana.

The back-to-back failures of his two television efforts, coupled with a slowly growing rumbling within the Hispanic community about Jose, began to eat at Dana. A group calling itself the Mexican-American Anti-Defamation Committee in September 1968 called Jose’s ads for the “jellow pages” demeaning. Another group, this one called Mexican Americans in Gainful Employment, also opposed Jose.

Tom Wolfe got one thing wrong in "The Right Stuff." He wrote that Dana portrayed Jose as “a stupid Mexican immigrant.” Dana never portrayed Jose as anything but a positive, though naïve, figure.

“This was just a beautiful little guy, a child-adult, a good American,” Dana says. “He never did anything for himself – always for somebody else.”

But in the spring of 1970, Dana decided to retire the character.

“I wasn’t out to hurt anybody,” Dana says, “So I said let’s shelve the character. My manager and other people were really upset with me. It cost me. looking back, I’d love to have the money that I lost.”
Before a crowd of about 11,000 people — mostly Mexican-Americans — at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, he announced he was done with Jose. The audience cheered. The news made national headlines.

“I wasn’t out to hurt anybody,” Dana says, “So I said let’s shelve the character. My manager and other people were really upset with me. It cost me. looking back, I’d love to have the money that I lost.”

Dana says his bookings began to dry up. He was known as Jose Jimenez, not as Bill Dana.

He turned his attention to writing again, and signed on as head writer for "The Don Knotts Show." But he abruptly left and moved to Hawaii, settling in the tiny town of Hana on the island of Maui. Dana was suffering from depression.

He needed money, but Dana says Hollywood’s reaction to him moving to Hawaii was the same as if he’d left the planet.

“I had this whole career as a writer and head writer of 'The Steve Allen Show' and had quite a reputation as a writer,” Dana says, “and then all of a sudden Jose came along and sort of overwhelmed everything. When I was I was in Hawaii sort of looking at my navel, I realized that I had lost my identity as a writer.”

Dana reached out to Norman Lear, who he first met when Lear was writing "The Norma Raye Show." Lear had created "All in the Family," the groundbreaking comedy that dared to tackle prejudice and ignorance.

Lear was willing to give Dana a shot, and suggested he find a way to write Sammy Davis Jr. — a big fan of the show — onto "All in the Family."

“At that time, when Sammy was at the Sands, he would delay his show a half-hour and then come out on stage and tell everybody in the audience what happened in the Bunker household,” Dana says.

Dana wrote a classic episode in which Davis leaves a briefcase in Archie Bunker’s taxi and arranges to swing by to pick it up. The episode, which aired in the second season, had such classic lines as Bunker asking: “Do you want cream and sugar in your eye?”

The episode ends with Davis and Bunker (played by Carroll O’Connor) posing for a photograph together. Just as the photo is snapped, Davis turns and kisses Bunker’s cheek.

Dana says he wrote one draft of the episode, which was then polished by Lear and the other writers on the show. He won’t say specifically what he contributed, but estimates 35 percent to 45 percent of what he wrote made it to air. Lear gave Dana sole credit for writing the episode. (The episode won an Emmy Award for its director but because of a mix-up the submission wasn’t made on Dana’s behalf for writing it.)

“I wasn’t in the best mental shape in that whole period, but it was a great boost,” Dana says. “Norman Lear, I can’t say enough in praise of that man and not only as a citizen but he’s just been a really very close personal friend, especially in times when I needed a pal.”

As it happened, writing for "All in the Family" didn’t do anything for Dana’s writing career. Hollywood still wasn’t calling.

In the years since, Dana returned to the mainland, married and picked up both his acting and writing career in earnest. He and his wife Evelyn live in Nashville. Dana resurrected Jose Jimenez, and this time around no one seemed to mind.

Dana reunited with some of the old gang when he appeared on an episode of "St. Elsewhere" with Steve Allen, Tom Poston and Louie Nye in 1988. He also appeared as a guest star on other TV shows in the 1980s and 1990s as "Blossom," "Sledge Hammer," "Empty Nest," "The Golden Girls" and "Too Close for Comfort."

His profile still not as high as it was in the 1960s, Dana continues to perform, sometimes as the still-innocent Jose Jimenez. But his passion these days lies with Emerson College, specifically the American Comedy Archives he’s compiling there. Dana created the archives in 2004 and since then has criss-crossed the country interviewing legendary figures of comedy. So far, he has gathered oral histories from such luminaries as Shelley Berman, Irwin Corey, Phyllis Diller, Don Knotts, Louis Nye and Jonathan Winters.

The archives contain plenty of material about Dana’s own storied career. Scripts, photographs and his own oral history are all included.

Dana says his favorite Jose Jimenez routine was the astronaut one. And as much as Dana enjoys his role as a pioneer from the early days of television, it’s his role with the space program of which he’s proudest.

“It’s very hard to pick up a book about the American space program and not have a reference [to Jose Jimenez],” Dana says. “He was referred to on every Mercury and Gemini flight one way or the other. It’s a source of great flattery and pride.”

Gilbert Gottfried

2007-08-14T15:13:00.001-06:00

Admittedly, “The Aristocrats” wasn’t for everyone. The unrated 2005 documentary focused on a joke that wasn’t particularly funny and was so raunchy that one movie theater chain refused to show it.

Enjoying a second life on DVD, “The Aristocrats” is finding new fans and giving a boost to some of the comedians featured in the film.

About 100 comics were involved in the telling of the joke, including such famous names as the Smothers Brothers, Martin Mull, George Carlin and Drew Carey. But the best version, agree many fans, critics and comedians, was the one told by Gilbert Gottfried.

“I liked the Gilbert Gottfried version. And I say that with no hidden agenda,” the man himself says by phone from Toronto. In a recording studio to tape his voiceover work for the PBS series “Cyberchase,” Gottfried conducts an interview in snatches between takes. On the phone, his voice is calm and quiet, nothing like the raspy screeching he’s known for on stage.

Gottfried uses his stage voice as the robotic bird Digit on “Cyberchase,” a familiar noise to anyone who’s heard him as the Aflac duck on television or as the parrot Iago in the Disney movie “Aladdin.” He also appeared as the voice of a penguin in “Farce of the Penguins,” a parody of the Oscar-winning film “March of the Penguins.”

“I’ve always said my career’s for the birds,” Gottfried says. “Maybe I’ll branch out to turtles or centipedes.”

Now 52, a newlywed and a new father, Gottfried has been a standup comic since he was 15. He began as an impressionist: Boris Karloff, Humphrey Bogart, Groucho Marx and James Mason were part of his repertoire. “I still pull them out sometime,” he says.

Gottfried has his fans — and several Web sites dedicated to him — but has never managed to achieve breakout status. He joined the cast of “Saturday Night Live” in 1980, after the departure of the original cast, but that entire season has been written off as largely forgettable except for the appearance of Eddie Murphy.

“‘Saturday Night Live’ was a creepy time period because it was right after the original cast left and I kind of think of our cast like the sacrificial lambs,” says Gilbert, who shared the stage with Tim Kazurinsky, Charles Rocket, Joe Piscopo and Gail Matthius and left at the season’s end. “Of course, now the cast changes between commercial breaks. Back then, it was like they were gunning against the show from before it went on the air, like ‘How dare they?’ When we did go on, we did suck, but that’s a whole other story.”

In the years since, Gottfried has appeared in a string of TV shows and movies, including a scene-stealing turn opposite Murphy in “Beverly Hills Cop II” in 1987, and made regular visits to Howard Stern’s radio show. He also was the voice of a talking smoke alarm in a 1991 fire safety video.

“Look at everything I’ve done in my career and do the opposite,” is the advice Gottfried says he would give to any up-and-coming comedian wanting any.

Gottfried’s ability to tell a joke, and tell a joke well, has kept him busy for decades. His appearance in “The Aristocrats” also has people giving him a second look.

“I believe that the movie exposed him to a lot of people and that a lot of people really enjoyed him in the movie,” says Paul Provenza, who directed “The Aristocrats.” “They used to just think he was an annoying pain in the ass. I’ve had a lot of people say that it really turned them around on Gilbert, that they used to just think he was this annoying voice, but now they get him. They think he’s really funny.”

Provenza has known Gottfried since the late 1970s. He says comedians can “understand why they [other comedians] are funny, but nobody can really explain Gilbert. There’s no real formula to what Gilbert does. It’s what Gilbert is.”

Of course, Gottfried still has his detractors. Perhaps turned off by his stage persona, in which Gottfried adds a squinty barely there look to his grating screech, members of the dating service JDate in 2006 voted Gottfried the worst Valentine’s Day date.

That’s not an honor, but at least Gottfried is visible enough now to be included in such polls. Gottfried appears to relish criticism. He says his favorite review was from a critic who wrote in Variety that “Gilbert Gottfried is the most unpleasant thing to happen to show business since the snuff film.”

“That one I kind of enjoyed,” Gottfried says.

“The Aristocrats” was made on a non-existent budget using a digital video camera. Provenza, also a standup comic, and magician Penn Jillette, who served as executive producer, emptied their address books to fill the movie with their friends and acquaintances. Taping began in early 2001.

“The Aristocrats” made $6.1 million at the box office, according to the movie tracking Web site Rotten Tomatoes, which also estimates it took in $13.2 million from video rentals in just nine weeks’ time. The movie might have done more at the box office, but AMC Theatres banned the film from appearing on any of its 3,500 screens.

Provenza, who declines to say which of his friends told the joke best, will say that “Gilbert’s is one of the best.”
More than 200 people reviewed the movie on Amazon.com, giving “The Aristocrats” an average of three-and-a-half stars out of five. Some said the reason they sought the movie out was because of Gottfried’s performance.

Comedian Steven Wright, who also appears in the film, says Gottfried told the joke the best. “He’s one of my favorite comedians. He’s so hilarious and different.”

Gottfried appears twice on the DVD. He is shown telling the joke sitting at a table in a segment included in the disc’s extras. But the highlight is him telling the bit during a Friar’s Club roast of Hugh Hefner.

Gottfried launched into the joke after the audience reacted poorly to his quip about the events of Sept. 11. It was 18 days after. Gottfried joked that he couldn’t get a direct flight from New York to Los Angeles: “I had to make a stop at the Empire State Building.”

“You could hear chairs screech back and someone yelled out, ‘Too soon!’ I thought that meant I didn’t take a long enough pause between the setup and the joke.”

Gottfried says he decided “to get twice as offensive” and tell his version of the aristocrats joke. The joke was fresh on his mind; he’d already taped the bit for “The Aristocrats.”

“It’s not a good joke,” says Bob Saget, who’s also in the movie. Saget starred in the 1980s sitcom “Full House” and also served as the original host of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” “It’s just about being offensive to be offensive.”
Forced to choose who tells the joke the best, Saget says it’s either Paul Reiser or Gottfried.

“Gilbert’s was just incredibly strong,” Saget says. “He just blew the place up.”

The irony in Gottfried receiving these accolades for telling the joke is that he isn’t known for dirty jokes.

“The funny thing is, in my regular standup I work clean,” he says.

“He doesn’t work raunchy at all,” Provenza says. “He can if he wants to, but telling dirty jokes is not really what he does. That’s just the thing he’s really good at.”

Riding the wave of interest in “The Aristocrats,” Gottfried released his first DVD at the end of 2005. “Gilbert Gottfried Dirty Jokes” is 50 minutes of Gottfried telling just that. He also released a CD that contains the same material.

“I guess the time was right because of ‘The Aristocrats’ and because I didn’t feel like using up all my material on the DVD, so I decided to do this one,” he says.

Gottfried tells yet another version of the aristocrats joke on his own DVD.

“I figured at this point it would almost be glaring if I didn’t,” he says. “This one, I tried to even outdo the one I did on the film. I felt proud of myself because a few people said their only complaint with the joke was it was too long and too disgusting, so I thought I accomplished something.”

Gottfried, who tends to dislike contemplative questions, deflects one about the future of his career.

“I really don’t know,” he says. “If I keep working, I’ll be amazed.”

Al Feldstein

2007-08-06T14:45:00.000-06:00

A congressional investigation cost Al Feldstein a job.

It was the 1950s, and Feldstein was writing and illustrating comic books for Bill Gaines' company, EC Comics. The comics weren't anything special, primarily imitations of popular comics of the day. If romance comics were popular, EC copied the formula. But Feldstein was an idea man. He convinced Gaines that EC Comics shouldn't be an imitator, but an innovator. He wanted Gaines to try something different.

Radically different, as it turned out.

EC began to publish a line of comic books with titles like "Weird Tales" and "The Crypt of Terror" and "The Vault of Horror." Kids were used to superhero and funny animal comic books. EC's comics featured drawings of beheadings and other ghastly murder scenes.

Those comic books drew the attention of a New York psychiatrist, Dr. Frederic Wertham, who blasted EC in his book "Seduction of the Innocent," and of a U.S. senator, Estes Kefauver, who held a congressional inquiry in 1954 into whether juvenile delinquency could be blamed on comic books.

When the smoke cleared from the congressional inquiry, other comic book publishers agreed to band together and enact a code that everyone must live by. Gone, the Comics Code Authority ruled, were any comics with titles that included the words "horror" and "terror," among other restrictions.

That nearly wiped out Gaines and EC Comics, and eliminated Feldstein's role in the company. Gaines was left with one comic that had a halfway decent chance of getting past the newly appointed censors: MAD. Gaines repositioned MAD, changing it from a comic book to a magazine to avoid oversight of the Comics Code Authority. Feldstein took over MAD with issue No. 28 in 1956. He remained on the job until 1984.

How did you and Bill Gaines meet?
I was a freelance comic book artist and writer. Bill Gaines’ father had his own company. He had started the comic book business by inventing the comic book back in the ’30s. He did that with a partner. Then Bill’s father was killed in a boating accident. Bill was 22 or so. He thought he’d be a teacher. He knew nothing about the business. His mother talked him into taking over the business.

I came down and met this young man who had just taken over the business. We became fast friends. I started to work for his “Crime Patrol,” “War Against Crime,” “Saddle Justice.” And then a trend came along called romance comics. These were directed at girls. They were love stories, so we started doing those.

The comic book business in those days was really kind of fun. There were 600 titles on the stands at a time. This was pre-television. We’re talking the late ’40s. Guys coming out of the service were reading them, kids were reading them. You could put it in your pocket, carry it and read it on the subway. This was the visual entertainment of the day, unless you wanted to pay to go into a movie.

Superman and Batman were the big names in comics. Why didn't EC publish superhero comic books?
Neither Bill nor I had a propensity for super-type heroes. I didn’t like them. I don’t know why we didn’t have them. But we did imitate others.

Bill and I both lived in Brooklyn. He lived in an apartment with his mother. I lived with my first wife in a small apartment in Brooklyn. When he would drive home to Brooklyn he would drop me off. And on our trips we chatted about the comic book business, about the trials and tribulations about publishing. Instead of being a follower, instead of putting out what somebody else starts and then getting clobbered when the trend softens, the innovators remain. I said, why don't we innovate? In the light of attempting to be innovators, we chatted about what would make interesting comic book material. He and I remembered having listened to the old radio shows, "Witch’s Tale," "Light’s Out," "Inner Sanctum," back in the’30s and early ’40s. I said why don’t we put out gothic horror? He and I were fans of H.P. Lovecraft and some of the other horror writers. It had never been done. He said well, let’s try it. So I created the "Crypt of Terror" with the Crypt Keeper as the host and wrote the first few stories, which were included in one of his titles, called "Crime Patrol."

We became extremely successful and also extremely hated by the other publishers. We were usurping dimes from their sales.

Who were you writing for? The kids or the adults?
We were writing for ourselves, actually, that’s what it turned out to be. It turned out to be a labor of writing for people who would enjoy the stories. We wrote up to our audience, not down to them. We didn’t write for 7 year olds. We wrote for teenagers and young adults, I assume because some of our science fiction stories were, for their day, were quite unique and intelligent and on a rather high level. I found myself getting involved in what we call preachy stories, which were stories about intolerance, drug use. We were hammering away at this stuff in the ’50s.

But then all of sudden Congress is pointing the finger, blaming your comics for juvenile delinquency.
This wasn’t all of a sudden. There were problems with juvenile delinquency. And just like the media is today, the media were looking for easy solutions. It was an era of red baiting and panic. One of the criticisms was that comic books were contributing to juvenile delinquency. We kind of ignored the whole thing because it was so stupid. But a guy named Frederic Wertham started to investigate this and became a kind of a torchbearer of this juvenile delinquency stuff. He ran a clinic up in Harlem. His stance was every troubled child he had treated read comic books. Later on when I was editor of MAD I did a takeoff of that where I said drinking milk is ruining our kids, baseball is ruining our kids, because every troubled child had played baseball and every troubled child had drunk milk.

This was a cause that was taken up by many, many media, and by a gentleman named Estes Kefauver, a senator, who wanted to be president in the worst way. He starts a Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency in America. And Wertham latches onto him and becomes the expert on juvenile delinquency. And comic books. He writes a book called "Seduction of the Innocent."

Your comics weren’t leading kids to a life of crime?
I don’t know. I didn’t think so. I didn’t think so any more than reading a book or seeing a movie, any more than any other escapist literature became a pattern or a model for misbehavior and anti social behavior.

The end result was the Comics Code Authority took effect.
There was a subtle something that was happening that was being encouraged by certain publishers who felt they were clean and could get rid of these upstarts that were kind of giving the industry a bad name by publishing these off-the-wall tiles and subject matter. They went along with this investigation and to alleviate this bad publicity they volunteered to have a comic book code of authority with a kind of censorship code. So they had this code, which in all rights put us out of business, because it had things like you couldn’t have the word "terror," you couldn’t have the word "horror," you could not make fun of authority. It was mad. The code was directed almost entirely at us. When the code authority came into effect, we immediately realized we weren't going to be able to get these books through the code authority, at least with the criticism and social commentary that they needed, so MAD was changed from a comic book to a 25-cent magazine, and did fairly well in the very beginning because here it was in a new format and he had some good writers. Bill was faced with having to drop everything else and I was suddenly out of a job.

Were comics dumbed down because of the Authority?
Well, what happened was the whole creative spark was taken out of the comics. There was, I'd say, a wasteland kind of thing that happened when the authority took effect because nobody could do anything. All through the late ’50s and early ’60s until a lot of the artists and writers started to rebel. The code became more elastic.

How did MAD magazine get started?
A very talented young man walked into our office, Harvey Kurtzman. I had been hiring artists with a very distinctive style. I convinced Bill that instead of having everybody draw like somebody, like Jack Kirby or whoever, our books would contain artists with other distinctive styles. So I encouraged our artists to develop their own style just as they have their own handwriting. Harvey had a fantastic style. I hired him to work for me because I liked his style. He did a few science fiction stories and Bill was chafing to expand the business so I suggested that we give him his own books. He did two war books. This was during the Korean War or right after that.

Harvey was meticulous and slow. I was writing eight books and editing them in a two-month period. And he was writing one book a month. But he wanted to increase his income. Bill said, "Fine, you want to increase your income 50 percent, put out another title." He said, "Well I don’t know what I want to put out." We had a brainstorming session and I reminded him that one reason we hired him was because we were rolling on the floor from his humor. Why doesn’t he put out an adult humor comic book? There’s nothing on the stands like it. When I say adult, I’m not really talking about adult, I’m talking about mature. Rather than little funny animals like Mickey Mouse. A humor magazine that’s more adult. That’s how MAD got started.

The first issues of MAD comics that we published, along with the rest of the line, was a compilation of the kind of stories we were publishing. He did a funny horror story, he did a funny crime story, he did a funny science fiction story. It wasn’t very successful. It was doing OK. Bill was having a good time being a publisher of lots of titles. He was a very paternal guy. He had a whole crew of artists that were depending on him. He was running a business that was making money. The horror was paying for everything. The science fiction was just getting by. The crime and suspense were doing well. Harvey’s war books did well for a while, but after the Korean War they started to peter out a bit. MAD in its initial phase was just kind of OK.

I used to walk home with Harvey to the subway, after Bill moved into his own apartment in Manhattan. We chatted. I said Harvey instead of making generic fun of our subject matter, why don’t you satirize known comic strips like Superman and Mickey Mouse and the Lone Ranger or Dick Tracy and stuff like that. And so little by little, in fact, with issue No. 4, he did the Lone Stranger. And issue no. 5 really took off, because it contained a takeoff of Superman called Superduperman. So MAD was launched into a rather popular cult comic book because it was the forerunner of the underground comics.

Right after these hearings when the code authority was being formed, we knew we weren’t going to be able to put out anything. MAD was changed from a comic book to a 25-cent magazine, and did fairly well in the beginning because here it was in a new format and he had some good writers. Bill was faced with having to drop everything else and I was suddenly out of a job.

How did you wind up running MAD?
I was coming home on the Long Island Railroad one day, and Bill Gaines is standing on the platform. He said, "I just fired Harvey Kurtzman." Harvey walked in and demanded 51 percent control of the magazine. Harvey had in his back pocket — and really, I think, wanted to be fired — an offer from Hugh Hefner to do a very expensive production version of MAD magazine called Trump. Harvey was intrigued with Hefner, that whole Chicago lifestyle, the mansion. He left, and he took almost all of the MAD artists with them. So Bill’s standing on the platform, saying, "What do we do?" I said, "What do you mean what do you do? We do MAD." Here was an opportunity to take over an established title and take it where I want it to go. So I went back to work for Bill Gaines at a huge cut in salary because he had financial difficulty. I had one MAD artist that didn’t want to switch over, Wally Wood. I started to look for artists immediately. I was extremely lucky. They were walking in the door. I was grabbing them. A guy named Don Martin walked in, a cartoonist. He drew funny faces.

You discovered the artists that gave MAD its signature look.
Partly. I wouldn’t give it all of its signature look, but yes. I took him on and we worked on what he could do. I encouraged him to do pantomime, humorous situations, and he developed his Don Martin sequences. Frank Jacobs, a writer, walked in, and now I had help. Bob Clark. Dave Berg. These guys all came within a month or two of my picking up the magazine and suddenly I was expanding my staff and I was able to continue and Wally Wood stayed on and worked for me. Jack Davis came back from Harvey and worked for me because Trump had failed.

Antonio Prohias was a Cuban artist who did political cartoons, anti-Communist political cartoons for La Prensa before Castro took over. When Castro took over, he had to run for his life thinking the handwriting was on the wall. So he came to America. He didn’t know how to talk English. He came to MAD. Why, I don’t know. John Putnam, my art director, grew up speaking Spanish. He was like my interpreter. He did Spy vs. Spy from the day he walked into our office until the day he died. I thought it was marvelous, a mime lighthearted representation of the cold War.

Sergio Aragones was a Mexican artist. He spoke fine English. He had this wonderful little scratchy style and he did great mime continuities. MAD looks at rock ’n’ roll, or Star Wars or Tarzan movies, whatever he does. He said he wanted to do little marginal cartoons and I said well, try it. And from the time he tried it and I saw it was going to work beautifully, we had marginal cartoons in MAD for years and years and years. He amazed me by the amounts of gags he came up with, on any subject.

Who was your favorite of the MAD artists?
Oh, I had no favorites. I tried to maintain impartiality, but Mort Drucker was my pride and joy. He came looking for art work when he was kind of young. He was a very talented artist but he had never done a caricature. I had just landed the approval of Bob and Ray, who were satirists on radio, to take their told scripts and do them in MAD. I said take these two photographs home and let me see what you can do. He came back with these two typical Mort Drucker renditions of them, caricatures. Kind of light exaggeration, not extreme like Hirschfeld. I said, "Mort, you've got the job and you're going to be doing my movies from now on." I still consider him one of America's best caricature illustrators."

Bill Gaines once said it was you that made MAD a commercial success.
Yes, I did. I always had in the back of my mind the George Kaufman statement that "Satire is what closes on Saturday night." What he was saying was parody and satire is very intellectual and you’re not going to get the average person to come and see it. So I wanted to do a magazine that was appealing to a large spectrum of audience. I developed the whole MAD look and subject matter, which was a stroke of huge luck. I adopted a face that had been kicking around in the magazine.

Alfred E. Neuman?
Yeah. It had been around for years. Harvey had gotten into it. He called him Melvin Coznowski and a few other names. I had been using the name Alfred E. Neuman as my pseudonym when I wrote two stories in a magazine so it didn’t look like I’d written the whole magazine. I decided just as Playboy had the rabbit and Esquire had Mr. Esky, that bug-eyed high-hat lecher, we ought to have a cover identification logo-type character. I advertised in The New York Times for a portrait artist. And in walked Norman Mingo who was in his 60s at the time. I gave him all of these postcards, prints, all these versions of this face and I said I want you to do a portrait of this kid so it’ll be our mascot. He did it and that face appeared on MAD No. 30. We ran him for president against Eisenhower and Stevenson in 1956 as our write-in candidate and called him Alfred E. Neuman. He appeared on the cover of every issue after that.

Over the years, did you get sick of seeing his face?
No. Not at all. I got exhausted trying to figure out situations where he was on it. Our highest-selling MAD, in 1978, was an issue that did not have his face. It had his feet. He was upside down in a life preserver with a boat sinking in the background. It was our "Poseidon Adventure" movie takeoff cover.

There are probably not many pristine copies of MAD because of the MAD fold-ins you ran on the back cover.
Real collectors would have bought two copies. It was a ploy on our part.

MAD introduced some colorful words to the English language — potrzebie and furshlugginer among them. What is the origin of MAD's new words?
It is hard to pin down the actual origin of most of the "mad" words and phrases that MAD adopted into its dialogue retinue. "Furshlugginer" is a Yiddish word meaning wild or crazy or mad, and Harvey Kurtzman started to use it in his MAD comic book, probably because his family used it when he was growing up.

"Potrzebie" is a little tougher to pin down. I'm not sure how it came into use in MAD, whether it was Harvey's doing or John Putnam's doing (he was our "contributing" art director) or whose doing. Its origin, even, is a mystery. It was said that it was
a Polish word, and was used in the Polish directions for the use of aspirin, but I won't swear to that.

Most of the gibberish words and phrases that MAD began including in its vernacular were picked up from staff, or friends, or writers or even artists.

What is the origin of the "What — me worry?" slogan?
Crude renditions of the face that our Alfred was based upon had been around for years before we adopted him as our trade mark and mascot, and many of them contained the words "What — Me Worry?" or "Me Worry?" When I decided to have the definitive portrait of Alfred painted (by Norman Mingo) and I christened him, I continued to use "What — Me Worry?" as his slogan because it epitomized the philosophy of MAD.

How much competition did you have at MAD?
There were many, many imitations of MAD put out by other comic book publishers that attempted to be our competition, but failed.

Why? Because they had absolutely no idea what was making MAD the success that it was. No idea of the underlying socially critical values that were serving as an orientation for young people into the reality of the adult world, and no talent for even closely approaching our value levels.

In reading various histories of MAD, I never read any mention of Cracked magazine. Why is that? Did you not view the magazine as competition for MAD?
"Cracked" — along with countless other titles that came and went — was an out-and-out imitation of MAD, and we ignored it the way we ignored all of our imitators.

We did not consider it competition, but merely another hanger-on, attempting to cash in on the market that we were creating. We ignored it the way a shark ignores the remoras that hang onto it, waiting to snap up stray scraps of food that the shark might feast upon.

Were artists and writers clamoring to work for MAD?
Yes. I had some very interesting experiences with a lot of people who went on to become extremely successful. Chevy Chase tired to write for me. He sold me one piece. He just wasn’t clicking on the MAD level that I wanted. Joan Rivers tried to write for me. This is before they became famous. Right after "All in the Family" was off TV, Rob Reiner tried to write for me. He approached me with some stuff. I told him it wasn’t right for us.

Were the offices total chaos all the time, or was it a fairly sedate place to work?
Chaos outside my door. But somebody had to do the work. I would close myself in and do my work. Everything in MAD went through my typewriter, from 1956 to 1984, when I retired. It was a very undisciplined free atmosphere. But there was also a work ethic. We had to put out our magazines and meet our deadlines, especially when you’re getting up to a 3 million-something print order every month and a half. There was no chance to fool around.

That's an impressive body of work you produced over the years.
Yeah. I don't get too much credit these days.

Do you still read MAD?
Oh, yeah, I read it. I’m on the subscription list.

Why do you think MAD has survived for so many years?
Because it is riding on its reputation and its history, recommended from generation to generation, and still, to some extent, supplying young people that orientation into the adult world through critical satire and humor, albeit not as effective or trenchant as the early days. It’s lacking the Feldstein editorial touch.

What prompted you to leave?
Bill and I kind of drifted apart. We had different feelings and he didn’t want to do certain things and I saw the handwriting on the wall. I wanted to do a TV show 25 years ago, before "Saturday Night Live" and "That Was The Week That Was," but I could not get Bill to do it. He was afraid to lose his writers to TV. As it was, they went off to L.A. anyway. Stan Hart, Larry Siegel wrote for Carroll Burnett, Bob Newhart and Johnny Carson, but they never turned down an assignment from me. Bill was not interested in a TV show. He threw all kinds of stumbling blocks in the way. Pat Weaver, the creator for NBC of Sid Caesar's "Show of Shows," and the president of NBC, he came to us and wanted to do a MAD show. Bill had made a list of things that would have to be acquiesced to in order to give permission. One was they couldn't use any of the MAD writers. The other one was — and this one killed me because nobody would ever do it — sponsor approval. At that time, there were cigarette and whisky commercials on television and he didn't want that associated with MAD. In 1981, when my five-year option came up for renewal, I told Bill I only wanted to sign for three years. I could go and do what I always dream about doing, which was painting.

What was Bill’s role with MAD magazine? You were the editor. What would Bill be doing while you were writing and editing?
Writing checks. He had no part of the creativity of MAD. He didn’t understand it. Contrary to his participation in plotting stories for the comic book line, he read MAD as a fan. I had a completely free hand. Sometimes he’d sit in on cover conferences and approve of a cover idea, but generally speaking he left me alone and I appreciated that. He was really a great publisher; although I guess it bothered him he wasn’t participating in the creativity.

What was the reason for the increased popularity of MAD magazine? My parents said I couldn’t read it, so naturally I went out and bought copies and hid them and read them.
That’s it exactly. That exactly demonstrates the formula of our success. We were anti-establishment. We were telling kids they were being lied to by manufactures of cigarettes. We ran anti-cigarette ad satires for years. We were way ahead of the anti-tobacco stuff of now. Back in the ’60s, we were clobbering the cigarette industry. Nobody was listening, but we were trying. We were telling it like it us, and they trusted us. And all we were doing, really, was reinforcing their own feelings. We were saying don’t feel badly about the fact that you don’t trust politicians. They are crooks, a lot of them. Don’t feel badly that you’re very skeptical about Madison Avenue advertising. They’re lying to you. This was the whole thrust of the magazine. It was an anti-establishment magazine, but it wasn’t as blatant or as iconoclastic as some of the things that followed that turned us into a buggy whip in the ’80s. "Saturday Night Live" and National Lampoon, they were more iconoclastic.

Who were you trying to reach, the kids or the adults?
We never directed it at anybody specifically. We never took a poll. We never did an ABC audit, because we didn’t sell advertising so we didn’t care.

You have no idea who your average audience was?
We didn’t know what our readership was. We wrote this magazine, I edited it and had writers writing. I didn’t want to do anything in the way of sales analysis because I didn’t want to inhibit our freedom by being forced to direct ourselves into certain directions just because we knew it would help sales. That would take the spontaneity out of a magazine and I wanted spontaneity. I wanted to try all kinds of things. If we fell on our face, we fell on our face.

What do you think of MAD taking ads?
Back in the late ’70s, when I saw the handwriting on the wall as far as the future of MAD was concerned, I began proposing many avenues of creative exploitation of the magazine and its unique approach to satirical and critical humor.

One of the things that I proposed was the introduction of full-color art, and I proposed paying for this (at the time) expensive improvement by accepting advertising. But I proposed limiting the advertising to campaigns and single pitches that would be created by the "MAD Advertising Agency" specifically for the magazine — done in the MAD vernacular and the MAD approach. Bill Gaines would have no part of it.

Bill Gaines was not interested in seeing the MAD operation mushroom into a huge entertainment organization. After all, he no longer owned it.
He had very early on, sold the magazine and was merely the publisher, an employee, like me. Except that my salary was based on the gross income of the operation. Which is one of the main reasons why I chose to retire in 1984, when the magazine was selling almost 2 million copies an issue.

How would you decide if something was funny enough for MAD? What was the litmus test?
If it made us laugh.

Did MAD ever go too far?
Well, some people thought we did. There was a general in Oklahoma City who called us the most insidious form of communist propaganda in America. We had to go out there and sue him. It was libel. He withdrew his statement.

Was anything off limits to the magazine?
Bad taste. Well, nothing was really off limits. God, motherhood and country. That was what we talked about in those days that was off limits. Not true. We would do satires of the excesses in these areas. We never made fun of the president as an establishment. We made fun of people who occupied the offices. We made fun of Nixon. We even made fun of Kennedy. We were bipartisan, which means we shot at both sides.

Didn’t you congratulate John Kennedy the morning after his election?
We decided that we were going to show the hypocrisy of the press so we did a double-ended magazine. Flip it over, reverse it. One cover congratulated Kennedy on his election as president. The other cover congratulated Nixon on his election as president. Because we couldn’t tell. This magazine was coming out the day after Election Day. Here’s an interesting story. I was living on Long Island at the time and Kennedy was coming through on a motorcade on the campaign trail. I got a proof of the cover just that week, so I cut off the Nixon thing. As he passed by I ran out and I handed it to him and he waved to me and smiled and put it in his pocket.

Did the people you satirize ever protest?
We never got sued by anybody that we made fun of. On the contrary. When Elizabeth Taylor was married to Richard Burton, when they did "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf," their representative called us and said they’d love to have the original art work or at least the splash page. But Bill Gaines wasn’t giving up any original artwork so we had photocopies made and sent to them. They were pretty delighted with that. We did a takeoff of the first "Star Wars" movie. George Lucas, who had been an old EC fan, science fiction fan, loved our stuff. It was obvious because he used a lot of bug-eyed monsters that I used to draw on the covers in his "Star Wars" bar room scene. He wrote us a letter saying how much he enjoyed the takeoff. In the meantime, we got a letter from his lawyers who were going to sue us. They were doing lawyer stuff. For publishing copyright material, characters, so we sent the lawyers a copy of George Lucas’ letter and said you guys ought to get together. That was the end of that.

Didn’t the young Prince Charles write you?
We did get a letter that purportedly was from Prince Charles and may very well have been. Prince Charles, when he was 11, had a birthday picture published all around the country. We started to get a lot of letters: "This is where you got the inspiration for Alfred E. Neuman." Because he had big ears and a grin. He had a faint resemblance. I published these in the letters column. About a month after the magazine was published, we get a letter from Buckingham palace, on Buckingham Palace engraved stationery, and it said something like "I absolutely do not resemble your Alfred E. Neuman so you can jolly well stow it." And it was signed "Charles P." We were talking to Time magazine about it when they were writing an article about us. We showed the reporter the letter and he said, "You know, not many people know that Charles P. stands for Charles Princeps, which is how he would sign the letter.”

Did you ever realize how influential the magazine would become?
I was aware that we were influential. I did not realize it was becoming an American icon, and that was very satisfying and gratifying as the years went by.

Of what are you proudest of your years at MAD?
Educating and orienting three entire generations of young people to be alert — and aware of — the abuses, the mendacity and the corruption practiced by politicians that occupy our sacred institutions, contained in the information decimated by Madison Avenue and our television and print media, preached by our educational, fraternal and religious institutions and yes, even promulgated by our own parents.

How did attitudes toward MAD change?
When I first became editor of MAD and started to do movie takeoffs, there were publicity packages that movie companies had for each movie. "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit." I needed reference for Mort Drucker, or, in this case, Jack Davis, to be able to draw Gregory Peck in his various shots. I needed at least some stills. I couldn't get them. We were blackballed. "You're going to make fun of our movie? No." Later on, the guys who had been reading MAD in the ’50s and ’60s became heads of publicity departments of movie studios. I was invited to every preview. "Make fun of our movie. It’s great publicity. You want sets of the stills? I'll give you sets of the stills." Mort Drucker had no problems anymore. Instead of shooting pictures of the screen with a Polaroid, struggling with distortion and whatever, he now had wonderful glossy stills of scenes from the movies that he could use as reference. Things changed and MAD became more acceptable.

How would you like to be remembered?
As a fine artist. That may shock you, but I felt that my entire professional career in the comic books and MAD was a career of prostitution. I was prostituting my creative abilities and making money and that was my goal, to make money and be comfortable. Pay the mortgage, send the kids to college, and live nice and retire. But I always wanted to be a fine artist and that’s what I’m doing now. I have a studio here on my ranch. I'm painting. I love it.

Bob Newhart

2007-05-10T12:15:00.000-06:00

Bob Newhart’s silence speaks volumes.

That’s because what the legendary comedian doesn’t say is as important as what he does. In the classic bit “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue,” for example, Newhart plays a press agent trying to convince the president to do things his way. The conversation takes place shortly before Lincoln is to deliver the Gettysburg Address. The humor flows from the part of the telephone conversation the audience doesn’t hear.

Newhart: “Abe, do the speech the way Charlie wrote it, will you? The inaugural address swung, didn’t it?”
Pause for Lincoln’s response.
Newhart: “All right, anything else?”
Pause for Lincoln’s response.
Newhart: “You talked to some newspaper men? Abe, I wish you wouldn’t talk to newspaper men.”
Pause for Lincoln’s response.
Newhart: “That’s just what I mean, Abe. No, no. No, no, no. You were a rail splitter and then an attorney.”
Pause for Lincoln’s response.
Newhart: “Abe, it doesn’t make any sense that way. I mean, you wouldn’t give up your law practice to become a rail splitter, would you?”

The routine has Newhart trying to convince Lincoln to keep his beard, lose the cardigan sweater and forget boiling down “four score and seven years ago” to the simpler “87.”

The Lincoln routine was among Newhart’s earliest bits. It’s included on his first album, “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” which upon its 1960 release became the first comedy album to top the charts. That and six subsequent albums didn’t just open doors; they knocked them down. From appearances on Ed Sullivan’s variety show to a string of movie roles, Newhart found himself in constant demand.

Today he’s best known for roles on two successful situation comedies – “The Bob Newhart Show,” in which he played a psychologist in Chicago, and “Newhart,” which moved him to the Northeast, where his character was an innkeeper and writer of how-to books in Vermont. The final episode of that show proved a classic, with Newhart waking up in his old apartment in Chicago, the whole run of “Newhart” just a strange dream.

Newhart was honored in 2002 by the Kennedy Center with the Mark Twain Prize. Among his many other honors: TV Land erected a statue of Newhart in Chicago depicting him in his role as a psychologist.

A telephone conversation with Newhart is a rare pleasure. Talking with Newhart would, to borrow his own setup line, go something like this.

At this stage of your career, what compels you to go out on the road again?
I’ve never really stopped going out on the road. Even when I was doing the television series, when we were in hiatus I’d go to Vegas or Tahoe or Cleveland. I just can’t ever imagine not doing standup. It’s so much a part of my life. I had an opportunity of maybe six months not doing anything and it drove me nuts. I do about 20, 25 dates a year.

And golfing the rest of the time?
Golfing and grandchildren. And seeing friends.

I’m sure you run into younger people who see your name on the marquee and aren’t sure what you do other than your series of television shows.
Exactly. Yeah. They’re unaware of the standup. And I did standup for 12 years before I did the first television show.

Was that the first "Bob Newhart Show" or the second "Bob Newhart Show"?
Actually, the first "Bob Newhart Show" was a kind of a variety show. We got a Peabody Award, an Emmy Award and a pink slip from NBC all in the same year. I really consider my television career probably starting with the Bob Newhart Show in ’72.

You were the first standup comic to get a sitcom on television. I think you opened the door for everyone who came after you.
I suppose. There had been comedians like George Burns and, of course, Jack Benny but they had transitioned from radio into television. I haven’t really researched it. I guess maybe I did. I don’t know if that’s good or not to be known for that.

Was that a difficult transition for you to make, going from nightclubs to starring in your own television series?
Uh, no because the kind of stuff I did and that Mike and Elaine did and Shelley [Berman] was kind of observational comedy. They weren’t jokes. They weren’t “Take my wife, please” kind of routines. They were little vignettes of pieces of life. So I had always been an observer of people. I think comedians, really, are observers of people. I know, in the very first Bob Newhart Show usually there was a monologue, which I felt comfortable in. Then there’d be a musical guest and then we’d do a sketch. I really never felt very comfortable in the sketches. You say to yourself I’m going to have to learn how to do this because this is part of what being a comedian entails, learning how to act and so by the time, in 72 when we did the pilot for the Bob Newhart Show I had been awful in enough things to turn into a fairly good actor. I remember Matt Hiken, who was a great sketch writer on Broadway and of course was responsible for the Phil Silvers “Sgt. Bilko” show, he said one day. We were working on a project and he said you never learn anything from a good show. He said you only learn something from a bad show. I guess you have to be bad before you can be good and there’s no getting around it.

Did the point come when you realized during "The Bob Newhart Show" that you would be successful at acting?
Yeah, I think so. I think people, I’m sure people thought it was me just being me. I didn’t think of it that way. I thought of it as acting. I never thought the show really got the recognition it should have gotten because we all made it look too easy. We should have made it look harder. I think it deserved some recognition. It’s not bitterness. They kind of took us for granted. We kind of lived in the shadow of Mary Tyler Moore, following her show as we did for six years. Then the show went to Nick at Nite and it began to establish itself on its own. Then the show began to get some recognition as having been good, having good writing and good acting.

Do you think if you were starting this today and went to the network and pitched the idea for "The Bob Newhart Show," would it make it on the air?
In all honestly, probably not. It would probably have to be edgier.

Any possibility at all of you coming back to TV?
No. I don’t see that. No. I had my run and it was a great run and now it’s somebody else’s turn. I don’t have a problem with that. The two shows that didn’t work, "Bob" and "George and Leo," were kind of, they were hard to take. You invest so much of yourself into it and then when it doesn’t work there’s a tremendous letdown. I don’t know that I’d ever want to subject myself to that again.

What made you try to capture lightning in a bottle twice with the "Newhart" show? You came back to television to do another sitcom.
With “Newhart,” I knew I was always going to come back to television. When I left after six years of the Bob Newhart Show I was sure I was going to come back to television because I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the creative process and I had been accepted by the audience. So I always knew I was going to come back to TV. I knew I wasn’t leaving TV to start a motion picture career. It was just something to do. There were four years in between. I did some movies and continued to do personal appearances. But always in the back of my mind I knew I was going to come back to television.

What did it take to get you back on television? Was it just the idea of "Newhart"?
No. What actually happened was I was in Seattle in the time. My wife and I, I was doing a week up in Seattle at a theater there. Doing standup. I had already started thinking about coming back on television. We went into the coffee shop. I saw other guests that were having lunch. Then there were employees who were sitting there and having lunch. I thought to myself that would be a good setting for a small pocket Hilton or something like that. Because it would have a lot of the same elements we had that worked in "The Bob Newhart Show." The employees were, the patrons of the hotel would be like my clients, my patients. Because you had to be nice to them, the customer’s always right kind of thing. Behind the scenes, the people working, that would be the home life with Emily and Bill. I had this idea. I called up. To do it in a hotel in Seattle, a small hotel. I called up my manager, who is one of the founders of MTM. I said I’m thinking about maybe coming back on television. He said well don’t tell anybody. He said because I know how to handle this. He went to Bud Grant, who was then president of CBS Entertainment. He said I’m not sure but I think I may able to talk Bob back into coming on television. Are you interested? And Bud said yes, of course we are. I think Artie said what kind of guarantee? It was either a 13 or a 22, I forget which it was, which is like unheard of now. So he put me together with Barry Kemp and I described this idea I had. He said what do you think about an inn in Vermont. I said yeah, that will still work for me. We could take advantage of some of the some stuff that was indigenous to the north, northeast, like town hall meetings and that kind of thing and the Colonial period. So he went off and he wrote the script, sent me a copy of it. I read it and I liked it. Then we began the task of casting it. So that’s kind of how it evolved.

Why do you think those two shows, of the four sitcoms you did, worked and “Bob” and “George and Leo” didn’t quite catch on.
I think probably “Bob,” the job setting was just kind of esoteric. The older people in the audience pictured a comic book as being Dick Tracy and that kind of thing, Smiling Jack. The younger people picture it as kind of the maddog comic books of today. I think it was the setting. I don’t think people identified with that as a viable line of work. And then “George and Leo,” it was weird working with Judd [Hirsch], We had some casting problems we never really solved. And I think we got caught a little where the networks wanted to have full ownership of the show and preferred renewing one of their own shows as opposed to a show they didn’t have a piece of. Which was the case of “George and Leo.” But that begs the question, would we have been able to solve that casting question. We really hadn’t been able to.

What in particular was the casting problem?
It was my son’s wife-to-be and life outside Judd and myself. We kept trying and trying and trying. It just never worked. I don’t know that we ever could have solved it. Also with “George and Leo,” I don’t think the writing ever came up to the pilot. The writing in the pilot was just wonderful. It was one of the best table readings I’ve ever been to. I thought the pilot was just wonderful. We never quite reached that level again.

You mentioned before about comedy moving away from that my wife is so fat kind of jokes and to more vignettes, more thoughtful comedy. I was wondering why you thought comedy had suddenly moved in that direction.
Well, it turns out it was a sea change in comedy. The people I mentioned -- Mike and Elaine, Shelley, myself, Jonathan Winters, Lenny Bruce -- we were all kind of lumped together. It was just our way of looking at life. We weren’t married. We weren’t doing mother-in-law jokes. We weren’t doing wife jokes. And all of us working apart from each other were working at the same thing.

It certainly was a new twist to comedy and the launch of recorded comedy acts, things you could listen to over and over again instead of the same old joke.
Exactly. And you could hear, I think in the recorded material, each time you listened to it you found something you hadn’t heard the first time. I wish I could take credit for that. But that wasn’t by design. It was just a more subtler way of doing humor, and more probably cerebral, I guess, so that you could listen to it over and over and over. It wasn’t like the did you hear the one about and you say oh I know that joke.

I read that when Warner Bros. wanted to record your album, you had not performed in front of an audience at that point.
Well, I had never performed in front of a nightclub audience. I had performed to a very limited extent. There might be a club date in Chicago or some kind of benefit affair that somebody who knew about me would ask me to appear at. I remember one time I was in Chicago and they had this big benefit. They were celebrating probably Harry Truman’s 75th birthday or something like that. Backstage they had 100 Harry Truman look-alikes. That was kind of surreal, walking into a room of people who looked like -- allegedly looked like -- Harry Truman. In a lot of cases I couldn’t notice the likeness at all. No, I had never done a nightclub.

Was that nerve-wracking, having to get up in a nightclub and do this recording?
Terror. Terror would better describe what it was like. You just, you have to learn how to do it. There’s no choice. There’s no book you read and you find out how to do it. You can only do it by doing it.

What made you overcome that terror?
Well, I recorded the album in February of 1960. It came out in about May of 1960. It just took off. It went through the roof, literally. Now I was getting calls: do you want to do six Ed Sullivan shows? A year ago my appearing on Ed Sullivan was the furthest thing from my mind. So the momentum of that just kind of carried me along. And then people wanted to see me perform the album, so I began to learn as I was doing it, learn how to be a standup.

Were you so driven that the idea of taking the stage was secondary to getting this done?
Was I so driven? I don’t know if it was driven. It was more I don’t know what the hell I’m doing but they don’t seem to realize it. And I just hope this keeps going. I hope they don’t get on to me too soon that I don’t know what I’m doing.

Any idea back that then this would have opened the doors for so many things for you?
No. I got married in ‘63. And we had a son in ‘63, 11 months later, being good Catholics. All of a sudden we had this responsibility. I was like that was all right when you were single but now these two people are kind of depending on you to provide. I don’t really know if I’m all that good at this. There was that apprehension. Before I had nothing to lose. I was single. I suddenly realized "You’d better get kind of good at this."

What made you realize that you were funny?
I don’t know where it came from. I just saw things differently, and at the same time saw things the same. Because people hear the routine and they would say, “Yeah, I’ve seen that like a hundred times. Yeah, he’s right. That’s the way it is.” I don’t know if you’re born with it or it’s a skill you develop. I don’t try to question it. It’s just there, thank God.

But you didn’t jump into comedy.
No. No.

You did accounting.
I did accounting and I left that. Then I did some copyrighting. Then another guy and I had a kind of half-assed radio show.

This is Ed Gallagher?
Ed Gallagher. Kind of a poor man Bob and Ray kind of show. That showed some promise. It didn’t pan out. Then Ed went to New York. He took a job in New York. He had a growing family. I said well to hell with it. I’m going to give this a shot and see what happens. I decided I would give it a year and then one year stretched into two years and two years stretched into three years. I think it was more other people’s faith in me. A local disc jockey in Chicago who kept encouraging me who eventually was the one who played the tapes for the Warner Bros. people. They said we’ll record your next nightclub. I explained that I’d never played a nightclub. They said well, we’ll have to get you in a nightclub. I was just kind of swept along by events, I guess.

What’s the process of creating one of your classic bits like Abraham Lincoln’s press agent? What’s involved in going from the idea to the finished phone conversation?
I think you put down all the things you know about it. Once you have the concept, it tends to write itself, it tends to just come full born. You write about Abe Lincoln: Gettysburg address, writing on backs of envelopes, he was a rail splitter. What else do I know about Abe? And just kind of putting all those things down and figuring out which ones are right for the premise?

Did the premise start with Abe Lincoln or with his PR guy?
It started off with a PR guy for Abe Lincoln. It started off with a book called "The Hidden Persuaders" by Vance Packard, which was a book about sublimation and how the advertising industry had been able to really create an image that they wanted to create. And the premise was if there hadn’t been an Abe Lincoln, would Madison Avenue have been able to have created one, as good as the one that actually existed. That was the premise. I knew I had a good premise and I just kind of ran with it.

People who come to your concerts, do they expect you to do certain of these routines?
Yeah. I think so. I’ll probably do one or two of the record routines, for that reason, because that’s what some people remember. And the rest of it is just kind of observational on this goofy planet we all inhabit.

I’ve heard how you twist the driving instructor bit.
Yeah. The driving instructor became politically incorrect and that’s kind of crept in. It’s become a kind of campaign. I think it’s silly. People are funny. I don’t care if they’re Chinese. I don’t care if they’re women. I don’t care if they’re men. People are funny. We’re beginning to lose our national sense of humor about ourselves. There are all these groups that are immediately offended. I would hear a murmur when I said "and seated next to me is a woman driver." So then one night I said, "OK, if you’re offended it doesn’t have to be a woman driver. I’ll make it a Chinese driver" and then proceeded to do the routine in my Chinese and then explained they could have eight more minutes of this or I could do it as a woman driver.

Do you tweak any of your other routines like that?
That’s the only one I can think of. There’s kind of a theme that we do have to laugh at ourselves and not take ourselves so seriously.

On both your successful shows, the “Bob Newhart Show” and “Newhart,” you went to the phone a lot. Was that playing to your strengths?
Yeah. That came out of the record albums. I became kind of identified with the telephone, and so whenever they could they would have the phone ring and have me pick it up.

Other comedians have tried to do similar bits. Richard Belzer tried to do a tribute at the Mark Twain ceremony and it didn’t quite come off. At the end he said only Bob Newhart can do Bob Newhart.
(Laughs)

So it’s not as easy as it looks.
I guess it isn’t. I know George Scott, I was playing with George Scott one day and we were on the fourth hole or something and he said in that gruff voice of his, he said How do you do those telephone routines I do. I said well George I ask a question and then I leave enough time for the person to answer and then I ask another question. George says That’s amazing. That’s amazing. I thought to myself, no George, Patton is amazing. (laughs)

When you make a phone call, do people listen in?
(laughs) I’m not used to having somebody on the other end. That’s what kind of throws me. That was one of the problems, as I mentioned before, with the sketch. My routines with people as I saw them, and then when I was in the sketch I hadn’t pictured the person quite like the person that was in the sketch with me. That kind of threw me for a while. I realized I’d better learn how to do this.

On the Dean Martin show, when you were playing the man trying to return the toupee, he was the one who was thrown off. He couldn’t stop laughing.
What happened was they came to Dean and they wanted him to do a television show. So he said OK, but I only want to come in one day a week. Thinking that would kill it, that no one in their right mind would agree to no rehearsal and just coming in one day a week, which was Sunday. NBC said OK. So Dean on Sunday he would be there. We’d all rehearse during the week. I’d rehearse with [producer/director] Greg Garrison or just kind of walk through what I was going to do. And Dean would come in. I rehearsed with Greg. I never rehearsed with Dean. Dean would be in his dressing room. Sometimes he’d look up at the monitor and other times he’d be involved in conversation and he wouldn’t look up at the monitor. He just had the cue cards over my shoulder. So he didn’t really know the bit. He didn’t even know what the premise was going to be.

He hadn’t read that far ahead.
No. No. It just started to strike him funny. He started to laugh. That’s like blood in the water to a comedian when you’ve got somebody doing that. I said to him are you sure you worked with Jerry Lewis. He said what would you like in exchange. I said what I really like is a straight man who didn’t laugh. That was the end of it. He was gone after that. (laughs) There was a trust. We were both coming from nightclubs, which is pretty unpredictable. I wasn’t afraid to go where he was going. He wasn’t afraid to go where I was going. We had that kind of trust between us.

It certainly made for a memorable bit.
Yeah. It was a lot of fun.

Who influenced your comedy?
I think every good comedian I ever saw work, probably. I mean, I studied comedians. I watched them work. I would say I wonder why that’s funny. Oh, OK, I see why that’s funny. I’ve got to remember that. Without mimicking them, just watching their technique and saying I’m going to have to learn how to do that. Jack Benny certainly influenced me. Not from a timing standpoint. I’m not sure you can teach timing. I think that’s an innate thing that you have or you hear. I’m not even sure it’s knowing good timing. I think it’s more knowing bad timing and hearing it done wrong and saying no, no, no, that it’s right, no, that isn’t right. Oh, that’s right, OK.

It’s interesting you mention the timing because in your routines what you don’t say is as important as what you do say and how long you don’t say it is equally important.
Exactly. Exactly. Especially in the telephone routines. What I’m saying is not funny at all. What I’m saying to Abe is not funny. It’s what he is saying. When I say to him No, Abe, you were a rail splitter and then an attorney. You wouldn’t give up your law practice to become a rail splitter. It’s his end of the conversation.

That line at the end -- Abe, why don’t you take in a play -- that got you labeled as a sick comic for a while.
Yeah, we were all kind of lumped together. It was that and it was making fun of a revered president. Lenny Bruce obviously was. Mike and Elaine did a routine on making funeral arrangements for his uncle. And Shelly did a thing on a ledge. So we were kind of lumped together as what was termed then as sick comics.

I don’t think that’s a deserved label, at least in your case.
Well, to the extent that we were exploring areas that maybe hadn’t been explored before. I never felt that way. Certainly by today’s standards.

Did you move in those circles, Lenny Bruce and Mike and Elaine and Shelley Berman?
No. I can’t say we would run into each other. I ran into Lenny a couple of times. I went to see Lenny at a club. But I kind of knew Mike and Elaine from the Sullivan show and Shelley from the Sullivan show. The four of us were all in Chicago at the same time. Mike and Elaine and Shelley knew each other. They were in a thing called the Compass Players, which was a predecessor to Second City. But I had no contact with them.

I wonder what was the competition was like, either for bookings or for when the records came out. Suddenly there was a flood of comedy albums and everybody was trying to get theirs bought and heard. Was there any kind of competition between you and the other comedians out there?
Ah, I suppose so. I never felt it with Mike and Elaine. I was at a club called Freddy’s in Minneapolis and got a call from Bob Finkel to do, I guess it would have been the 1960 Emmy Awards in California. So I went to the club owner, a guy named Pete, and I said, “Can you let me off over the weekend? They want me to do the Emmy Awards. Just tack the days on when I come back.” He said, “Yeah, yeah, sure. That’s great publicity.” So I flew out to California on, I guess Saturday night, and arrived late Saturday night and then Sunday was the Emmy Awards telecast. Mike and Elaine were doing a routine on shampoo and one of the sponsors of the show was Clairol. I was supposed to do I think Abe Lincoln was the routine they originally wanted me to do. They came to Mike and Elaine and said, “Well, the sponsor has a problem with you doing that routine.” They said, “We’re sorry, but that’s the routine we’ve chosen to do”. And they said, “Well, the sponsor really is objecting to it.” Mike and Elaine said, “Fine, then we’ll leave ‘cause we feel that our integrity is at stake.” Then they came to me. They said, “Do you have another routine you can do?” The theme was television, I think, and advertising and that kind of thing. I said, “There’s one I can do but it really doesn’t have much to do with television.” They said it doesn’t matter. We’ve got to fill the spot. What is it? I was in the makeup room at NBC. There was the writer, Ed Simmons, and Bob Finkel was the producer. I did the submarine commander. They said, “Oh, OK, do that. We’ll have to find a reason.” They came up with a premise as to why I would be doing the submarine commander, which really had nothing to do with television.

Was there any concern about going on TV and doing the routines off the records, that that might spoil it for a live audience?
Yes, there was, but how else do you get known? You do a Sullivan show and your business went up. You could measure how much it meant to do a successful Sullivan show.

What happened that made you realize you were going to have a successful career?
I don’t know that there was ever that feeling (laughs). Maybe after the success of the first show, the “Bob Newhart Show,” the one with Suzanne, probably bolstered my confidence somewhat.

You have a routine where you talk about seeing people in the audience moving their lips along with yours throws you off. Do you actually get that?
No. No. It gets a good reaction, but no.

You’ve mentioned in other interviews your admiration for Richard Pryor. What was it? Because it seems like you two come at things from opposite sides of the street.
Yeah, we’re 180 degrees away. I guess it’s like one jazz musician listening to another jazz musician. You realize what he’s doing and you kind of respect him for that and the language has nothing to do with it. I think I said on the Mark Twain thing, I thought he was the perfect choice to be the first one [given the Mark Twain Prize] because what he did was closest to what Mark Twain did. It introduced me and millions of other people to what it was like growing up in an urban environment. He was given an award by the American Comedy Awards, I think it was called. I had mentioned to George Schlatter what a huge fan I was of Richard Pryor. He said we’re going to honor him. Would you present him with it? I said I’d love to. I had gone to concerts he had given and gone backstage afterwards and talked to him. He was in the wheelchair by that point. We showed a retrospective of his life. We went to commercial. At that point, I went and stood next to him and presented him with the award. Then we went to a press group in one of those side rooms. He said to me, (in Richard Pryor’s voice) “I stole your album.” I said, “What’d you say, Rich?” He said, “I stole your album in Peoria. I went into a record store and I put it in my jacket.” (laughs) Knowing his reaction, I said, “Well, Richard I used to get 25 cents an album in royalty.” He turned to people with him and said, “Give me a quarter, somebody get me a quarter.” He handed me a quarter. (laughs)

Do you still have that quarter?
Still have it.

The Mark Twain Prize, that must have been an incredible honor for you.
Yeah. It really came out of the blue. I wasn’t expecting it. We brought the whole family, all the grandchildren and everybody, back to D.C. so it was a very special evening. It was at the Kennedy Center. I campaigned for Jack and had gotten to know Ethel pretty well and invited her. She was there.

In terms of honors, that’s up there. Is there some other recognition you would like to have one day?
Like you say, that’s really up there. Maybe my induction into the Television Hall of Fame would rank with that. That was a very special evening. When you realize the company you’re joining it’s kind of numbing to realize that you’re joining Lucy and Johnny Carson and Jackie Gleason and Berle and Sid Caeser and on and on and on.

You certainly belong up there.
Well, thank you.

Who do you think you influenced as a comedian?
I hope I inspired some people to do it. Because it is great. When it’s working, it’s just great. It’s totally enjoyable and you don’t want it to end. Without it being specific, I hope I’ve inspired some people. We don’t have enough of them. There’s never enough people who make you laugh.

I have to thank you for all the laughs over the years.
Well, it was my pleasure.