I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder Read Free Page A

scared the shit out of him.
    Lewis had been funny as far back as he could remember, the class clown from kindergarten on. He fell in love with laughter at the age of five and gobbled up whatever comedy early television had to offer— The Colgate Comedy Hour with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Texaco Star Theater with Milton Berle, Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar, The Ed Wynn Show. By age nine, he had 9
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    memorized the TV Guide schedule and was a discerning enough consumer of comedy to prefer Steve Allen to Ed Sullivan on Sunday night. He tried not to miss Oscar Levant’s weekday afternoon show and stayed up late to catch Alexander King and Shelley Berman on Jack Paar.
    Humor provided solace from the sense of isolation he felt growing up as the baby of his family with a considerably older brother and sister who consequently paid little attention to him. His father, William Lewis, known in northern New Jersey as “the King of Caterers,” was devoted to his business and was seldom home. His mother was lonely and often depressed. The only time “Richie” felt connected to his parents was on the rare occasions when he would lie between them in their bed watching The Honey mooners. But the feeling lasted only as long as the show. So, he sought comfort in the company of comedians he found first on television and later on record albums: Jonathan Winters, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, and Carl Reiner. He came to think of himself as a rebel, laughing at authority, like Holden Caulfield.
    He experienced an epiphany one day at Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, New Jersey. During an assembly in the school gymnasium, he was mocking the people on stage under his breath and cracking up everyone around him when the principal suddenly stepped to the microphone and halted the proceedings.
    He directed the students to file out of the gym homeroom by homeroom until only Lewis’s homeroom remained. Then he ordered the class to file out row by row until, out of the original nine hundred kids, only Lewis was left in the gym, whereupon the principal looked down at him and said, “Richard Lewis, you are the troublemaker of this school.”
    Most teenagers would have been mortified, terrified, undone by such a singling out. But Lewis appreciated the absurdity. His first thought was, “Hey, I might be able to make a living at this.”
    At first his plan was just to write comedy. In college he started jotting down funny premises and jokes in a notebook that he car-1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 11
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    ried everywhere he went. He fantasized about transitioning directly from student life to that of a staff writer for a TV star like Sid Caesar, which was how Woody Allen had gotten his start.
    When that didn’t happen upon graduation, he hung around Columbus, Ohio, for nearly a year, doing odd jobs, afraid to return home to New Jersey and face his father’s inevitable questions about finding “a real job.”
    What finally moved him out of Ohio was the news that one of his comic heroes, Robert Klein, was going to host a summer
    “replacement” show on network TV. A friend tracked down the address of Klein’s manager, Buddy Morra, who was with the prestigious firm of (Jack) Rollins and (Charles) Joffe, which also managed Woody Allen and Dick Cavett. Lewis mailed off a pack age of material he wrote specifically for Klein and followed up a week later with a phone call to Morra, who’d been impressed enough with what he read to pass it on to Klein. Morra told Lewis to call him the next time he was in the New York area, and he’d arrange a meeting with the comedian. Lewis couldn’t get back to New York quickly enough.
    The meeting proved to be life changing, but not in the way Lewis had expected. “I read your stuff, and it’s really good,” Klein told him. “But I got into stand-up to