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

express myself , so I only do my own stuff on stage. I don’t get off doing other people’s premises.”
    Lewis was disappointed but also buoyed by the praise and the fact that Morra had promised to hook him up with some older comics who were always looking to buy good stand-up material.
    The best known of them was Morty Gunty, a big star in the Cats -
    kills who’d appeared numerous times on TV. Over the next few months, Lewis earned a few hundred dollars writing jokes for Gunty and the others, but he was frustrated that they invariably turned down what he thought was his best stuff, the most personal material that expressed how he felt about the world around him.
    The obvious solution was to perform the material himself. But he couldn’t even think about that because of the conversation it 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 12
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    would require with his father, whose approval he craved. What was he going to say? “Hey, Dad, I’ve decided to chuck the college education that you worked so hard to pay for in favor of becoming a stand-up comic?” Writing comedy was one thing—that was being a “humorist.” Performing comedy was something else entirely—
    that was show business , and they were not a show business family.
    He couldn’t imagine his father saying, “My son, the comedian,”
    with any pride. As a result, he was uncomfortable with the idea himself and felt guilty even considering it.
    But all that ended on April 12, 1971, when William Lewis died of a heart attack (his fourth) at age fifty-seven. After the first wave of shock and grief, Richard realized that he was finally off the hook. He didn’t have to face the conversation that he so feared. His father’s death had freed him to find his own comic voice. Two weeks later, as he emerged safely from the Lincoln Tunnel in his haunted Vega, he said to himself, I’m writing jokes for Richard Lewis now. . . . But how am I ever going to get up on that stage? He headed uptown toward the only place he knew that might hold the answer to that question.
    The Improvisation, at the corner of Forty-fourth Street and Ninth Avenue, was the comedy center of the universe. Established in 1963 by a former ad man named Budd Friedman, it was the only nightclub of its kind, a casual, chaotic cabaret where comedians and singers alternated sets and on any given night you might catch David Brenner and Jimmie Walker working out new material for The Tonight Show , Robert Klein blowing blues runs on his harmonica, Bette Midler doing some impromptu warbling in the bar accompanied by Dustin Hoffman on the piano, David Frye climbing out of a limousine in front with a drink in his hand, or Woody Allen arriving in a raincoat and fedora and dramatically instructing the doorman to “whisk me to my table.”
    It was 8:30 p.m. on a Monday when Richard Lewis first walked into the Improv. Monday was “open-mike night,” when anyone with the will or compulsion to do so could get up onstage and 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 13
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    perform five minutes of material in the wild hope of impressing Friedman and being asked back to perform as a regular in the Tuesday-through-Sunday rotation. Lewis had no intention of getting up on stage, however. He was there purely for research purposes. For all his love and knowledge of stand-up comedy, he had never seen it performed live.
    The first comic he saw was a handsome, shaggy-haired Jewish kid about his age whose name he didn’t catch but who was everything he wanted to be as a performer—cool, hip, confident, sexy.
    He particularly liked the way the guy handled a heckler: “So, you come here to work out your heckles in a small club, right? Thinking that pretty soon you’ll get really good at it and maybe some-day you’ll be in Vegas heckling the biggies? ”
    Between shows an hour later, Lewis saw the comic sitting alone in the back of the room, nursing a