I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder (3 page)

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 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 beer and looking morose. “Jeez, you were really great,” he said sincerely.

The guy’s eyes lit up. “You’re kiddin’ me,” he said. “I thought it didn’t go so well.”

“Naw, man, you were the best, hands down,” Lewis said. “I
aspire
to be that good.” They shook hands.

“I’m Richard Lewis.”

“Steve Lubetkin.”

Both felt an immediate connection. Lewis confessed that he was thinking about becoming a comic but had no idea how to go about it. Lubetkin said he knew a lot. “I’d be happy to show you the ropes,”

he said. They wrote their phone numbers on cocktail napkins.

In the ensuing weeks, Lubetkin proved even better than his word, guiding Lewis on a tour of every bar, restaurant, disco, or strip club that allowed self-proclaimed comedians to entertain, or irritate, its customers. The itinerary included such oddball venues as Dan Lurie’s Gym & Health Spa on Long Island and Gil Hodges’s Grand Slam Lounge in Brooklyn, which abutted a bowl-ing alley so that punch lines often had to compete with the crash of falling pins.

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Lewis especially loved the Greenwich Village clubs that Lubetkin introduced him to—Café Wha, the Village Gate, Gerdes’s Folk City—where Warholian hipness permeated the walls and the smell of grass and sound of Dylan still wafted in the air.

The Village was Lubetkin’s turf; he was born and raised there.

His father, Jack Lubetkin, owned Ye Olde Treasure Shoppe at 1

West Eighth Street, right off Fifth Avenue. Opened in 1948, the year Steve was born, the Shoppe was one of the original Eighth Street establishments that catered to a beatnik clientele, selling antique furniture and jewelry and leather bags, belts, and sandals that Jack made by hand in the back. By the late 1960s, the Shoppe had become a Village institution, with customers often lined up outside waiting to get in.

Growing up, Steve and his older brother, Barry, worked along-side their father, as did their mother, Evelyn. The brothers didn’t get paid, but they were allowed to take money from the till whenever they needed. Jack Lubetkin fostered a loose, irreverent atmosphere in the store, entertaining customers with his constant shtick. “Excuse me, madam,” he’d say to an indecisive browser,

“but I have a rather weak heart, and I’ve been watching you looking around, and it’s upsetting me, and I don’t want to faint, so could you please leave? ” Then, he’d wait a few seconds before winking at the flummoxed woman to let her know he was just teasing. One of his favorite bits was playing off the family’s flatu-lent pet bulldog, Caesar. Every time Caesar farted with a customer nearby, Jack would rebuke one of the boys—“Steve, how many times have I told you about that?”—then they’d all break up.

The family lived above the store, which was set back from the street in a quaint little arcade that looked as if it had been lifted straight out of colonial times. The boys’ bedroom overlooked the arcade. One block away, Washington Square Park served as their playground when they were little and their political classroom as they got older—a multiethnic, multiracial marketplace of free-thinking, loud talking, and public protesting.

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Free expression was encouraged in the Lubetkin household.

At their weekly “Sunday Breakfast Club,” the four would sit around the dining table and decide such family issues as whether to buy a pool table or a new car or what TV shows to watch. The two boys had an equal vote with their parents. The Lubetkins were culturally rather than religiously Jewish. Evelyn tried to keep a kosher kitchen, and both boys were bar mitzvahed, but if the family went to temple at all, it was only on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. Jack Lubetkin was a conservative Republican who as a young man had battled the Nazi bunds in Yorkville (now New York’s Upper East Side) before World War II. He was forever thankful that his parents had emigrated from Russia in the late 1800s. A distant cousin, Ziviah Lubetkin, had been one of the leaders of the Warsaw rebellion and now lived in a Holo-caust survivors’ kibbutz in Israel. Leon Uris’s novel
Mila 18
was dedicated to her. Steve often boasted about being related.

All in all, it would have been a storybook childhood if it hadn’t been for Evelyn Lubetkin’s slow, agonizing death from ovarian cancer at the age of forty-four. Steve was twelve at the time and took it harder than anyone. Barry, who was seventeen and later went on to earn a PhD in psychology, always believed that the tragedy of their mother’s death had driven Steve to become a comedian, that his little brother figured if he could just learn to make other people laugh then he could laugh again himself.

Steve Lubetkin and Richard Lewis made one another laugh a lot. They got each other’s sense of humor completely, no doubt because they had so much in common: a middle-class Jewish upbringing, a deceased parent, a degree in marketing, a part-time entry-level job in advertising, an intense interest in sports and girls, and, above all else, a love affair with stand-up comedy.

In the first week of their friendship, Steve took Richard to a tiny West Village dive called the Champagne Gallery. “You’re gonna love this joint,” he said. “It’s as far off the beaten path as you can get.”

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With its not-ready-for-
The-Gong-Show
lineup of wannabe comics and weirdos doing whacked out performance art, the Cham pagne Gallery made the Improv seem like Vegas. “This is like a variety show at Christmas in a mental institution,” Lewis said.

“That’s why it’s the perfect place for you to start doing standup,” Lubetkin responded. “It is safe here. There’s no pressure.”

Lewis made his debut at the Champagne Gallery a week later, on a Sunday night, with Lubetkin and forty other people in the audience. In stand-up parlance, he killed. He felt it as it was happening, a high like he’d never experienced before. He’d finally done it; he’d gotten up on stage and made people laugh. He’d passed the test. He was a stand-up comic.

From that night on, Lewis and Lubetkin were nearly inseparable. Using the Improv as their hub, they hopped from joint to joint, sometimes hitting four or five places in a single night, plying their trade, testing material, trying to develop their acts. They’d do sets at a club called the Metro in Forest Hills, hustle out to Pip’s in Sheepshead Bay, and eventually wind up back at the Improv with $20 apiece to show for their night’s work, enough for dinner and a couple of beers before they headed home for a few hours sleep followed by eight hours of day job.

Steve continued to do open mike nights at the Improv and eventually graduated to occasional late-night spots during the week. But Richard held off trying for the Improv on the advice of David Brenner, who took a liking to him after meeting him in the bar and became something of a mentor. “Wait until you’ve put together twenty minutes of killer material,” Brenner told him. “Then call me, and I’ll tell you if you’re ready.”

Lewis waited six months before he invited Brenner to see him at the Champagne Gallery. Lubetkin was in the audience as usual, and once again Lewis came off the stage feeling like he’d killed.

Still, he needed to hear it from Brenner. The older comic greeted him with a serious face, placed his arm around his shoulders, and 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 17

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walked him outside without saying a word. Then, he turned to him and broke into a smile. “You’re ready,” he said. It was the most joyous night of Lewis’s life.

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

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

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

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

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The Hippest Room

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

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

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

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