Rubber Balls and Liquor (9 page)

That's pretty much the bare-minimum standard, and I rose to meet it. Like here: a man says to a pretty waitress, “You look tired. Why don't you go up to my room and lie down?” It's a funny line, right, but it's only a little bit funny until you say it like Henny Youngman. Then, it's a whole lot funnier.

Once, not too long after I'd started working as a comic, I had the chance to meet Henny Youngman. (I'm getting ahead of the story, I know, but you look like you're in good shape. You can catch up.) We had the same agent, and he arranged it. At least he was good for something. We met out in front of the agent's office. I could see Henny walking toward me from halfway down the street, carrying his violin case. When he reached me, I put out my hand, thinking we would shake hands, but he just handed me his violin case. He said, “Are you married?”

I told him I wasn't.

He said, “So what do you do for aggravation?”

But that came later. First I had to find that side door and sneak into show business. For that, I needed a small push. One day, my sister Arlene told one of her friends about my emerging talent for doing voices. All these years later, it's unclear to me if she was bragging about her little brother, or apologizing for my odd behavior, but in any case it turned out her friend had an idea. He told her about the Bitter End, a club in Greenwich Village where they had something called Hootenanny Night. This was back before the stand-up comedy boom of the 1970s, when all these different comedy clubs started opening up around the city. Hootenanny Night was mostly like amateur night at the Apollo Theatre, only instead of a bunch of black people trying to sound like James Brown or Little Stevie Wonder you had a bunch of entitled Jews trying to sound like Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger.

Arlene and my other sister, Karen, agreed that Hootenanny Night at the Bitter End would be a good venue for my emerging talents, which by this point had emerged all over our apartment and were looking for a bigger room. So they came to me one day and suggested I perform at the Bitter End. It's possible they suggested this in unison—as in, “Gilbert, we think you should perform at the Bitter End,” like they'd put it to a vote—although I can't recall. Whenever I ask them about this now, neither one of them will take the credit for me becoming a comedian, which they very sweetly refer to as
accepting blame
, which is almost like the same thing. Still, there's no disputing that they came to me one day and offered to take me to Greenwich Village.

I was fifteen years old, and the reason my sisters offered to take me was because I hadn't figured out how to ride the subways by myself. I didn't really need their moral support. I wasn't smart enough to feel stage fright or performance jitters. I just needed them to hold my hand and take me on the subway—basically, to make sure I didn't get lost. The deal was, if I didn't bomb, they would also take me home.

I didn't know enough to check things out beforehand. If I'd thought about it at all, I might have gone to a couple of Hootenanny Nights before stepping out on that stage, just to get some idea what I was getting myself into, but I wasn't the type to think things through. It didn't even occur to me to prepare any material. I just went backstage and gave the emcee my name and waited to be called. I think I followed a guy doing Arlo Guthrie. Or maybe it was a guy doing Joan Baez. When my turn came, I stepped to the microphone and started talking. I did Groucho Marx. In those days, I did the young Groucho. Since then, I've become famous for my old Groucho, but my act had yet to mature. I also did Peter Lorre and Bela Lugosi, which meant that even in 1969 my act was a bit dated. Even in 1949, my act would have been a bit dated, but who am I to quibble?

I wish I could remember my first few jokes. And I wish I could remember if people laughed. Nobody booed or threw anything, though, so I guess it went well enough. Plus, my sisters ended up taking me home—another strong indicator. They didn't tell me I sucked or that I should probably rethink this not-going-to-school business, so I vowed to go back to the Bitter End the following week, for the next Hootenanny Night.

And the one after that. And the one after that.

Before long, I was a Hootenannying fool. (If you asked my father, he would have told you I was just a regular fool, but far be it from me to keep from turning a fun-filled word like
Hootenanny
into a descriptive phrase.) I still didn't have an act, and it would be years before I had the good sense to prepare any material. At some point, after years and years of performing onstage, I developed a routine. Each time out, my impressions would be a little less lame, a little less bottom-of-the-barrel. Gradually, I moved from doing impressions to telling jokes. And, also gradually, I brought my material more and more up to date. By 1979, I was doing some killer Woodstock material. By 1999, I'd retired my peanut farmer jokes for bits about the Gipper and
Bedtime for Bonzo.
By 2009, I'd finally gotten around to Monica Lewinsky.

Some nights, I killed. Other nights, not so much … I started hanging out with other comics, working at other clubs, working on my act. In fact, it wasn't until this time that I even thought of what I was doing as an
act
. I was just telling jokes, doing impressions, trying to make people laugh. One night I met another comic who brought a tape recorder to his shows, so he could listen to his performance and make some refinements, and that seemed like a good idea. However, it also seemed like too much trouble, so I didn't bother.

I worked the New York comedy circuit before it could even be called a circuit. It was more like an unmarked trail. Most of the time, I'd go to some club and wait around until three o'clock in the morning before it even occurred to anyone that I hadn't gotten on. More often than not, I'd wind up at Catch, which was what those of us in the know called Catch a Rising Star, which had quickly become
the
place for young comics to work on new material and hope like hell to get noticed by some talent agent looking to cast a forgettable sitcom—or, at least, that's what the club owner told us to keep us working for free. There were a couple times at Catch when the emcee would be onstage, looking out across the club, desperate for another comic to step up to the microphone. There'd be like an hour to go before closing, and he'd be looking right at me and saying, “Jesus, folks, this has never happened before. We've run out of comics.”

This was not a good sign, as far as my fledgling career or my flagging self-esteem were concerned, but fortunately for me and my tens of fans I was never any good at picking up on stuff like this. For example, I never thought it was unusual that I didn't get paid on those nights when I actually did get to go on, because none of the comics I knew got paid for performing. It wasn't really part of the deal. Once, a bartender took pity on me at some club, when he saw me waiting half the night to go on, and he came over with a glass of Coke, which I counted as my first piece of compensation. I arrived home that night just as my mother was getting up to start her day, and I very proudly told her of my first rush of success. “I got a free glass of Coke tonight,” I said, my chest bursting.

It was hard to tell, but I believe the look I got back in return was one of enormous shared pride. After all, I was now one step closer to being able to support myself. So, yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what it was, enormous shared pride. That, or it was something she ate.

Another time, I was at the Comic Strip, where the emcee was also known to look right past me when he needed another few sets to close out the night. I was working with a comic who shall remain nameless in these pages—mostly because his career never amounted to anything and he did remain nameless. If I told you his name, you'd have no idea who I was talking about, even though it would amuse me and a few other comics who also worked with this guy. On this particular night, this particular comic got lucky and hooked up with a girl from the audience. This happened sometimes, I was told, although it never happened to me. Whenever a girl from the audience tried to throw herself at me, she'd turn out to have terrible aim. She'd wind up fifty miles away.

This girl from the audience hung around until closing time, at which point she and this unknown comic started messing around onstage. (Talk about losing your audience!) While he was fucking her, the lucky comic was going at it with such wild abandon that his colostomy bag burst open.

He told us the story the next night like it was the funniest thing in the world, but no matter how he dressed it up it came out sounding like one of those
I-guess-you-had-to-be-there
stories. If I
had
been there, two things would have likely happened. One, I would have stood in the wings with my digital camcorder and invented YouTube right there on the spot, because a thing like this, it should be shared with the entire universe. And two, I would have finally gotten lucky myself, or so I like to think, because all of a sudden I would have looked pretty damn good, standing next to a guy like this. I would have turned to this girl from the audience and said, “Hey, at least I won't shit on you.”

I still remember the first time I got paid for telling jokes, which in the end turned out to be a far more likely scenario than me getting laid for telling jokes. It was in the basement of some church. I could do no wrong that night, as I recall. I was on comedy fire. I was hot, hot, hot. In stand-up circles, we comedians have a phrase we like to use to describe one of those nights when we're especially on, when everything seems to work and the audience catches every piece of cleverness and nuance in our material. It's called
one of those nights when we're especially on, when everything seems to work and the audience catches every piece of cleverness and nuance in our material
.

I was like the Beatles at Shea Stadium, only you could actually hear what I was saying and I didn't get laid afterward. All I got was seven dollars, which seemed to me like all the money in the world.

I went back to that church a couple weeks later, when my seven dollars ran out, hoping for more of the same, only this time I bombed. This time, I was like the Mets at Shea Stadium—which, I'll confess, is not a line that's original to me. You see, I don't know anything about baseball, so I bought that line from a guy at a comedy club who seemed to need the money. To be accurate, I didn't actually
buy
the line from this guy, but I did give him half of my sandwich. (Okay, okay … if you really want to know the truth, I let him have two bites.)

Just to clarify, I don't know or care a thing about sports, except I seem to recall hearing that Babe Ruth was fat—which now that I think about it makes a whole lot of sense because he must have eaten a lot of his candy bars.

(Gee, maybe I've been fooling myself, all this time. Maybe I know a lot more about baseball than I let on.)

Some of my first gigs were so far off on the fringes of show business you could hardly recognize the neighborhood. Once, I worked at a synagogue event with a conservatively dressed lounge singer named Pat Benatar. She sang that song from
Godspell,
the Jesus Christ musical, the one about finding her corner of the sky. I always hated that song, because there are just too many people in this world and not enough corners to go around, but she sang it well enough. You could almost dance to it—or, at least, not puke to it. Still, I didn't think she'd go very far in show business, because by this point I was a wise old veteran of show business and a shrewd judge of talent.

Another time, I went out on a booking to an address I didn't recognize and when I got there I saw that it wasn't a club or a bar. It wasn't even a church or a synagogue or a public meeting place of any kind. It was just an apartment building, which I thought was strange. But what the hell did I care? A gig was a gig. Money was money. So I rode the elevator to this giant, decrepit loft. It was dark and dreary and mostly empty. There were four or five folding chairs, and a few tables set about the room. On the tables were a bunch of pamphlets or flyers—from the looks of things, they could have been left over from an Eisenhower rally.

A creepy-looking guy stepped out of the darkness to greet me. He said, “No blue material, kid. You go on at eight-fifteen.”

It was about eight o'clock already, and it was just me and him. It was the same guy who hired me, a couple nights earlier, backstage at one of the comedy clubs, only in that setting he didn't look so creepy. I thought,
This can't be good
. So I made some excuse. I said, “Do I have time to step outside for a smoke, before I go on?”

The creepy-looking guy said, “Sure, kid. But remember, no blue material.”

I nodded—then I raced downstairs and never came back.

I'd go anywhere for a gig when I was just starting out, even all the way to Canada. One of my very first shows outside New York was in a run-down club in Ottawa. It was during a ridiculous cold spell, which was even cold by Canadian standards. It was like a million degrees below zero—and that's not even counting the exchange rate. There was no way to keep warm, and I was supposed to do three twenty-minute shows, back-to-back-to-back. There was no opening act, no emcee, no stage. There was a microphone set up in a corner of the bar area, at the same level as the cold, drunken Canadian patrons, but there was no way to tell if it even worked. Before my first show, a woman who could barely speak English stood on the other side of the room and introduced me. She just yelled my name out, and the people at the bar stopped talking for a moment.

Surprisingly, some people showed up for my very first show, although it's possible they had just stepped inside to get warm. It was just horrible. No one knew who I was—although this alone wasn't so unusual, because even in New York no one knew who I was. I told a few jokes. No one laughed. It's possible the microphone wasn't working and they couldn't hear me, but I kept going for twenty minutes.