I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder by William Knoedelseder Page A
Authors: William Knoedelseder
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(hosted by sportscaster Howard Cosell), and was booked to appear on a summer replacement TV series starring Monty Hall, the longtime host of the game show Let’s Make a Deal.
The word among her fellow comics was that Boosler had balls.
At the New York Improv, she would beg Budd Friedman to let her go on after Freddie Prinze, a slot her male counterparts preferred to avoid because Freddie was the proverbial tough act to follow. (Andy Kaufman was the toughest because he closed his set by leading the audience in a Conga line out of the club and into the street.) But Boosler’s attitude was, “I’m as good as any of the boys. Don’t make it easy on me because I’m a girl.”
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William Knoedelseder
No one made it easy on her, that’s for sure. “Hey, baby, you wanna fuck? ” was a common heckle she heard from the crowd in the early days. She handled the abuse with such aplomb that Richard Lewis dubbed her “the Jackie Robinson of stand-up comedy.” She preferred to describe herself as “the first young, unmarried, dressed-up-for-a-date female stand-up comic.”
Boosler’s material sprang from a female perspective, but it stopped short of being stridently feminist. “They never want you to think the pictures are posed,” she said of the then dominant Playboy magazine. “‘We just happened to catch Cathy typing—nude on top of a Volvo in a field this morning.’ Maybe I’m sheltered, but I don’t know anybody who takes a shower in a baseball cap and knee socks.” On the subject of prostitution, she quipped, “Why would any woman sleep with a total stranger without having had dinner and a movie first?”
It was originally expected that Boosler would be among the headliners at the new Los Angeles Improv. But before leaving New York, she had a falling out with Budd Friedman, who’d paid her only $78 a week as a hostess for two and a half years, and she vowed that she would never again work in a club he had anything to do with.
Boosler auditioned for Mitzi Shore on a Monday night at the new Westwood Comedy Store. She had no problem breaking into the regular lineup or gaining admittance to the West Coast boys’
club of comics. Richard Lewis and Jay Leno, of course, were old pals from the Improv, and she was soon a fixture at Tom Dreesen’s nightly after-hours gatherings at Theodore’s and Canter’s Deli, where she met Johnny Dark, George Miller, and David Letterman. Boosler thought the guys were a godsend, especially Dreesen and Dark because they were older and married, with kids and homes you could always go to on the holidays. It was like the best version of a family that she would have designed for herself, comprised entirely of quirky, funny people on a shared mission and completely supportive of one another.
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Working the Westwood Store, she got to know an entirely different group of comics: Michael Keaton, who was edgy and sexy and did a hysterical routine as a driving-school instructor with a flip chart; Charlie Hill, a Native American comic who drew constant titters from the crowd by holding a tom-tom in his hand throughout his entire set without ever acknowledging its presence; the comedy team of Rick Granat and Jim Carozzo, who became heroes to poor and hungry comics—and the butt of many Jay Leno jokes—for discovering that every Tuesday night, the Ralph’s supermarket on Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles tossed a veritable truckload of slightly spoiled, but still very edible produce in its dumpster; and Mitch Walters, a chronically broke, inveterate gambler whose day job selling lightbulbs in a telephone sales call center provided him with emergency material he used whenever his act bogged down on stage. He’d urge people in the audience to shout out where they were from, then dazzle them with his encyclopedic knowledge of U.S. area
The word among her fellow comics was that Boosler had balls.
At the New York Improv, she would beg Budd Friedman to let her go on after Freddie Prinze, a slot her male counterparts preferred to avoid because Freddie was the proverbial tough act to follow. (Andy Kaufman was the toughest because he closed his set by leading the audience in a Conga line out of the club and into the street.) But Boosler’s attitude was, “I’m as good as any of the boys. Don’t make it easy on me because I’m a girl.”
71
1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 72
72
William Knoedelseder
No one made it easy on her, that’s for sure. “Hey, baby, you wanna fuck? ” was a common heckle she heard from the crowd in the early days. She handled the abuse with such aplomb that Richard Lewis dubbed her “the Jackie Robinson of stand-up comedy.” She preferred to describe herself as “the first young, unmarried, dressed-up-for-a-date female stand-up comic.”
Boosler’s material sprang from a female perspective, but it stopped short of being stridently feminist. “They never want you to think the pictures are posed,” she said of the then dominant Playboy magazine. “‘We just happened to catch Cathy typing—nude on top of a Volvo in a field this morning.’ Maybe I’m sheltered, but I don’t know anybody who takes a shower in a baseball cap and knee socks.” On the subject of prostitution, she quipped, “Why would any woman sleep with a total stranger without having had dinner and a movie first?”
It was originally expected that Boosler would be among the headliners at the new Los Angeles Improv. But before leaving New York, she had a falling out with Budd Friedman, who’d paid her only $78 a week as a hostess for two and a half years, and she vowed that she would never again work in a club he had anything to do with.
Boosler auditioned for Mitzi Shore on a Monday night at the new Westwood Comedy Store. She had no problem breaking into the regular lineup or gaining admittance to the West Coast boys’
club of comics. Richard Lewis and Jay Leno, of course, were old pals from the Improv, and she was soon a fixture at Tom Dreesen’s nightly after-hours gatherings at Theodore’s and Canter’s Deli, where she met Johnny Dark, George Miller, and David Letterman. Boosler thought the guys were a godsend, especially Dreesen and Dark because they were older and married, with kids and homes you could always go to on the holidays. It was like the best version of a family that she would have designed for herself, comprised entirely of quirky, funny people on a shared mission and completely supportive of one another.
1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:55 PM Page 73
I’m Dying Up Here
73
Working the Westwood Store, she got to know an entirely different group of comics: Michael Keaton, who was edgy and sexy and did a hysterical routine as a driving-school instructor with a flip chart; Charlie Hill, a Native American comic who drew constant titters from the crowd by holding a tom-tom in his hand throughout his entire set without ever acknowledging its presence; the comedy team of Rick Granat and Jim Carozzo, who became heroes to poor and hungry comics—and the butt of many Jay Leno jokes—for discovering that every Tuesday night, the Ralph’s supermarket on Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles tossed a veritable truckload of slightly spoiled, but still very edible produce in its dumpster; and Mitch Walters, a chronically broke, inveterate gambler whose day job selling lightbulbs in a telephone sales call center provided him with emergency material he used whenever his act bogged down on stage. He’d urge people in the audience to shout out where they were from, then dazzle them with his encyclopedic knowledge of U.S. area
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