amazing. That performance secured her Saturday Night Live gig.
Meanwhile, I was crushed that I couldn’t make it work. After all I’d done to get some recognition there, it was easy to feel that I’d blown a golden opportunity, that I’d hit a ceiling. But Lisa and Judy Toll felt differently about my abilities, and each one independently told me the things that would help change my life and career for good.
The late Judy Toll was one of my best friends, and was the only friend of mine who was an actress and a comic, living in those dual worlds. She was always one clique ahead of me, which was kind of good, because while we were pals—getting into misadventures, going to Carl’s Jr. at three in the morning to eat four orders of fries and then compare stomachs: “I’m fatter!” “Shut up! I’m fatter!”—there was always a little part of her that was mentoring me. I used to follow her around to her stand-up gigs, where I got to meet the top comedians of the day, like Richard Lewis and Andrew Dice Clay. She’d finish up at the Groundlings on a weekend night, then say, “I have a fifteen-minute set at 1:40 a.m.,” and run to the Melrose Improv. I’d go and meet the most interesting people at the Improv bar. I even got into a conversation once with playwright Sam Shepard.
One day Judy said to me, “You know, you should try stand-up. I think you can do it.”
My first reaction was “No way. I do characters. I can’t tell a joke to save my life. I can’t do what you do. I’d get heckled. At the Groundlings nobody gets up to leave. There’s no dinner served. I could never perform for people who are given drinks. That’s my alcoholic family, bored and wishing they could just eat their food instead.”
My good friend Judy Toll and me all dolled up.
She was persistent. “No, this is your thing.”
Here I was, saying that doing characters was my thing. But Lisa Kudrow gave it to me straight. “You’re okay with characters,” she said. “But you’re really funny as yourself. When you talk to me as you, you’re funnier than anybody I know.”
Whoa. Okay. I always enjoyed making my friends laugh by just talking about my day, my parents, some stupid TV show I was watching, something crazy that happened at an audition, or my less than stellar love life. But that certainly wasn’t the stand-up I saw being done on local stages. It was one-liners and screeds about men versus women, or observations about pets and airplanes. But with Judy and Lisa’s encouragement, I convinced the show director at the Groundlings to let me open the late show each week with a monologue, a five-minute story. Which invariably became a twenty-minute story. (The one downside was that everyone in the Groundlings company backstage began to hate me for making the show start so late.) It put me out front in a way that I was comfortable with—in other words, outside of the sketch format where I could start to develop my own persona with my own point of view—and I started to get good feedback.
As for what I would talk about in those openers, believe it or not, I did no celebrity material back then. My act has pretty much always been retelling whatever happened to me that week in a funny way. I didn’t begin ragging on celebrities until years later when I would actually be in the presence of them, experiencing them firsthand. So I started out mostly talking about my crappy day jobs, some new guy who’d just dumped me, or my family, but celebrity referencing didn’t kick into high gear until I started getting parts on television.
Meanwhile, Judy was trying like hell to get me sets at the Melrose Improv or the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard. She got me an audition with Mitzi Shore, who ran the Comedy Store (and who birthed Pauly), and the cool thing was I got my first crack on a regular standup night with the other name-brand comics instead of on the night usually reserved for beginners: open mike night. Picture gang members,
Meanwhile, I was crushed that I couldn’t make it work. After all I’d done to get some recognition there, it was easy to feel that I’d blown a golden opportunity, that I’d hit a ceiling. But Lisa and Judy Toll felt differently about my abilities, and each one independently told me the things that would help change my life and career for good.
The late Judy Toll was one of my best friends, and was the only friend of mine who was an actress and a comic, living in those dual worlds. She was always one clique ahead of me, which was kind of good, because while we were pals—getting into misadventures, going to Carl’s Jr. at three in the morning to eat four orders of fries and then compare stomachs: “I’m fatter!” “Shut up! I’m fatter!”—there was always a little part of her that was mentoring me. I used to follow her around to her stand-up gigs, where I got to meet the top comedians of the day, like Richard Lewis and Andrew Dice Clay. She’d finish up at the Groundlings on a weekend night, then say, “I have a fifteen-minute set at 1:40 a.m.,” and run to the Melrose Improv. I’d go and meet the most interesting people at the Improv bar. I even got into a conversation once with playwright Sam Shepard.
One day Judy said to me, “You know, you should try stand-up. I think you can do it.”
My first reaction was “No way. I do characters. I can’t tell a joke to save my life. I can’t do what you do. I’d get heckled. At the Groundlings nobody gets up to leave. There’s no dinner served. I could never perform for people who are given drinks. That’s my alcoholic family, bored and wishing they could just eat their food instead.”
My good friend Judy Toll and me all dolled up.
She was persistent. “No, this is your thing.”
Here I was, saying that doing characters was my thing. But Lisa Kudrow gave it to me straight. “You’re okay with characters,” she said. “But you’re really funny as yourself. When you talk to me as you, you’re funnier than anybody I know.”
Whoa. Okay. I always enjoyed making my friends laugh by just talking about my day, my parents, some stupid TV show I was watching, something crazy that happened at an audition, or my less than stellar love life. But that certainly wasn’t the stand-up I saw being done on local stages. It was one-liners and screeds about men versus women, or observations about pets and airplanes. But with Judy and Lisa’s encouragement, I convinced the show director at the Groundlings to let me open the late show each week with a monologue, a five-minute story. Which invariably became a twenty-minute story. (The one downside was that everyone in the Groundlings company backstage began to hate me for making the show start so late.) It put me out front in a way that I was comfortable with—in other words, outside of the sketch format where I could start to develop my own persona with my own point of view—and I started to get good feedback.
As for what I would talk about in those openers, believe it or not, I did no celebrity material back then. My act has pretty much always been retelling whatever happened to me that week in a funny way. I didn’t begin ragging on celebrities until years later when I would actually be in the presence of them, experiencing them firsthand. So I started out mostly talking about my crappy day jobs, some new guy who’d just dumped me, or my family, but celebrity referencing didn’t kick into high gear until I started getting parts on television.
Meanwhile, Judy was trying like hell to get me sets at the Melrose Improv or the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard. She got me an audition with Mitzi Shore, who ran the Comedy Store (and who birthed Pauly), and the cool thing was I got my first crack on a regular standup night with the other name-brand comics instead of on the night usually reserved for beginners: open mike night. Picture gang members,
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