Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir (18 page)

We worked at my house until about seven-thirty or eight at night. Then Mister Geno and I would roll over to the Store. On the way we decided which jokes to test out on stage. Mister Geno had a copy of them and would check them off as I tried them. If the audience liked the joke, he put a check mark next to it. If it flopped, he put an “X” next to it. I almost always taped my shows too. Later, we would go over the tape, analyze the audience responses, and work on changes. My rule has been that if a joke does not work three times, I take it out—no matter how much I personally like it. There are some comics who say, “To hell with the audience, what do they know?” But I believe you have to be true to yourself
and
you have to listen to your audience.

I thought I already had a good work ethic, taught to me by comics such as Brenner. But watching Lear control as many sitcoms as he was—as many as eight in one season—was inspirational. I learned from him never to be satisfied with a performance, never “phone it in.” Lear told me, “Don’t rest on your laurels. Don’t just show up to pick up the dough.” To this day I tape the late-night talk shows every night to see what the new comics are doing and what topics people are talking about. I am not beyond learning something new.

The best jokes from my writers were collected into “chunks” arranged by subject and were ready for any television appearance or major gig. When I appeared on a TV show and did my stand-up, they would tune in to see if any of their jokes made the cut. If none of them did, they would not be happy. When they heard someone else’s joke, they would shout at the TV, “That’s bullshit! My joke was better than that!” Then they would come to a meeting and ask, “When are you going to use my joke?” I’d say, “I’m getting to it, man.”

A joke might experience so many changes in meetings or afterward that in the end you could not decipher the original source. All I know about the following joke was that it came out of a March 3, 1976 session with me, Wayne, Jay, Byron, and Dave:

You all into that astrology stuff? Some girls really believe that their lives are controlled by the planets. This fat girl told me the reason she ate so much was because her moon was in the house of Mercury. Looked more like it had been in the International House of Pancakes.

Maybe no one wanted to take credit for that one. But with such talent in that room, there were more hits than misses. Some of the uncredited jokes that earned check marks:

Kids always say they’re seven and a half, eight and a half—always fighting for those halves. As you get older, you stop fighting for those halves, like you never hear adults say, “Yes, I’m forty-nine and a half.”

The government just did a study. Found out the reason the unemployment rate is so high is because there are so many people out of work.

Went to the doctor. Had to get an X-ray. Just before the technician took the X-ray he ran behind the screen with me. Said he wanted to be in the picture too.

There’s a new course they have in school now called Black Studies. But I always wondered what would happen if I flunked. Would I fade?

An article in
Cosmopolitan
says that women can tell a man’s sexual prowess by the kind of plants he grows. I’m taking no chances; I have a redwood growing in my bedroom.

I was on the Johnny Carson show last week and I mentioned in passing that I had never gone out with an airline stewardess or Playboy Bunny before, and I do not believe the response I got. I got like two hundred letters from guys who said they’ve never been out with one either.

There is one place, however, where even the greatest jokes ever told do not stand a chance—on stage before a rock concert. No one was bigger during his heyday than rock star Peter Frampton, who hit in 1976 with “Baby, I Love Your Way,” “Do You Feel Like We Do” and “Show Me the Way,” when his folks invited me to open for three upcoming dates.

For the first one there were four thousand fans waiting for him at an outdoor amphitheater in New Jersey. The old line about rock fans at a concert is true: They had their drugs timed for the act they wanted to see—and I was not that act. All they knew was that I was the guy keeping them from seeing Frampton. The reaction was harsh. People were yelling, throwing things—pissed off. They kept screaming for Frampton. I finally yelled out, “Anybody have VD?” They all cheered. After a few minutes I walked off the stage feeling like I had been flushed down a toilet, driven through the sewer system, and dumped into the Hudson River.

The Frampton people still wanted me to do the next date! We flew charter to Vancouver, Canada. This time there were fifty thousand fans waiting at a football stadium. Again, nothing good happened for me. I told them I could not do the third date and flew back to New York.

Sometimes not even a staff of writers can help. Many years after
Good Times
I opened at the Hilton in Las Vegas for Gladys Knight, which I had done many, many times before. I went on stage for the first performance of an eight-night run and did my jokes. The audience was so quiet I could hear the air conditioner blowing. The next day I got an absolutely horrendous review. The writer was not wrong, because there were no laughs the night he was there. I was so unnerved that, before the weekend dates, I flew in some of my writers, including Mister Geno. They watched a show. Once again there were no laughs.

They were as confused as I was. “But these jokes work!” they said. They had no answer. Mister Geno and I resorted to picking up a few joke books and old comedy albums to adapt a few of their jokes. That helped a little, but I still ate it. I never knew why. The next shows I did elsewhere, with the original material, I killed again. Go figure.

I will never forget that week in Vegas, but I have let other bad nights slide. A cliché in comedy is that you never take the audience reaction at a Friday night late show to heart because it is always bad. No one has ever understood the reason. When Steve Martin received a Kennedy Center Honor a few years ago, a reporter said to him, “You haven’t done stand-up in twenty-five years but you got a standing ovation tonight. Why don’t you do stand-up again?” Martin reportedly answered, “Second show, Friday night.”

For my writers who were interested in working on sitcoms, I brought to the meetings scripts from
Good Times
,
The Jeffersons
, and
Barney Miller
, the latter courtesy of Landesberg, who was starring as Detective Dietrich. I urged them to rewrite the scripts as an exercise, to see if they could improve on the scripts that were being filmed. I also wanted to get them used to not only the sitcom form but also what the writers’ room atmosphere was like on a series.

I must have done something right.

After Danny Arnold, the creative genius behind
Barney Miller
, had a heart attack . . . or two or three—he had an oxygen tent on the set so he could continue to work—ABC insisted he bring in more writing help. Landesberg suggested they take a look at the spec script Frank ’n’ Stein had penned. By the following season Frank ’n’ Stein were story editors. They later won an Emmy for the show and also created
Mr. Belvedere
.

People criticize TV commercials, claim they make us do things we wouldn’t ordinarily do. It’s true. After seeing a couple of commercials the other night, I got so fed up I turned off the TV and read a book.
(Frank Dungan, April 26, 1978)

Nadler met people from the Garry Marshall camp and almost immediately began writing for their smash hits
Happy Days
and
Laverne & Shirley
. He also wrote for
Chico and the Man
and
Perfect Strangers
(which originally was to costar Louie Anderson). Mister Geno would write most notably for
Who’s the Boss?
The team of Rod Ash and Mark Curtiss would write for
Fridays
,
Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theater,
and
Sledge Hammer!

Everything is bad for you. I heard the government has just come up with another thing they say you shouldn’t put into your body . . . bullets. The healthiest thing you can do nowadays is die!
(Ash & Curtiss, date unknown)

Wayne Kline wrote for
Fernwood Tonight
and
Laugh-In
before I got him on
Good Times
. He then worked at
In Living Color
. Most notably, he became a staff writer on talk shows—in the ’80s on
Thicke of the Night
with Alan Thicke and the
Late Show with Joan Rivers
, then for Leno’s
Tonight Show
from its debut in 1992 through 2009, when he moved over to the ill-fated
Jay Leno Show
. When Leno threw him overboard, he joined Letterman. Another writer, Larry Jacobson, would sometimes show up at my door at 11 o’clock at night with a page of jokes. He pushed and pushed and finally hit with
Married . . . with Children
before writing for Letterman and then switching to Leno.

The brilliant Paul Mooney wrote for
Good Times
and for me even as he was helping Richard Pryor craft his act in the mid-’70s. Years later he became the head writer for
In Living Color
, where he created Homey D. Clown, played by Damon Wayans. Steve Oedekirk also worked on
In Living Color
, where he connected with Jim Carrey and subsequently collaborated on the
Ace Ventura
films as well as
Bruce Almighty
. He also wrote
The Nutty Professor
for Eddie Murphy and
Patch Adams
for Robin Williams. Jack Handey wrote for Steve Martin and was responsible for “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey” on
Saturday Night Live
. Allan Stephan would write and produce
Roseanne
. Alan Zweibel (
Saturday Night Live
) and the team of Jim Mulholland and Michael Barrie (the
Tonight Show with Johnny Carson
) probably still owe me some jokes!

Byron went from my writing staff to cohosting the TV series
Real People
for five years. He then went back to stand-up before creating his own syndicated late-night talk show, the
Byron Allen Show
. He sold that show station by station across the country. He would not give up. That series ran for another five years. Now he’s a TV mogul, producing and hosting several shows, including
Comics Unleashed
, on which comedians chat about their lives.

Jumping to the head of the class, however, was Letterman, who was given his morning show in 1980. His director was Hal Gurnee, the same director I auditioned for when I made my national TV debut with Jack Paar. Letterman thought his morning show was great, but after weeks of low ratings, the network blew that baby out. He was devastated. Sitting on my couch, he went on and on about how hard he had worked and how he didn’t know what he could do next.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “you’ll get another shot.” But the truth is that I thought he was done.

I felt the same thing about Steve Martin after I saw him open for singer Phoebe Snow at the Troubadour in LA around 1975. The crowd was filled with industry people—a tough audience. He wore a black suit, not a white one. He did his balloon animal bit. He played the banjo. He died a comic’s lonely death.

I went backstage and told him, “Hey man, you have to let this stand-up thing go. You have a nice job writing for that Dick Van Dyke show (which costarred Andy Kaufman). The people in these audiences are the ones who might hire you for other writing gigs. If they keep seeing you do this act, they will never hire you again.”

Steve said he had some gigs coming up with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and then he was going to New York to guest host a late-night show called
NBC’s Saturday Night
. “Then I’ll take a look and see what I should do,” he said. On that late-night show (which was later renamed
Saturday Night Live
) he sang “King Tut,” was one of the “two wild and crazy guys” with Dan Aykroyd, and became a sensation. That’s right, people, I told Steve Martin to get off the stage!

I was wrong about him, and I am glad I was wrong about Letterman too.

Since
Good Times
, some people come to a stand-up gig to see Jimmie Walker and some come to see J. J., that kid who popped into their living room and was part of their family once a week when they were growing up. People approach me and say, “How come you ain’t smilin’? Say ‘dyn-o-mite!’” or “I love the show you did about . . . ” But those who knew me prior to
Good Times
were surprised I was so loosey-goosey on the show. They knew me as fairly serious, someone who worked hard and was, basically, a loner. They knew that all I wanted to be was a stand-up comic, not a character on a sitcom.

I wanted people to see me as a comedian, not a cartoon character. Jerry Seinfeld overcame that difficulty perfectly by actually playing a stand-up comic on his TV series. The audience knew that was who he really was. For most of us, though, separating yourself from a successful character is problematic. Michael Richards, Kramer on
Seinfeld
, could not do it. Henry Winkler could not do it.

Leonard Nimoy tried to continue as a serious actor, but his fame as Spock on the cult TV sensation
Star Trek
overwhelmed him. Nearly a decade after he last played the Vulcan on television, he even wrote a book called
I Am Not Spock
.

I can relate.

I am not J. J. I just played him on TV.

What I did not know during the early days of
Good Times
was that J. J. would become a flashpoint for a controversy about race and that I would become the whipping boy.