Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir (32 page)

NBC, who was not happy with her anyway, began to move to force her out. On Howard Stern’s radio show, Helen charged that she was being picked on because she was a woman and threatened to sue the network for sexual discrimination. Apparently she felt she held the trump card—Leno. If she was purged, she would take Leno with her.

She did not realize what those of us in comedy circles already knew—Leno would do whatever was good for Leno. Helen was fired. Jay kept his job.

Soon after, Helen was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to have a mastectomy. To show how despised she was, a “joke” made the rounds among comedians: “She’s alright, she still has her dick.” Like I said before, comedians can be tough.

With Helen no longer in charge, Leno agreed to have me on his
Tonight Show
. But he still spoke with her, and her antipathy toward me made him refuse to work with me on my shot, like he had done many times before when I appeared on Carson or Letterman. This time I would have to go over my shot not with him but with Jimmy Brogan, who had become his right-hand man and comedy coordinator. I had helped Brogan get the gig as one of the regular emcees at the Comedy Store when he was on my staff. Now he was doing for Leno what Mister Geno and then Brogan himself had done for me back in the day.

“You can’t do the Jeffrey Dahmer line,” Brogan said after looking over the jokes I had planned. Dahmer was a notorious serial killer who, at the time, was incarcerated for several gruesome cannibalistic murders. Also at that time another convicted murderer was about to be executed, again sparking a debate about capital punishment, and I had an oh-so-topical joke that connected the two killers.

“Why can’t I do the joke?” I asked Brogan.

“Jay doesn’t like Jeffrey Dahmer jokes.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “Jay does Dahmer jokes all the time!”

Later that day it was showtime. I went into my shot. The audience was laughing, the band was laughing. I was rolling at breakneck speed. The spot came for the Dahmer joke and I did it:

All this talk about capital punishment, about whether the electric chair is humane, about lethal injections being humane. I have an idea that’ll make everybody happy: If you want to get rid of a murderer, you rub barbecue sauce on him and put him in a cell with Jeffrey Dahmer.

Excuse the expression, but the joke killed.

I looked out the corner of my eye at Leno at his desk. He was not laughing. He was not happy.

I finished my shot and walked to the couch. Leno did not shake my hand. He said, “Jimmie Walker. We’ll be right back.” During the commercial break he told me, “You had to do the Dahmer joke.”

“Didn’t it kill?”

“That’s not the point.”

When we came back on the air, we did a couple more jokes and then we were finished. Jay was still not over it, saying, “The point is I asked you not to do the line and you did the line.”

My point was that funny mattered. Even Branford Marsalis, then the bandleader, came to my dressing room and said my shot was the funniest he had heard on the show to date.

Here’s the kicker: A couple weeks later Leno was quoted in a national magazine with a joke about Dahmer. It was my joke! I was shocked. When I called him to talk about it, his staff referred me to Brogan. I have not been on the
Tonight Show
since. When I have seen him in passing, Ray Peno says, “Brother Walker,” and imitates a bit in my act where I go, “Well, well, well.” That’s all.

Stand-up comics are a brotherhood. We have seen each other bomb, seen each other helpless on stage, seen each other at our worst. So when we have a chance, we give each other a hand. What I am most proud of in my entire career is not what I have done but that I helped out “my guys”—Letterman, Leno, Frank ’n’ Stein, Louie Anderson, and all the others.

Once upon a time all of my guys wondered if they were good enough, if they had a chance to make it in this business. An actor can get by without being dramatic. If a comedian isn’t funny, then he’s not a comedian. They were funny, but a lot of folks come to Hollywood with talent and never succeed. I have seen many great comics who never made it. There was no rhyme or reason or logic why they didn’t—except luck did not come their way. Maybe my guys would have hit the big time without me being around. But it makes me happy to think that when they needed a hand, I was there for them.

I have continued to do that with my opening acts, becoming for them what David Brenner was for me. Dustin Ybarra, a Hispanic kid from Texas, was seventeen when he opened for me in Dallas a few years ago. He was very talented, but he was raw. Sure, he was big in Dallas and all his friends and fans laughed at his jokes, but he had to get among other comics, compete with them, grow that thick skin, make himself better. I took him under my wing and helped him move to New York and get an agent. As the song goes: If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.

The world is going to end in 2012. That’s what they say. I’m kind of hoping that it does. Cause I’ve got this couch from Rent-a-Center. No payments until 2012. That’s a free couch right there! The guy said, “You know you’ve got to pay in 2012.” I said, “Bro, we’re all going to pay in 2012!”
(Dustin Ybarra)

I’m glad I don’t go to school now. Bullies are so mean. Now they kick your ass and put it on YouTube. You go home and your parents already know you got your ass kicked. You walk in like, “Mom . . .” She goes, “I know, sweetie, ‘Fat Kid Cries’ got forty-two thousand hits. Your ass-whomping went viral. Congratulations!”
(Dustin Ybarra)

He took my advice, and, with material like that, before long he was getting spots around town. A couple of MTV pilots followed, then
Live at Gotham
, and now he is in major films.

Jay has had the opportunity to help those who had helped him as well as encourage and develop a new generation of comics. He was made the keeper of the franchise, the
Tonight Show
of Jerry Lester, Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and Johnny Carson. Along with Letterman, Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, and others, they helped launch and support the careers of so many comedians. That the same cannot be said for Leno is a shame. He abandoned the stand-up comic. That is not just my indictment; that is the widespread belief in the comedy community.

An exasperated Boosler once asked me about Leno: “What does he think? That the one with the most toys wins?”

“Yes, Elayne,” I said. “He does.”

No one begrudged Leno his success. What was expected, however, was that he would help other comics, whether behind the scenes with the Greek or on his stage for Bob Shaw or some unknown stand-up needing his first shot. When he closed out his first
Tonight Show
run in 2009, he said that sixty-eight children had been born to his staff since 1992. Too bad he couldn’t also say he had brought a new major stand-up comic into the world during that time. Instead, in now some twenty years of hosting his own show, he has not broken a single significant stand-up act, which is amazing given the reach of the
Tonight Show
. The only comedy career he has launched has been that of Ross Mathews, who is more of a personality than a stand-up.

However, Chelsea Handler and her
Chelsea Lately
show has been a tremendous platform for comics—Whitney Cummings, Natasha Leg-gero, Jo Koy, Josh Wolf, Heather McDonald, Sarah Colonna, Loni Love, and Kevin Hart, just to name a few. There are radio shows that have done a better job than Ray Peno at providing a stage for comics. Howard Stern can take some credit for Sam Kinison and a lot more for Greg Fitzsimmons and Artie Lange.
Bob and Tom
helped Frank Caliendo as well as Larry the Cable Guy, Bill Engvall, and Ron White from the Blue Collar Comedy Tour.
Opie and Anthony
brought Jim Norton to the forefront. Some have appeared on Leno’s show but only after achieving their breakthroughs elsewhere.

Ironically, the most popular comic Letterman launched was Leno. But within the comedy community there have been so many more that he has helped, including nearly everyone from his early days at the Store, from Johnny Dark, Tom Dreesen, Richard Lewis, Jeff Altman, and Johnny Witherspoon to George Miller and a road comic named Jimmie Walker.

Designer colognes . . . they got Obsession, they got Passion. Now they’ve got a cologne for black men only, called Repossession—for the black man who thought he had everything, but it didn’t work out that way.
(Jimmie Walker,
Late Show with David Letterman
, 1995 or 1996)

Letterman is not a “people person.” Neither am I. Neither was George Miller, who in the early days roomed with Dave. Letterman and George became the closest of friends, and the three of us always got along. George and I traveled across America playing so many shows together.

When George was diagnosed with leukemia, Letterman made sure he was booked on his show enough times so he would qualify for his union health benefits (he would appear fifty-six times over two decades). When his condition worsened, Dave donated a million dollars to put him into an experimental medical program at UCLA. It saved his life for a while. And when George said, “I don’t want to sit around and wait to die. I want to work,” Letterman came through for him again.

He rarely called his agents at Creative Artists Agency (CAA), but for George he would do anything.

“Yes sir, Mr. Letterman, what can we do for you?”

Letterman proposed a tour called Classic Comics of Late Night, starring four old friends—George, Bobby Kelton, Gary Mule Deer, and myself. He told CAA he wanted the agency to book us into casinos and theaters around the country.

Miller, Kelton, Mule Deer, and Walker?

They told him, “We’re agents, not God!” They could not book the tour.

What Letterman did next has never before been revealed: He paid the freight himself—paid for the whole tour. When a show did not sellout, he bought the remaining tickets and had them given away. We played about twenty dates—the Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos in Connecticut, Emerald Island casino in Nevada, Cerritos Performing Arts Center in Southern California, and elsewhere. We traveled first class and stayed at first-class hotels, and it was a great show too. Letterman did that for George.

Kelton had no idea what was going on; he thought we really were selling out. When Dave found out I told Kelton the truth about the tour, he was very upset with me. He didn’t want everyone to know. He’s that kind of guy. He will probably be pissed reading this now.

One day George and I were driving to a gig in Washington and we passed a cemetery. As if it was the most ordinary thing, George said, “Oh, that’s where I’m going to put my ashes.” The last thing he ever said to me was “You’re gonna miss me when I’m dead!”

He worked until his last day. In March 2003 he collapsed in his hotel room at the Riviera in Vegas and was rushed to a hospital. I received an e-mail from Boosler saying, “Hi. How’s your day going? Oh, by the way, George Miller died.”

His memorial service at the Laugh Factory has gained legendary status. Assembled were Richard Lewis, Dreesen, Boosler, Mort Sahl, Johnny Dark, Charlie Hill, Kelly Monteith, myself, and many others. Of course, Leno showed up too. Letterman was unable to attend because he was dealing with his own medical condition at the time—shingles. Given the nasty breakup between Leno and Letterman, many of the comedians in attendance were grateful that a potential scene of discomfort and awkwardness was avoided.

Leno and others took the microphone to talk about George. The stories were rough, but as Boosler said, “Never has someone who hated so many been loved by so many.” There was nothing but love in that room—comedian love.

It was the same when Landesberg, one of the nicest people any of us ever knew, passed away in December 2010. Brenner arranged for a memorial at a downtown LA theater, and those of us there, including Richard Lewis, Marty Nadler, and Hal Linden and Max Gail from
Barney Miller
, told Landesberg stories and jokes for two or three hours. I repeated his Laurence Olivier and Gabby Hayes story—and it killed.

Comedians can be strange and twisted and dark. Sometimes we are not nice people. But, dammit, anyone can make you cry. Only a few people in this world can make you laugh. George and Steve made me laugh. I miss them.

Not long ago I was once again on Letterman’s show.

“Dave, thanks for putting me on, man,” I told him during a commercial break. “I know you don’t need me to come on. I do appreciate it.”

“Hey,” he said, “you’re one of my dearest friends. As long as I have a breath, you will always be on my show.”

Dave is not an emotional guy and neither am I. But after I finished my little skit, I went off stage and had to stop for a moment. Yeah, there were a couple of tears, people.

11

The N-Word

IN THE ’60S THERE WAS A TV COMMERCIAL ABOUT AJAX LAUNDRY detergent, which was so good it supposedly turned dirty white clothes into sparkling white clothes. The character in the commercial was a knight on a white horse.

I only have one minor complaint about television, that is one commercial. The White Knight. You know, that nitwit on the horse that goes by, turns everything white. Lord, I hope he never passes me. I’ve got enough problems. Turn me white, I’ll start running around feeling guilty all the time.
(Godfrey Cambridge, 1965)

Among the things white people feel guilty about is using the n-word—nigger. Political correctness is the opposite of truth and honesty, and I am all for truth and honesty. I would rather someone tell me the truth to my face than behind my back—and no ethnic group is more direct than Italians.

I loved working for them at private parties in their own resort area in the Catskills, called Monticello. Also, opening in Vegas for everyone from the Carpenters to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, I would often get asked to perform on an off day for groups of Italians. Every now and then I met the guy I was working for and the next day saw his mug shot next to a headline reading, “Johnny ‘Three Fingers’ Maragano Arrested.”